3.18.24 — A Handful of Dust

Gabriel Orozco will show you art in a handful of dust. It is a rebuke to traditional art forms all the same, with a little help from Jacob Samuel.

Dust is a space, but not a landscape. Orozco makes that clear on the opening page of a series of prints. So what if it, too, is a work of art? Samuel, a printmaker in Santa Monica, has worked with some sixty leading artists over more than thirty years. Many of them would otherwise have refused to enter any space that reeks of fine art. That includes the space of “Jacob Samuel and Contemporary Etching,” at MoMA through March 23. James Welling's Untitled (Quadrilaterals) (Museum of Modern Art, 2008)

What kind of print is right for modern and contemporary art? It could be lithographs for their relative ease of making—and for a poster style going back to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. It could be silkscreens, for the world after Andy Warhol, or monoprints, where anything goes. For Max Beckmann and German Expressionism, it could be woodcuts, with thick, jagged outlines that speak of a crude past and a still harsher modern world. But no, for Samuel favors a medium as disciplined as etching. He took it up in the late 1980s in the studio of Sam Francis, the abstract painter, and has been seeking collaborators ever since.

In etching, the artist makes incisions, akin to freehand drawing, in a protective layer over a metal plate. An acid batch then penetrates the incisions, leaving its cuts in the plate. Wipe away the protective layer, brush ink over the plate, wash away all but what has found its way into the cuts, press the plate against paper, run them through a printing press, and (voilà) you have an etching. Each of Samuel’s collaborations led to an entire series of prints, and many have entered the museum’s collection. It has been a learning experience for everyone, and he likes it that way, even if the artist gets the credit. It takes both parties out of their comfort zone.

The curators, Esther Adler and Margarita Lizcano Hernandez, open a modest show with a display case for portfolios, with elegant, intriguing covers tailored to the artist. They close with two walls for sample prints from many more. In between, they focus on series from a single artist—with the added interest that prints, however ephemeral, can come in multiples, as series of series. That includes series of series of dust. Samuel favors series in a single tone, and several artists favor limited tones within a single work as well. For John McElheny, that means an elusive white on white.

A video shows instruction from Francis himself, who pronounces himself indifferent to whether the work will sell. He wants only to try things—like his big splashes of primary colors. That must have been a daunting message for an aspiring printer with a career in mind, but if Samuel had reservations, he keeps them to himself. It certainly prepares him for some difficult artists. I never could decipher McElheny’s white text or decide whether his minimal forms represent champagne flutes. I am still searching for signs of a notorious social butterfly, Harry Crosby, in prints by Charline von Heyl, such as slippers and a silk scarf.

So what's NEW!The artists had to learn something beside printing technique. Christopher Wool, known for his word paintings, says that it helped him find his way to drawing again. James Welling, known as a photographer, instead assembles quadrilaterals into larger shapes, starting with paper scraps and software. Samuel had to learn far more. How was he to transform dust into incisions with Gabriel Orozco—or, with Mona Hatoum and Matthew Monahan, masking tape and human hair? Jannis Kounellis keeps piling on the challenges, with molten lead, smashed glass, coffee grounds, and more.

They enlarged his view of prints as well, beyond etchings. They took him to aquatints with Dave Muller and to drypoint with Barry McGee (while Kounellis used both). They had professional needs, like dance notation for Meredith Monk,and personal ones, like Marina Abramovic making (she hopes) love potions, Chris Burden in the wilds with knives, and Muller sharing home turf with bears and dragonflies. They all had to learn new questions for art. How much line, how much texture, and how much text? The contemporary etching wants to know.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

3.15.24 — A War with Many Sides

An-My Lê could be a citizen of the world if she did not have so many memories. Her retrospective opens with a photograph of a schoolgirl. Could it be her?

I doubt it, but with Lê you never know. What looks later like ground action in the Vietnam War is only a recreation in North Carolina or Virginia—or a training exercise in California for wars closer to today. Wall text speaks only of her return to Vietnam in 1994, nineteen years after the fall of Saigon, and what she set out to see. Still, she is not saying, and she herself had barely entered her teens when she left for America. But then she is never saying, in photos that speak for all sides, apart perhaps from her own. MutualArtShe is forever “Between Two Rivers,” at MoMA through March 16—and I work this together with recent reports on photography from Lagos and from Tracey Rose in South Africa as a longer review and my latest upload.

