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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JESSICA HOLMES: What are you working on at Centrale Fies?

JUSTIN THOMPSON: I’m working on a big performance, “Mi Daran Tomba…e Pace…Forse [They will give me a grave…and peace…maybe],” which is a dialogue about Leontyne Price, the first African-American opera singer to sing a lead role at La Scala, in Milan. In the 1960s, she performed the lead in Aida. This piece is a way of thinking about the layers and implications of this woman in Italy, singing the aria “O Patria Mia,” about how she’ll never see her country again, and the politics that allowed her to step into the main role of an Ethiopian princess. I created a triumphal arch out of scaffolding that’ll have musical instruments attached, and I’ve got a local marching band, the Banda Sociale Dro e Ceniga, who will perform the instruments. We’re also pulling from Price’s farewell to opera, where after she sang she just stood there while people applauded. She didn’t move for 10 minutes; she didn’t break her pose, she didn’t do anything. I’ve sort of expanded upon the idea of controlling the audience, not allowing that release. We’re playing with this kind of anticlimax.

Many of your works, including “Moldy Figs,” involve collaboration, most often with your brother, saxophonist Jason Thompson, and the artist and filmmaker Bradly Dever Treadaway. Can you talk about how the three of you work together?

The collaboration with both of them was born as an undergrad at the University of Tennessee. I’ve played music with Jason since we were kids, but in college I took a filmmaking class where I had to create movement and gestures. There was performance involved, and I had to create sound for it. I first collaborated with my then-classmate Bradly on his films, and he’d collaborate with me on mine. Jason also performed in those films and was involved with the sound explorations.

Unlike Jason, I’m not a musician. If I have to do something vocally, or with my guitar, I can, but working with Jason has opened up a world of collaboration with musicians. Generally, I’ll provide a driving concept of the piece, reference points that I want to touch on, and usually some sort of feel — awkwardness, or whatever it is that I’m interested in — and he has free reign to interpret that. Sometimes he’s really literal, sometimes not at all; and we’re able to discover things together. I trust him 100% with whatever he comes up with, and most of the time I don’t hear it till we’re going live.

With Bradly, we have two different branches of how we collaborate. He works with me to develop video, which creates a new experience that is not the same as the live performance. The other branch of our work is going head to head, which we first initiated when he got a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy in 2005-2006. We show up in a space with our own tasks to do and we just make it happen. I’m making his stuff, he’s making my stuff, and it’s completely fluid and interchangeable. We’re able to push each other in a way that I haven’t been able to do with other artists. I always find it amazing how different we are in our language. He often pulls from an idea of identity that is much more rooted in specific lineage, images and archive, while I think of my work as much more abstract, a collective identity. A visual clash happens that makes me uncomfortable and I thrive on that. I enjoy more and more what happens when I’m not in control. There are often things I absolutely would have never put in a piece that are in the piece. But I appreciate the way it wakes me up.

When I went to see “Moldy Figs,” the painstaking, homespun effort of the many assembled parts impressed me. Tell me about your process.

For every show I make the centerpiece; everything else is stuff I’ve made over time. In “Moldy Figs” there are some pieces that date back even six years. No individual object took all that long: I sewed the hundred pairs of shoes in a month. The five shoeshine boxes I did over a period of a couple weeks. The pieces I developed onsite were the centerpiece — the merry-go-round, which I just built out of wood, and the DJ booth. That was a more abstract thing that I initiated while I was in the space. I think a lot about the ways in which doing things by hand creates a sense of ritual through repetition.

The concept of labor pervaded “Moldy Figs.” I participated in the performance held during Bushwick Open Studios. While sitting on the merry-go-round and having my boots gilded, a significant part of the experience was watching your crew perform physical labor: pushing the machine, stopping, doing the shoe work, then pushing again.

