William Eggleston: American Color at Instituto Moreira Salles

March 14 to June 28, 2015
Rua Marquês de São Vicente, 476
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, +55 21 3284 7400

The only English-language review that I can find of William Eggleston’s retrospective at Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) in Rio de Janeiro, has the title “What’s William Eggleston’s Doing in Brazil?” Despite the explicit surprise and no other mention throughout the American press, the retrospective, which went through the end of June, was a notable survey of Eggleston’s early work. “William Eggleston: American Color” was also the artist’s most ample recent retrospective in all the Americas — the last major one happened at the Whitney Museum, in 2009.

It was no wonder for Brazilians that IMS could stage such a great exhibition; the non-profit has a fundamental role in supporting arts and culture in Brazil. In Rio, IMS settled in the former residence of the Moreira Salles family, a large remodeled Modernist property in Gávea, wrapped in ornamental brise soleils, and with a landscape designed by Roberto Burle Marx. That atmosphere mingled perfectly with Eggleston’s works. It was like traveling in a time capsule that could combine and contrast the glamorous life of the 1950s in Rio with American landscapes and people of a few decades later. Besides the Modernist atmosphere, the show’s exhibition design borrowed creative solutions — such as special supports and curtains­ — from objects that Eggleston photographed. “We wanted to use those colors and materials, which were so new at the time when Eggleston captured them — those bright plastics, neon lights, Wal-Mart-like, industrialized, furniture,” curator Thyago Nogueira explained.

When Nogueira took over IMS’s contemporary photography department, Eggleston’s was the first name that came to his mind. “Brazilian enthusiasts were familiar with Eggleston’s most famous images, but we wanted to add more of his work to their repertory,” said Nogueira. And he did: the show’s five galleries were fully taken by 172 photographs from the first three decades of the artist’s career. Though many of these early works had been shown before in the US, the Brazilian retrospective brought the entire Los Alamos series and works rarely seen.

The first room included around 40 photographs from the Los Alamos series, and four early black-and-white works. In this room, visitors encountered some of Eggleston’s most famous images, such the redheaded boy leaning over a supermarket cart. In a second room, there were exhibition catalogues in display cases and one of Eggleston’s original portfolios, Troubled Waters (1980), a popular format among collectors of that time. In the third, main room of the exhibition, visitors followed Eggleston’s shift of subjects, when he photographed his family and friends and started using dye-transfer, a sophisticated advertising technique, to have control over each color.

One of the show’s highlights was encountering, in the fourth room, Eggleston’s large-format portraits, taken in 1970s and printed in 2000; most of them were shot at hangouts and bars. These works were accompanied by Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton (1973/2008), a film that depicts a fictional country invented by him and his friends, where “you can smoke marijuana, hang out naked and never need a passport.” I was so overwhelmed by seeing selfies all over social media that finding those portraits was soothing to my eyes: I took time looking at ordinary things like teeth, pores, pupils, hair. It was as if those people could get together with us. They gave me room to imagine my own stories about them: a rock-band singer, with his hairy chest and opened leather vest, stoned eyes, hypnotized by a prophetic song. Or a pizza-delivery boy, who found time to make a pose, with his naïve smile and broken tooth, happily gazing at me.

When I moved to the US, years ago, I had the feeling I was in a movie. Thanksgiving turkey, baseball and Rocky Balboa seemed distant fabrications on screens, but the moment I stepped on American soil they became magically real and a little less stereotyped. For most Brazilians though, that change won’t happen; a compacted, fanciful, American society will continue to dwell in their minds, given the extreme and continuous exposure to the American culture. Although my Brazilian eyes loved the fictional exercise of looking at Eggleston’s works, the recent shooting in Charleston and the polemics about the Confederate battle flag kept drumming on my head. Through Eggleston’s images I was looking at the crossroads between two eras, the Old and the New South, full of expectations, but inhabited by a racial conundrum that, to this day, hasn’t come to an end.

This reality came to my mind when I saw Untitled (from the portfolio Troubled Waters) in which beautiful black children are barefoot, walking on a field in Eggleston’s relatives’ cotton farm, under a bright blue sky. They wear yellow and blue outfits, the older girl in pigtails; they all look straight at the camera, curious and a bit wary. Then later, in Untitled (Sumner, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in Background) (1971), a white car and two men stand over a carpet made of autumn leaves. The white man wears black suit and a striped tie; he has his back to the black man, who wears a white jacket. Their postures are alike, they have both hands in their pockets, and both avoid Eggleston’s eyes, staring at the same unknown event. There is a third man barely seen in the car, with his hands on the wheel, his door is open, as if he would get out. The relationship between the standing men is not clear, but their similar stare and pose suggest they are bound to each other. The same tension is within the children’s gaze and gets spread throughout Eggleston’s works. He keeps the puzzle incomplete, the mystery unsolved. That’s why an ambiguity between fiction and non-fiction, between desolation and enchantment by the South ­­just lingered in my mind; I kept feeling a bit of both.

