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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Roberta Smith begins her review of “The Production Line of Happiness,” the Christopher Williams retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, by describing one of Williams’ photographs as an “act of elegant iconoclasm.” Based on her explanation and the exhibition itself, though, Williams more accurately represents a smug iconophilia. The photograph in question features a sliced-open wide-angle lens made by the renowned German manufacturer, Carl Zeiss AG. In the image, we see the lens’ “guts,” as Smith calls them, laid out in a pristine description of the device’s inner workings. Smith continues that, “Mr. Williams produced a big color close-up of a cross section that is as formal as an official oil portrait, as alluring as a high-end fashion shot and yet as startlingly exotic as an image from National Geographic.” This statement is problematic for a couple reasons. First, I like to think that we are past the knee-jerk reaction to compare photography to painting, as though photography still doesn’t have its own history of highly skilled execution, as exemplified by Williams’ impressive craftsmanship (or at least the craftsmanship of the studios he employs). Secondly, the exoticism and fetishization that Smith notes amplify the contrived perfection Williams supposedly undermines. He does include a few details that negate the shiny rhetoric of advertisements: an ill-fitting shirt, the dirty soles of a model’s bare feet, the naturally pendulous breasts of a Netherlands Playboy Playmate of the Year. But these slight indiscretions hardly count as subversions of commercial realism.

One reason for the images’ conceptual opacity is Williams’s highly considered use of the visual language of advertising, and what he, in the wall text outside the main exhibition galleries, called a “semiotic reduction” and the “strategic use of ambivalence.” The issue I have with this approach is that, at least in Williams’s case, his ambivalence begets the audience’s ambivalence, whether it is aimed at Williams as an artist, or at the exhibition’s subject matter. In Richard Woodward’s review of the exhibition for the Wall Street Journal, he questions Williams’s claim that the work critiques late capitalist society: “Don’t they actually function here more as promotional ads for the artist himself, proof of his cleverness, such as it is?” Woodward generally writes off Williams as an uninteresting photographer trying too hard to appear smart, and whom he doesn’t feel the need to consider further. This attitude would be fine if there weren’t a dearth of attention given to Williams’s elitist approach to complex issues, for which he offers no real alternative. As such, critics’ tepid dismissal or giddy celebration creates a volatile credulity.

Something I haven’t seen mentioned in the writing on “The Production Line of Happiness,” is the relationship between white masculinity and the otherness of females and non-white males. The only portraits in the gallery are of women (often in “domestic” situations especially those involving bathing) and black men, while white, male fingers hold the camera — the power — both literally in the photographs, and figuratively in the authorship of Williams, a white male. He might say, Of course the images objectify women and “exotic” races, because that’s what advertising does — and that’s what he criticizes in his gesture to mock Capitalism. But the elitism of the exhibition’s presentation contrasted with the pedantic style of the catalog makes his commentary largely inaccessible. The irony would not be so troubling if it weren’t receiving such grand support: “The Production Line of Happiness” occupies half of the 6th floor of the MoMA, which he shares with the exhibition of Henri Matisse’s seminal cutouts, placing him temporarily at the top of the institutional art world. Has the urgency of socially and politically responsible artworks dissolved so much that the curators see no problem in celebrating Williams’s impertinent banalities? Or perhaps they were satisfied that he sits comfortably within the art-historical lineage of his predecessors such as Institutional Critique all-star Michael Asher. How he utilizes this pedigree to contribute to art or culture today is unclear. Just four floors below the Williams spectacle however, I found works that actually do something.

“Robert Gober: The Heart is Not a Metaphor,” organized by Gober and the MoMA’s Anne Tempkin, has room upon room filled with evocative and politically charged works that do not let you turn away from the issues he addresses. Gober’s silk-screened wallpapers of a sleeping white man and a lynched black man stand as a prime antithesis to Williams’s startling combination of sugar coating and ostracizing. Gober plastered the walls of one of the galleries with the repeating pattern of racial injustice to remind us that our history contains the same pattern, regardless of whether or not we want to acknowledge it. Throughout the exhibit, he balances the straightforwardness of his chosen subject matter — sexuality, religion, politics, and the indelible scars they leave on American culture — with the bizarre lyricism of his objects and the materials he used to make them. Gober also embedded within the retrospective a smaller show he curated of works by artists Anni Albers, Joan Semmel, Nancy Shaver, Robert Beck, and Caty Noland. The humility of this gesture — in addition to his numerous curations of other artists’ works in the past — acts as a reminder that we are in this together, and that ambivalence is not an option.

One main difference between Gober and Williams is in the ways they communicate with their audiences. Gober invites empathy and dialogue. Williams delivers a message, which only after complex decoding reveals what he’s really getting at: an often-anticlimactic endeavor. Furthermore, Williams relieves himself of his responsibility as an artist to effectively convey his idea, saying: “Everything is interesting, and if it isn’t interesting, it’s more your inability to activate it.” If that isn’t an emperor exulting his new clothes, then I don’t know what is. Art need not be obvious or definite, but it should be generous in the way it engages its audience. Even if ambivalence is ironic, it perpetuates apathy instead of acting against it. In today’s tumultuous social and political environments, we can’t afford not to care.

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