Labor has been at the root of social unrest forever. Black history in the US is frequently a dialogue about labor, and the social roles that are assigned through that. Gold-leafing shoes is one of my longer-standing projects. It’s had the most iterations, and each time I’m trying to find new ways to engage with it, and allow the old layers to show up and be represented. The gold-leafing is based on this minstrel song “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers” which was included in an anthology of poems my mom gave me when I was about eight. It’s followed me till now, this song, which talks about putting your best things away on a shelf, awaiting judgment. It’s a wonderful metaphor of preparation for freedom/death. Because of the class and racial associations linked to shoe shining, it made a lot of sense to think about what happened if it’s the shoe shiner that’s providing redemption. With the “Moldy Figs” crew, I assigned them each a very simple task. I said to them for example, “The only thing I want you to do is spray this on the shoe. That’s it! That’s the whole gig. But own it.” So the task is refined in the hands of whoever is doing it.

A lot of the gold-leaf work is also about creating a dialogue about fictional elegance. It’s striking and lush, but also really, really low-class. You see the gold-leafed shoes and think, “Is that falling apart?” I really love the ways in which this superficially elegant thing actually gains importance by context. When I was initially researching shoeshine stands I came across a newspaper article from the 1930s that showed a shoeshine merry-go-round. The poet Melvin B. Tolson wrote in the 1940s about his philosophy of hierarchies, the merry-go-round of history versus the Ferris wheel of history. In terms of the Ferris wheel, he spoke about conquerors going up, and then inevitably coming down, whereas on a merry-go-round everything is on equal planes but just keeps moving and shifting in space. He equated that to democracy. I really like how inadequate that metaphor is.

A lot of your work deals with history, most often African and African-American history. How do you see it situated in the contemporary moment, which, especially in the US, is so volatile? Is that something you’re thinking about?

I think that looking to elements of African-American history has always been something ingrained in me. My grandfather first instilled in me an interest in history, specifically African-American history, and literature, poetry, and art. Living in Italy, you begin to understand kinds of continuums, and that feeds me. I don’t think of my work as being about race, but about class and the hierarchies involved. In Italy, so much art-historical iconography is rooted in classism. I like to think about how to unsettle some of the traditional associations we have about class regarding work and folk culture, and the distinctions we make between those humble traditions and the more elitist sphere. I like when those things mix, completely contaminate each other, and perhaps become the same. Culturally, I miss the US. Living here and trying to remain connected to my American roots, it always feels good to arrive in the US. You feel you’re still in touch somehow and what you’re doing still has relevance. You’re not a foreigner.

People seem to have an inherent need to label others automatically: what “are” you? Why do you think that is?

I think about it a lot. In the visual arts, in particular, we’re not comfortable with simply experiencing something. We’re on a quest to understand. There are certain keys you can put in artwork that allow people to check a box that says, “I get it,” and that makes it much more comfortable. For example: most of the time people read it as a giveaway that I sing. I once titled one of my sound pieces based on the four–word critique a guy in Italy gave me: “Molto soul, molto black!” Once, after a layered, involved project I did in Spain, the first comment I got afterwards was a guy walking up to me and saying, “Oh, you do have a little Negro in you.” One of the reasons I don’t like to define my work through the lens of race is because I think it assists people in reading stuff in a way that is not constructive. The point of entry is there for everyone.

The post Justin Randolph Thompson in Conversation with Jessica Holmes appeared first on artcritical.

Lawrence Carroll: “Ghost House” was at Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, December 12, 2014 to April 6, 2015

In the late 1970s, when I was making my way from academic aesthetics to writing art criticism, I was vastly influenced by the magnificently original series of “Iconicity” essays published in Artforum by Joseph Masheck, who then was editor of that journal. Masheck argued that to properly understand contemporary abstraction, we need to revisit the entire history of Western art. According to Clement Greenberg’s account, which remained influential, abstract painting is the ultimate product of the flattening of the deep old master picture space. When there no longer is any room for figurative subjects, then art had to become abstract. Rejecting this analysis, Masheck rather drew attention to the ways in which the Byzantine sacred tradition was involved with literal uses of the stretcher and the picture surface. Guided also, perhaps, by some precedents in the revolutionary Soviet avant garde circa 1917, some contemporary abstract art (what he called “hard-core painting”) embraced that seemingly forgotten tradition which was concerned with the literal properties of the medium.