That serious schoolgirl says little as well. She takes care with everything, right down to a proper hat, and her glance gives nothing away. Nor does that first series in Vietnam. Boys playing soccer dissolve in a blur, while adults mill about. A tiger cage and a vast interior with a single desk are devoid of life. Yet Lê is determined to see it all and to listen.

She is caught up in it all as well. That first series took her to the former South Vietnam, where she had lived, and to the north, which held childhood memories as well, but of her mother’s childhood. It also includes shots of Louisiana, where she had fled. The Vietnam War reenactment did not just allow her to participate, but demanded it in exchange for letting her observe. Naturally she fought on both sides. And could that be her playing pool with sailors?

An-My Lê's 29 Palms: Night Operations IV (Museum of Modern Art, 2003–2004)Lê gives the show’s title in English, Vietnamese, and French, not just because Vietnam was once a French colony, but also because she spent much of her childhood in Paris. The two rivers are primarily the Mekong and the Mississippi, but also the Seine, the Rio Grande were she traveled to observe the border, and the Hudson, where she taught upriver from New York City. She also finds affinities. The Mekong and the Mississippi both have storied deltas and storied poverty, and the bayou has a parallel in Vietnam;s tall grass, swampy pools, and flat, parched land. It, too, might make a miserable place for a war. It also helps drive a lifelong conviction that landscape means as much as people.

How much do they mean? They are still not letting on. One might never know one side from the other in the reenactments without a photo’s title. Maybe that is what was so wrong with the war. For ever so many, as another title has it, it was Someone Else’s War at that. Events Ashore shows the U.S. Navy engaged in scientific research, earthquake relief, and flood prevention, but Lê knows that all these, a navy included, may descend on countries like a show of force.

Her latest series, a shift to color, takes her across the United States, looking for clues to its controversies and turmoil, and she herself may wonder whether she finds them. Students protest against guns, but half the time in the background. Migrant labor blends easily into a cattle drive, and the White House briefing room is breaking down or still setting up. Here Confederate statues are neither going up nor coming down. Her very artlessness can seem an evasion. The closest her reenactors come to war’s drama and fear is lightning descending on night ops.

The curators, Roxana Marcoci with Caitlin Ryan, take one series at a time. Think of them less as finished work than as personal projects, to which Lê can devote herself completely. She does arrange one series in an open circle, like an old-fashioned diorama. Its fourteen landscapes cover a lot of ground. Does that add up to common ground or telling contrasts? Once again, she is not saying.

Lê’s photos can seem all but artless, and well-meaning critics may praise her more for her history than for her art. The Navy removes unexploded ordinance, but with none of the poignancy of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, for whom Vietnam’s past is a minefield, or of boat people for Danh Vo. That diorama might be more immersive if its components meant more. Still, silence speaks to her own sense of helplessness or displacement. When she returned to her last childhood home, “I felt that I didn’t recognize anything,” but she kept looking. For her, a refusal to take sides is taking sides, but in a different war than either side ever knew.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

3.13.24 — Old Masters at the Y

Ask an artist or two about their work, and you can almost hear the gears turning. Where to begin?

It is unlikely to be where Paul Cadmus began an interview, with the old masters. He rattles off an eclectic and eccentric mix, with little in common but the impossible—the search for timelessness and pleasure. One and all, they root that search, too, in the human body. Paul Cadmus's Male Nude NM16 (D. C. Moore, 1965)Who knows where the search would end and in which New York? I also work this together with my earlier report on another New Yorker, Edward Hopper, as a longer review and my latest upload.

That interview plays on video amid a show of his male nudes, mostly drawings, at D. C. Moore through March 16. As a hasty addition, he says that he hopes nonetheless to contribute something original. That extra something could be the frenetic detail of his drawings and the unapologetic expression of his desires. Others, like Edward Hopper, roamed the streets of Manhattan and gazed at its bridges. Still others looked to a world of dreams or to modern art itself. It may be impossible to say whether Cadmus starts by looking within or without.

Where to begin indeed? For Cadmus, the list of influences begins with Luca Signorelli, whose early Renaissance precision fed the sinuous outlines of his standing nudes, and the fleshier women of Peter Paul Rubens. It extends to the Rococo wildness and weightlessness of François Boucher. Along the way it has time for the undisguised and disturbing eroticism of Caravaggio before his subjects turned to pain and death. When Cadmus draws a man lying in bed, he, too, can offer temptations but only scant comfort. In the changing room at the Y in 1933, from an artist just short of thirty, or a Subway Symphony from the 1970s, men are literally climbing the walls.