For Brazil’s photography enthusiasts, having Eggleston’s first retrospective in the country was matter of honor. But one of the most important accomplishments of this show was that of offering Brazilian visitors a “guide” in redefining our sight and the way we make images. We are becoming tamed by an online culture of self-curated pictures, but all that these images have to say is “I’ve been here and I’ve done this.” That eagerness to empower ourselves through images doesn’t mean we are able to read and understand all of them. Eggleston took pictures because he was bound to what he had seen, bound, but not imprisoned. He gave space to what was outside of him and it’s within that space that we plunge to connect with his work. If in the past he raised color and an amateur style to the status of art, today we look for him again in hope of finding some mystery, some crookedness, uncertainties among our self-controlled realities. I guess that was what William Eggleston was doing in Brazil.

Instituto Moreira Salles and its magazine, ZUM, have compiled numerous articles and other online content on the retrospective, including a nine-minute interview with Eggleston and Nogueira, available here: http://revistazum.com.br/we/

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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.

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Concurrent shows at Cheim & Read of photographs by William Eggleston and Diane Arbus presented new and rarely-seen work, respectively, by two critical pioneers of the medium. Created roughly in the first decade of this millennium, Eggleston’s photographs continue to invigorate the banal and the unseen by way of meticulous attention to detail, form, and vibrant surges of color. The selection of photographs by Arbus, on the other hand, retain the artist’s fascination with the out-of-the-ordinary, the freakish, except here applied to vacant landscapes which are as quietly unsettling as her portraits.

William Eggleston’s photography stems from the snapshot, the idea that what we see is transient and evershifting. Yet, as has always been the case with Eggleston, such an attitude is at odds with the artist’s acute vision and observation evidenced in purposeful compositions that convey both intimacy and fragmentation. While he is largely known for his pictures of middle class families of the American rural South, this new body of work expands Eggleston’s practice to an international context. Works such as Untitled (Water on Dirt Road, Las Pozas, Mexico) (2005) “document” the most mundane details of the world around us with few, if any, signifiers that place us in a particular locale.  With their jolting, unique perspectives and brilliant color, however, they become small moments of revelation. Typically with Eggleston’s oeuvre, something dark and macabre lurks behind his lush color saturation. Untitled (Lamplighter Kitchen, Memphis) (2000) frames a small, squalid kitchen crowded with white bread, mustard, and utensils, electrical wires and metal boxes circling the walls, the colors muted but garish in the washed-out light. The straightforward, controlled honesty with which Eggleston renders this and other pictures, stripping the subjects of every conceit, barely hides the threat of evil looming beneath the surface. We are left to our own conclusions about who or what these photographs indirectly portray, based on the implications of the details. These new works are even more fragmented and isolated than vintage Eggleston.  Refreshingly, they are less concerned with representing the symbols of a cultural landscape, and slightly more focused on the beauty and possibilities of form.

Eggleston and Arbus were introduced to one another by John Szarkowski, legendary former director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who showed both artists along with Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander in the 1967 exhibiton, New Document.  The artists occupied a critical moment in photography, rebelling against the tradition and conventions of the gelatin silver print to embrace the “documentary style” of the new generation, as a way to further close the gap between art and life. They promoted the shared view that no subject is uninteresting when captured a compelling way.

According to Susan Sontag, “In the world colonized by Arbus, subjects are always revealing themselves. There is no decisive moment. Arbus’s view that self-revelation is a continuous, evenly distributed process is another way of maintaining the Whitmanesque imperative: treat all moments as of equal consequence.” (On Photography, 1977). Along these lines, the photographs shown at Cheim & Read slowly unravelled their subjects, begging a second look, and then a third. Arbus applied the same idiosyncratic interest she found in her human subjects, seeking out sites that project a disturbingly private kind of loneliness—even humor—through their eccentricities and kitsch. It’s the Arbus freakshow as applied to landscape, an approach that, for the artist, has always bordered on exoticism.

Christ in a lobby, NYC (1966) shows a large close-up of Christ’s face against a marble wall, and another, similar but smaller image just off to the left that seems to float, transparently. This juxtaposition, like many of the other locales in the show, is both surprising and off-putting, injecting a semblance of mysticism into an otherwise ordinary room. Other works, like An empty movie theater, NYC (1971) and Rocks on wheels, Disneyland, CA (1962) also convey an eerily ephemeral, surreal quality, yet still feel intimate despite the lack of people. Subsequently, much like Eggleston, a compelling poignancy come from their humanity—while there are no people portrayed, their presence can be felt, their traces are in fact visible.

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