June 20 to September 13, 2015
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, 310 443 7000

“Perfect Likeness,” organized by veteran curator Russell Ferguson, is an intentioned and poignant show, with moments of profound tenderness. It was without question the best exhibition I’ve seen this year. It charts a renewed interest in photographic composition beginning in the 1970s, focusing in particular on the prolific photographers of Europe, Canada and the US working between the 1990s and 2000s. The works flow beautifully without the conventional curatorial buttresses of chronology or conspicuous thematic groupings. Ferguson’s deft arrangement sparkles with the subtle lyricism of a photographer’s series, allowing for moments of affection, irony, and fascination to unfold in front of the viewer.

Ferguson’s introductory wall text presses upon our current condition of image saturation, a point which interested me less than the mid-century break he posits between pictorialism and more candid, even journalistic, photography. The return to the “inauthentic” or arranged image is where “Perfect Likeness” finds its genesis. A gorgeous Robert Mapplethorpe work, Orchid (1982), could have opened the exhibition — it nearly perfectly characterizes the pictorial shift for which Ferguson argues. It was in 1982 that Mapplethorpe found his muse in female body builder Lisa Lyon, and his evocative image of a drooping orchid is anthropomorphized on film, displaying the same elegance, grace and emotion as his expertly staged corporeal forms. While Ferguson could have just as easily chosen a nude to mark Mapplethorpe’s predilection for choreographed imagery, I appreciate the fact that the flower, itself a site of sexual reproduction, was chosen. Roe Ethridge’s work Peas and Pickles (2014) shares a wall with the Mapplethorpe, and serves as both a formal counterpart and self-aware double entendre.

Christopher Williams’ Department of Water and Power General Office Building (Dedicated on June 1, 1965), from 1994, consists of two images taken at slightly different angles in the morning and evening. The subtle change produces vastly different effects: in the first, the building’s vertical lines are emphasized, while in the second it appears wider and more horizontal. One of the aims of “Perfect Likeness” seems to be the unification of painterly technique with that of photography. In Department, Williams draws upon the tradition of Monet, who depicted Rouen Cathedral dozens of times as a means of indicating the subtle distinctions in perception caused by shifting light and shadows.

This understanding of the photographic subject as malleable speaks to the issue of authenticity, a question which photographer Jeff Wall has spent a career examining (and debunking). Wall’s 2011 work, Boxing, features two white teenage boys sparring in what appears to be their childhood home — an elegant high-rise apartment with a Joseph Albers painting hung in the background. The art historian Michael Fried has made much of the quality of absorption present in Wall’s subjects; many times they perform a task or mundane action that suggests they are oblivious to the fact that they are being photographed. This absorptive quality squares with Wall’s pictorial aims: to create an image that appears candid but is in fact painstakingly composed. While two of Wall’s major large-format works are featured in the exhibition, it was his more diminutive 1993 piece Diagonal Composition that was the standout. The quotidian image of a kitchen sink glows with the help of a light box and was so perfect, so complete, and so personal, that I was nearly moved to tears.

Lucas Blalock’s Broken Composition, from 2011, consists of a double image of a broken light bulb. The wall text equates Blalock’s visible method of technical composition to the painter’s brushstroke. Here, both the picture and its subject are broken, adding another layer of ambiguity between the photo’s “truth” and inauthenticity. Stan Douglas’ Hastings Park was another standout in the show, a composite of a photo taken in 1955 and edited using Photoshop in 2008. For the photo, Douglas restages the 1955 scene at a Vancouver horse track using models in period clothing, creating an image composed of 30 separate snapshots.

Sharon Lockhart’s evocative 1997 series The Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team makes manifest a century-long photographic cliché: with her carefully arranged images Lockhart raises a mundane scene to the level of magnificence. By omitting the ball from the frame, the players appear to gaze up hopefully towards a higher power above. Thomas Ruff’s glossy portraits from the 1980s take up an equal amount of the exhibition’s real estate, though they’re nowhere near as compelling as Lockahart’s scenes. Ruff’s sitters look directly at the camera blankly, as though posing for an identification card. While the enormous format of these images is in itself seductive, they lose their visual punch when displayed in a series. In contrast, Elad Lassry’s Chocolate bars, Eggs, Milk (2013) is deliberately diminutive; apparently his subject of glossy chocolate and smooth eggs is plenty seductive, even at such a small scale.

The poignancy of the images on display is what left me thinking about “Perfect Likeness” weeks later. Catherine Opie’s 2012 portrait of the artist Lawrence Weiner raises him to the level of an old master, equal parts Rembrandt and Hans Holbein. However, Weiner’s soft body and gentle face lay bare a degree of tenderness on Opie’s part — she doesn’t revere Weiner, but cares for him. Equally affectionate were Gillian Wearing’s self portraits dressed as her mother and father from 2003. In these blown-up images, Wearing’s wig, glue, and mask are made visible, though not pronounced. This evidence of the characters’ construction points to the mother and father themselves as constructed figures, reproduced and reimagined in our own memories, often tainted with shades of nostalgia. Rather than recognizing “Perfect Likeness” on a register as broad as the shared human condition (as the wall text suggests), I understand it as a touching time capsule — one that, in my opinion, will mark the set of issues facing photographers today.