That Y.M.C.A. Locker Room has no lockers, only partitions that open onto still more men. The subway, too, not in the show, has an unnaturally wide aisle in unnatural perspective, but not wide enough for the behavior of crowds. In the drawings, a man lies on a stone like a dead Christ, while those in bed lie on their backs as well. They look just as restless awake or asleep. Standing or seated men lean forward, curling into themselves. It is more a sign of agony than introspection.

They are at once inviting the male gaze while turning away. They have the lean, muscular bodies of the Renaissance but a refusal of Renaissance idealism. Right on the way in, one has thick calves and thighs, but preposterously narrow knees and ankles. Cadmus does not name an influence from the late Renaissance, but for him its Mannerism began earlier and persists to this day. Is this magic realism truly magic or realism? He himself would say so, but do not be too sure.

The question always hovered over prewar American art, and the Whitney called its look at American Surrealism in 2011 “Real/Surreal.” One could see Cadmus alongside Philip Evergood, Peter Bloom, and Jared French. They, like George Tooker and Edith Gregor Halpert, struggled with social realism and their nightmares alike. Realism took them Coney Island and men on shore leave, but also to the desires they found there. Meanwhile George Bellows has entered history for his love-hate relationship with bulked-up boxers.

Whatever you call it, it could seem hopelessly out of touch. Is starting with the old masters, like Cecily Brown and Kehinde Wiley, unlikely today or merely pretentious? At the height of Modernism, it could seem a refusal to face reality. It does, though, face a contemporary issue head on, sex. In another painting, Cadmus takes his troubled relationship with a man to the beach, along with his lover’s new wife.

He is also in love with technique. Paintings stick to an early Renaissance medium, tempera. Drawings have a dense crosshatch in crayon. A man’s blanket has discordant colors on each side, but most stick to black with equally dense highlights in white. I may still look down on his art and his confused desires, even while admiring them. But then he must have felt the same way.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

3.11.24 — A Center of Concern

To wrap up from last week on ICP, the International Center of Photography would like you to know: it is concerned.

It is concerned not just about you, politics and wars, or even the planet, although its center of concern has been growing ever since its founding. A celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, through March 6, encompasses more than one hundred fifty works, spanning at least as many years and much of the globe. It has kept rethinking photography along the way. What began as the hopes of a leading photojournalist to keep his vision alive has changed, along with its name. “ICP at 50” opens with portraits of Americans, but African Americans—Gerda Taro's Republican Militiawoman Training on the Beach, Outside Barcelona (International Center of Photography, 1936)as couples, at choir practice, and alone. It cannot be an accident that its concern for dignity leads into a second, smaller show of David Seidner, a white fashion photographer who died of AIDS, while new acquisitions in photography at the Morgan Library seem blissfully secure.

The center’s very origins lay in concern, and the C in ICP first stood for just that. Cornell Capa created the International Fund for Concerned Photography in 1956, in concert with Robert Capa, David “Chim” Seymore, Werner Bischof, and Dan Weiner, becoming the ICP we know in 1974. To this day, it boasts of the lines out the door for its opening. I still miss how well its Fifth Avenue mansion showed off photography, although I have followed it on its journey to a midtown office lobby, a basement space on the Bowery, and (with luck) a permanent home on the Lower East Side across from the Essex Market. It may not have space off the entrance for more than coffee and a gift shop, but it has a library, media labs, and a school. One of two floors for galleries has narrow walkways, but it pays off in the drama of looking down, not to a bloated museum atrium, but to art.

It can also boast of the two hundred thousand prints in its collection, so many that “ICP at 50” can handle only one per photographer. (You will just have to take its word that Elisabeth Sherman, Sara Ickow, and Haley Kane as curators, examined each and every one.) The show is a survey of photography all by itself. The section on the nineteenth century also points to a changing medium—from tintypes that allowed only one-off prints to plates that could print again and again. An unknown photographer, it turns out, printed in color as early as 1935, decades before the saturated colors of Helen Levitt and William Eggleston. But then Levitt’s photo of legs sticking out from under a car is street photography, too.