Masheck’s very imaginative commentary was not easy to follow. And, ironically, the contemporary figures he championed who now are most distinguished — Jonathan Lasker, Thomas Nozkowski and Sean Scully — have developed in ways that have little to do with his concerns. But history can sometimes be surprising, for Lawrence Carroll, who arrived in New York around 1984, has, apparently entirely unconsciously taken up Masheck’s concerns. This ambitious retrospective, in a former bread factory, presents 63 paintings, some of them very large. At the entrance, on the diptych Untitled (1989-90), are the words “I am alone.” Here is a box mounted on the wall, Untitled (1990); the Untitled floor piece (1992-94), the skin of a painting on the corner of the floor; and the Untitled, table painting (2006-2014) a construction on a pedestal which has a slight resemblance to Anthony Caro’s tabletop sculptures. As you walk through the 10 rooms, you can see Carroll taking painting apart in its components, and reassembling it. Mostly his paintings are untitled; when there are titles, often they are descriptive. He inserts one panel into another, as in Untitled, insert painting (1986); constructs a vertical assemble of frames, in Untitled (1988); draws black bands across the surface in Untitled (1986); presents a box on the floor in Yes (Floor Piece) (2000) or, in Untitled Yes bag (2014) as a bag on the floor; installs the painting on the wall, Untitled shelf painting (1985) in one example or, as in Untitled flower piece (2014) leans it on the wall. Occasionally, as in Untitled light painting (2014) a light bulb is attached to the picture plane. Sometimes panels extend off of the wall, as in Untitled hinge painting (2013). One singular work, Untitled No. 51 (1993) consists of canvas folded on the floor. And some of the pictures, Untitled box painting (2006-14) is one example, are wall-mounted boxes. These paintings are very varied.

Carroll is always a painter, never a sculptor, and that’s a statement compatible with the fact that he sometimes works in three dimensions. In the almost 30 years of work on display here, there’s no obvious sense of development. You sense that from the start he’s known how to proceed. He owes something to Carl Andre and Donald Judd, but unlike these Minimalists he always retains a personal touch and is not interested in repetition as such. And although he has some affinities with Robert Ryman, he is a more varied and, I think, a more sensuous painter. Upstairs on temporary display is the collection from Museo Morandi of a very different, very relevant figure, whom he admires greatly — Giorgio Morandi. Interested in the varied qualities of his medium, Carroll almost never is concerned with image appropriation. “I wanted to paint my paintings the color of the canvas I was painting on,” he has said, “so I could always erase myself and start over. I always then had a way out and back into the painting.” This statement does not, I think, entirely explain his ongoing originality. More, perhaps to the point, he speaks of his desire to anchor himself to the world. “I needed to find my own way with the materials I was using.”

Recently MoMA presented “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World,” a much discussed exhibition. According to the curator, when now everything has been done, all that is left to artists is to recycle prior visual discoveries. “The obsession with recuperating aspects of the past,” Laura Hoptman writes, “in the condition of culture in our time.” When I started writing criticism, the same claim was presented: everything has been done, we were told, so artists are doomed to merely recycle. It’s hard not to see this as a very pessimistic worldview — who would care about visual art if genuine originality were in fact impossible? No doubt this is a very New York perspective, from a city in which there are so many competing young artists. But this vision of art is demonstrably false, for much remains to be done. In movies, black-and-white defines a flashback, taking us back to an earlier moment prior to the main narrative. Perhaps this is how we should understand Carroll’s lack of concern with being a colorist — he takes us back to the 1980s. He has said: “I wanted to paint my paintings the color of the canvas I was painting on, so I could always erase myself and start over. I always then had a way out and back into the painting.” Carroll is as good as anyone anywhere I know who is painting right now. Compared with him, almost all contemporary artists are noisy, lacking in trust for their medium. The happiest contemporary painter whose art I have had the pleasure of viewing recently, a very American artist, he’s not had a solo exhibition in New York for 15 years.

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