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Gillian Wearing approaches identity furtively.  This even applies to her self-portraits where she is rarely fully present, instead flickering in and out of the frame, oscillating between herself and an older self, or another family member, or another photographer.  It seems fitting, therefore, that the retrospective of her work at the Whitechapel Gallery, (March 28 to June 17, 2012) curated by Daniel Herrmann and Doris Krystof (it will travel to the K20 in Dusseldorf and then the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich) starts plaintively with a ceiling hung monitor showing Dancing in Peckham.  This seminal early work that so perfectly expresses alienation and the raw nerve of hidden, unspeakable secrets is not alone in the main ground floor gallery, but because the other films in the room have their own self-contained theaters, Dancing in Peckham dominates the room, and gives us our only glimpse of the artist, herself, doing a weird lonely dance in a crowded, South London shopping mall.

Wearing’s most recent film on display, Bully (2010) is a staged performance of what might be either an acting exercise or some kind of psychological role-playing.  The question of what genre the films actually fall into is an important element of her work.  Most are interviews, but with whom?  Often the main character has been switched out with another, who lip-synchs their voice, or the speaker wears a mask.  The monologues are morbidly fascinating, but again, who they are aimed at is equivocal, as much of the time it seems the characters are more interested in seeking absolution than entertaining an audience.  The main protagonist of Bully coaches his fellow actors into re-enacting an altercation on the playground from his youth.  He then chastises those who intimidated him and those who stood by watching, but whether this is a cathartic release for a real person or a figment of Wearing’s imagination is never revealed.

Upstairs, the series of photographs,  Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say are virtually given a room of their own.  Even after numerous advertising campaigns over the years have borrowed or stolen Wearing’s imaginative vehicle of pure self-expression, these pictures of average Londoners, many again photographed in Peckham, retain their original energy and power.  The attractive young man in a suit holding the words “I’m desperate” or a man with facial tattoos whose sign reads, “Have been certified as mildly insane” are a tremendous leveler of humanity, in the face of superficial appearances.  The room also contains Crowd, a video on a small flat screen created in imitation of Dürer’s still life with weeds and wildflowers of 1503, a reenactment of sorts, and several small, precisely executed sculptures of individuals who have distinguished themselves: a rooky police officer, Gervais (2010) and Terri (2008) who was injured during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2011 but still rescued several others that day.  In the sculptures, Wearing inverts the traditional tropes of heroism, instead creating a small delicate trophy-sized replica of an individual, rather than a large monument.

The exhibition ends with a series of self-portraits of Wearing as members of her immediate family, or masquerading as various members of the historical family of photographers.  The eerie portraits which strive for realism through prosthesis show Wearing as Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus , Robert Mapplethorpe and August Sander, among others, and as her father and brother, as well as a particularly disturbing image of herself as a chubby-cheeked toddler in Self Portrait at three years old, (2004).  These costume changes and disguises seek to question who Wearing herself is, literally referencing where she came from but also questioning where it is that the personality of the artist rests within the context of photography.

Sara VanDerBeek’s exhibition at The Approach (May 24 to June 24, 2012;) follows a methodology of transmogrification between concepts and sculptural forms.  This may seem like one of the textbook definitions of sculpture, but for VanDerBeek, there is a poignant directness.    . Until recently the objects that she fabricated were at third-stage removed through the filter of photography.  Thus a sculpture that was a physical interpretation of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, for example, still did not exist in the viewer’s space (Sara Vanderbeek:  Of Ruins and Light, Whitney Museum 2010).  This lead to a seductively fictitious art practice that involved layers of creation that were in the end relegated to a two-dimensional medium, an art practice that functioned through traces rather than objects.  VanDerBeek’s exhibition at The Approach is a 2 stage process, the first involving a series of photographs the artist took working with   ballet dancers from her native Baltimore, and the production of cast and painted plaster sculptures based on these images.

VanDerBeek hurls herself into the debate as to whether architecture is actually frozen music as Goethe would have it.  The questions and criticisms that arise in deriving one art from another, in this case sculpture from dance/photography or in her past work, poetry, add up to whether the work stands on its own, references its origin point, or even needs to.  The black and white photographs are of dancers performing short choreographed interludes.  “Baltimore Dancers 10” is a stark white photo of a dancer flexing her leg, the contrast of the pale leg against velvety black background reduces the movement of the dancer to a series of stresses and vectors. It is a visually engaging image, but more mathematical than organic.

These images are then referenced by the cast plaster sculptures.  The totemic towers each have their own unit, stacked one on top of the other.  Untitled VII presents a column of plaster rectangles with a single transverse from corner to corner, to the best of it’s simple plaster capabilities mimicking the dancer’s calf and thigh in Baltimore Dancers 10.  In a very literal way the mass-produced units of these totems are reminiscent of uniformly garbed dancers in a corps de ballet, interweaving and executing identical movements.

The static white of the plaster, and the right angles and sharp corners of the simple geometric volumes bespeak the mathematical precision of choreography, and do form a palpable physical counterpoint to the clean lines and undulating shades of the dancers’ legs arms and backs.  While the dancers are soft and their bodies a mass of curves and shadows, living, breathing and in flux, the sculptures exist as the other side of dance, the rhythm meter and the absolute fact of ballet that it must be learned and repeated.  Though the sculptures have emerged from their original hiding place in the space of the photograph, they still engage the images of the dancers and their movements in the space of the gallery.

Whitechapel Gallery: 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX. +44 (0)20 7522 7888

The Approach: 47 Approach Road, Bethnal Green, London E2, +44 (0) 20 8983 3878

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