ICP will always have a soft spot for photojournalism. It has had recent shows of Magnum Photos, with its dedication to social history, and Robert Capa in Spain. The older of the Capa brothers, he witnessed the Spanish Civil War from the point of view of those who fought against fascism and lost. Sure enough, the poster photo for “ICP at 50,” by Gerda Taro, depicts a Spanish militia member in dramatic profile, raising her pistol. The show then leaps ahead to Martin Luther King, Jr., from Weiner, and JFK shaking hands from Cornell Capa himself. One need not claim a photo of the lunar lander for fine art, not when it is credited to NASA rather than an artist, but why try when the medium reaches to the moon?

Still, the story continues. Diversity remains in focus well after early black America. Gordon Parks has Ralph Ellison in a midnight hideaway like the protagonist of Invisible Man, but with music, making blackness audible and visible. Paul Mpagi Sepuya puts his own black body in question in a mirror study, and Mickalene Thomas looks as ever at herself. For once, her glitzy self sits off center and closer to the rear of her tacky surroundings. Taro’s Spaniard is kneeling, as much to display her youth and beauty as to take better aim.

Just ticking off the women contributors would be a lost cause. Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deana Lawson continue their unraveling of black identity, in the case of Simpson with enigmatic text. Others were creating modern photography, including Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, and Ilse Bing, whose shades of gray look more vivid and mournful every day. Still others mark the shift to present-day concerns. It is not just a matter of feminism or a matter of pride. When an unseen woman for Lee Friedlander casts her shadow on another woman, her back to the camera, she is casting a long shadow on photography itself.

It is about what photography does and is. For An-My Lê, photography’s public record can only approach her private history as a woman from Vietnam. But then ICP has always had its private side, like the intimate records of “Love Songs,” “Face to Face,” and “Close Enough” in just the last year. It has also begun to challenge photography as a reliable medium. That is where Postmodernism and such women as Laurie Simmons, Louise Lawler, and Barbara Bloom come in. Simmons and Lawler have their dolls and rephotography, while Bloom needs a whole wall to place images in an uncertain museum context—and I pick up the story of ICP’s formal and private sides next time, along with a look at photographs at the Morgan Library.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

3.8.24 — Your Money or Your Life

Before there was capitalism, there was money. Think of Judas and his thirty pieces of silver. Matthew, before becoming an apostle, might have collected taxes on it.

It may have been a flimsy thing or awkwardly bulky and heavy, but a lot turned on it. Now the Morgan Library makes the case for just how much, in “Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality,” Jan Gossart's Portrait of a Banker (National Gallery of Art, c. 1530)through March 10. If it has a discomforting moral for an institution founded by a man of means to display priceless possessions, it may say more than the museum itself ever knew. Together with a report on “Morgan’s Bibles,” it is also the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

The Morgan gives new meaning to “your money or your life,” the afterlife. When Hieronymus Bosch painted Death and the Miser, with sacks of money tempting a man on his deathbed, he was taking up a subject familiar from illuminated manuscripts and Sunday sermons. If a deathbed seems an unlikely place to accumulate wealth, it is only, after all, a parable. The show includes Petrarch and Geoffrey Chaucer, who wove the message into their poetry (although Chaucer also makes the case for merchant cunning). Bosch himself had an unmatched talent for bringing an older world view to the very height of the Renaissance. As his interior passes into depth, in proper perspective, it presents one temptation after another in cabinets, shelves, and doors.

More than half the show elaborates on that message. A still more lavish deathbed scene appears in The Hours of Catherine of Cleves from around 1440, across from the fire of Purgatory. Boys in another book of hours scramble for a shower of coins, ignoring the Visitation of Mary and her mother, Anne, on the facing page. A saint flees an entire golden mountain, by Fra Angelico, while gesturing toward an actual city on a hill. With Albrecht Dürer, the prodigal son at last comes home. If accumulating wealth is bad, spending is worse.

It was not too late for the prodigal son, and it is not too late for you. So at any rate goes the story, but has its moment already passed? Bosch’s painting teems with devils, and devils always put on the best show. Those boys scrambling for money could be your neighbors at play. One work on display is more lavish than the next, from the gold leaf of medieval painting to the subtler richness of the Renaissance. Saint Francis may have renounced worldly goods, but a High Renaissance collector possessed Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Francis in the Desert.

Those contradictions run happily through the show, right down to its title. Is this medieval money, merchants, and morality? Not just morals are changing. A show that opens with Bosch cannot be all that medieval, and sacks of gold are not yet money. (Wikipedia assigns a present-day equivalent for thirty pieces of silver, but I am not so certain.) Bosch hangs next to an imposing strongbox and actual coins from the late 1300s, so flimsy that one might mistake them for paper tokens in a child’s game.

