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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September 9 to October 11, 2008
37 West 57th Street, 3rd floor
New York City, 212 750 0949

Janet Malcolm, who is best known for her sober and incisive writerly persona, and who has had previous exhibitions of collages at Lori Bookstein and elsewhere, is currently showing a suite of photographs there of burdock leaves depicted in early stages of decay and decomposition. A book accompanies the exhibition. It reduces the images by around one half. There are no notations as to size, edition or photographic process and subsequently does not function like a catalogue so much as a picture book. An introductory essay about her work by the author also accompanies it.

Malcolm writes in the introduction that the photographic portraits of Richard Avedon particularly influenced her—which he “radically extended photography’s capacity for cruelty…the faces he photographed were mercilessly, sometimes gruesomely, recorded.” Malcolm chooses to photograph leaves of the burdock plant because of its lowly status in the plant world – as a common weed that grows “along roadsides…and around derelict buildings” – and because of its literary status. She notes that Chekhov and Hawthorne have referenced it in their fiction to denote “ruin and desolation” and explains that she prefers “older, flawed leaves to young, unblemished specimens — leaves to which something has happened.”

The Avedon portraits were largely of famous people, well known in the mass media. Like Malcolm’s statement about what the journalist does, Avedon, in some cases “preyed on their vanity.” The naïvely trusting Duke and Duchess of Windsor, for example, were reduced to pathos under Avedon’s lens, while more sophisticated sitters were willing collaborators in a new kind of celebrity portrait that exposed them in their ravaged glamour.

Avedon’s portrait photographs appeared at the very end of an era that saw photographic material as containing “truth”. Where we now understand that it is a kind of fiction. The photographer, Moyra Davey, in her recent, very exceptional book of writing on photography, “Long Life Cool White,” locates this moment of de-authenticity in 1981 when an essay appeared by Martha Rosler entitled “in, around and afterthoughts”. In the same essay in her book, Davey writes with great admiration for Malcolm, and discusses Malcolm on photography on a par with Sontag, Benjamin and Barthes.

Malcolm: “The camera’s bland inquisitiveness…[its] capacity for aimless vision…it is through photography that we first discover the existence of the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”

Davey also notes her appreciation for Malcolm’s odd personal revelations that crop up in her writing: “A small aside…will unexpectedly open up a window of emotional life onto what had otherwise been a fairly hermetic discursive field.” Any admiring reader of Malcolm brings a particular sense of expectation to the viewing of her photographs.

In the introductory essay Malcolm acknowledges how her leaf photographs have precedents in eighteenth and nineteenth century botanical illustration. She might also have mentioned leaf exposures performed by the nineteenth-century progenitors of the photographic medium.

All the leaves in the pictures have been popped up against a white wall with stem at bottom in a glass of water. Only one leaf picture in the exhibition, Burdock No. 24 (all 2005-07) exposes the neck of the water bottle, and only No. 12 does not maintain the entire image within its borders.

Most of the images are suspended in a slightly grainy atmosphere that is lost when reproduced in reduction in the book. The low luster of the paper stock in the book also robs the viewer of the Iris print quality which prints the image into the paper rather than suspending it in emulsion on top of it. The documented leaves all have individual personalities: No. 17 is “prim”, No. 21 is “busted”, and No. 18 is “plagued”. No. 4 is “like a tree”. No. 6, my favorite, contradicts the general run and is young, unfurling, like spring and forest blue green. No. 16 is broken in shreds and is a deep dark green. All the photographs have beautiful color and evidence high technical accomplishment.

An added aspect is their ability to trigger memory out of proportion to the apparent subject matter, which brings the viewer to their curious vacancy, that the leaves may be individuals but seem to be stock characters. My suspicion is that the exhibition might be best considered as an extended aria to the camera. Its “bland inquisitiveness” seems to hover in the room, a strange, delightful presence never isolated quite this way before.

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