The exhibition tells a different story as well. It is about the emergence of a new merchant class and the spirit of capitalism—for whom wealth was a mark of divine favor and charity is owed to only the “deserving” poor. By its end, money becomes more intricate and weightier. It had to do so, because coins at first established their value by their weight. And then mere paper takes on arbitrary value as well. If a medieval manuscript has its unmatched glories, a merchant’s register or a text on money management is a book, too.

The curators, Diane Wolfthal and Deirdre Jackson, add two paintings, for additional stages in a Renaissance economy. They are not just displays of wealth, like so much art in Tudor England, but portraits of getters and spenders. The first, by Hans Memling, a man in black holding a pink carnation, hesitates to speak of just what he does for a living—but the second, by Jan Gossart in 1530, glories in it. The tools of this man’s trade have the magic of still life, and his records hang like wallpaper. They foretell a time when wealth can go not to charity or the church, but to a library like Morgan’s, and the party of religious zealots can favor tax cuts to the wealthy. Fitting or chilling, a camel need no longer go through the eye of a needle for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

3.6.24 — The Fashionista Himself

“I’m HIV positive. It doesn’t have to be negative.” So runs a magazine ad that David Seidner accompanied with his own photograph, of himself. Can his optimism withstand his dying and his anxiety over what he had become as an image maker?

The International Center of Photography opens with a self-portrait. Retrospectives often do, but Seidner was a fashion photographer first and foremost. It consumed pretty much the entirety of a sadly abbreviated life. Yet surely fashion photography is not about the photographer, right—and not about art? Such, at least, is convention, but his torn allegiance powered some provocative art, through March 6. You can only return to “ICP at 50” chastened and questioning. David Seidner's Francine Howell, Azzedine Alaïab (International Center of Photography, 1986)

Photography is always about looking, through the camera and the human eye behind it. It is also about making you want to look—for photojournalism, at the urgency of breaking events. For fashion photography, that means making you look at a look that you will want for yourself. It is a work for hire about work for sale, and Seidner knew that, too. He snagged a contract, an exclusive contract, with Yves Saint Laurent. He loved it because photography for him was always about appearances, ones that he could manipulate and turn on himself.

Seidner in that self-portrait is lying down, seductive, provocative, and vulnerable. He turns the camera on other men as well, with an overlaid black grid. It defines his work as art back when the grid of late Modernism ruled. It also highlights the body and dismembers it. That can mean a naked body, a clothed body, or, in other work, a fragment of clothing alone. It is a polished image but also a teaser for what may never come.

He brings the same versatility to fashion. He directs the eye to the model and the designer, and he does not distinguish the two. A magazine feature about a designer requires no less. He elevates his subject while taking it apart and reassembling it, with multiple exposures and with mirrors. Nicely dressed store mannequins look more individual and alive than many a professional model. One can almost claim to know what they are thinking.

If that were not sufficiently a matter of art, Seidner devotes a series from the 1990s to well-known artists. Hung in four rows of four photos apiece, their unsmiling faces appear up close, approaching you and challenging you. Naturally he includes himself, as a boast but also in wonder as to whether he belongs. And then he is back with clothing, billowing outward. One hardly knows whether he has fallen prey more than ever to fashion or turned away from the model. The conventions and the fashion still turn me off, but they have me thinking.

An eye to appearances is also an eye on gender, and Seidner was gay. He died of AIDS in 1999, at forty-two. One might see his work as his coming out or anxiety about his identity. It has its parallel in art and anti-art photography of his time, like that the self-portrait as a pose for Cindy Sherman or dolls in place of mannequins for Laurie Simmons. It looks ahead to painting by women today that makes a point of the body but minimizes the self-questioning. I hardly know whether to call Seidner more or less radical for that.

He accords with the current interest not in minimizing fine art, but in refusing to set it apart from design and craft—no more than photography from painting. Museum shows of fashion are still mostly pandering, but the Jewish Museum has recovered magazine photography for art as well. ICP sees Seidner as long neglected but vital to its collection (pairing it with its fiftieth anniversary show, no less). It has his tear sheets, but it ends with something else again. A final series sets orchids in blurred close-up against a backdrop of fabric. It becomes pure color, but still an emblem of impending death.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

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