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. An-My Lê's 29 Palms: Night Operations IV (Museum of Modern Art, 2003–2004)She 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?

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.

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2.19.24 — Trust Me

In “Love Songs” (at the International Center of Photography this past fall), photography was not just an expression of love or a record of love. It was an act of love itself. For Iiu Susiraja (at MoMA PS1), that love seems directed mostly at her.

Not for the photographers in “Trust Me,” who reach out to family, friends, romantic partners, and (lest that leave out anyone) “other networks.” It is about “forging connections,” Alvin Baltrop's Pier 52 (Gordon Matta-Clark's Day's End) (Bronx Museum, 1975–1986)but connections may prove fragile or elusive. It requires trust in others, at the Whitney through February 25, but can you look at a photograph and trust in what you see?

To Moyra Davey, reaching out is an ongoing project, and it keeps circling back to her. For the show’s title work, as curated by Kelly Long, she mailed identical envelopes to everyone she could trust, who handed them right back. Perhaps the differences never mattered much in the first place. Davey has taped a photo to each one, the tape as prominent as any connection. The subjects, from meds (lots of them) to trees, can seem revealing or remote. As she writes in black pen, “most people will divulge more than you would wish,” and that may or may not include her.

As Bob Dylan sang, “I’ll see you in the sky above, in the tall grass and the ones I love.” Barbara Hammer presents Barbara & Terry, in the grass and in one another’s arms. A couple of mixed race, for D’Angelo Lovell Williams, reaches out across still taller and paler vegetation. It might almost be shredded paper from Davey’s envelopes. Mary Manning photographs friends just milling around, but also flowers, almost like a silkscreen for Andy Warhol. Jenny Calivas herself sinks into water or mud, perhaps never to return.

Shadow and light, too, provide a cover. Subjects for Muriel Hasbun hide not just in the reeds, but in a ghostly overexposure. Genesis Báez turns herself and her mother into multiple silhouettes and their shadows. Elsewhere she stays out the picture, connected to her mother by a thread. It might be all that remains of their love. Lola Flash settles for a single face lost in a glare, perhaps her own.

Maybe they are all simply overexposed, under photography’s harsh gaze. Still, they share strong feelings and a sense, however elusive, of place. It could be the return address on Davey’s envelope. It could be the sea off the coast of Florida, where Williams goes for a swim. Is that a wheelchair on the moon for Flash? No, it is a beach in Provincetown, on a sandy hill beneath a blistering sky.

Place may refer to ancestors, much as for Hasbun—who adds the words “all the saints,” both in Arabic and in the Spanish of her native El Salvador. Williams reenacts the final stage in a tortured African American journey from Nigeria to George. Place may also refer to gender and the body. After all, who can imagine connections apart from desire? Alvin Baltrop is once again cruising the Hudson River piers, like gay men in a time of Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz. Dakota Mace makes her prints from chemicals on paper exposed to light, because her own body cannot tolerate photographic silver, and calls them Bonds.

Susan Sontag saw photography as, inevitably, exploiting what it claims to lament or to love. Not in this show, so modest that its eleven photographers (from the Whitney’s collection) could almost be one. Not when the self depends on others for its very identity and existence—and not when trust is so hard to sustain. Laura Aguilar poses with a cardboard sign, “Will Work for Axcess.” For Franz Kafka, “A book is an axe for the frozen sea within us.” Here art knows best the frozen sea.

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2.12.24 — Barriers to Photography

Life would be tough going, even if people did not put so many obstacles in their own way. One could try to clear them out by, say, spending less time alone with devices, viewing nonsense like mine. Sandi Haber Fifield delights in them—the ones she observes and the ones she creates in photocollage.

Sandi Haber Fifield's The Thing in Front of You: TYO23_444 (Yancey Richardson gallery, 2023)A barrier for her can stand in the way of knowing others, like the shadowy figures in her work. Yet it is simply part of life. It is the visual equivalent of memory, at Yancey Richardson through February 17.

Nature presents obstacles enough, from stony landscapes to dense undergrowth, and Haber Fifield brings them into sharp focus. The accumulated fragments in her collage create their own depth of field as well, layer upon layer. Her point of view shifts easily between face down and face front. One can feel oneself approaching things to push them aside. One can feel oneself, too, stepping back to find one’s footing. Her considerable white space may or may not help.

That is not to mention the built environment. Not that she necessarily distinguishes it from nature, no more than James Welling or John Houck—and I work this together with last week’s report on Welling and an upcoming one on Houck as a longer review and my latest upload. Potted plants with bare branches stand just outside a garage because her cuts place them there, but they could just as easily have grown there or landed there as home decor. A work crew must have piled those irregular gray stones. A man stands face to face with an entire wall of vegetation. Like the plants and stones, he may never find his way inside.

Much else, too, has no sense of home, only of barriers. That includes the one-piece plastic fencing that people love to hate—on top of her own thin strips of wood. A police cone has acquired colorful stripes and presides over torn branches in full leaf, like a memorial or celebration. If that suggests a death or absence, so do the silhouettes of boys at the beach. Do not, though, lose hope, for they are taking a break from exertion, and flowers, too, appear in silhouette. They are, the show’s title has it, “The Thing in Front of You,” and that is not the same as the thing in itself.

Mark Alice Durant, in the show’s catalogue, compares her attention to that of a well-known painting by Caspar David Friedrich, the epitome of Northern Romanticism. A man stands on a rock, back to the viewer, looking out on distant mountains and foggy seas. Still, Haber Fifield (no relation to me) is not so much commanding as creating, and the layers keep coming, defying distance. Brutalist architecture comes at you corner on, one side in shadow. Her angled cuts echo the building’s edge and her edge-on point of view. Once again, obstacles are just another word for experience.

Covid-19 brought its share of barriers to entry, but it gave her time, she says, to think. For the rest of us, what was there to do but take up knitting? And what was there to do after the lockdown but pick up the camera and get going? It may sound like a cliché, but Rachel Perry, at the same gallery, did both. She has not fallen for female stereotypes, but she makes the most of them. They become a window onto her studio.

Knitting for her is not folk art but Minimalism. And Minimalism, in turn, takes shape from the business of art in the present. Perry broke down cardboard boxes, delighting in the odd shapes that others would take to the trash. She also photographs herself with her work, in a floor-length dress of many colors, in diagonal stripes. She also keeps finding ways to hide her face, with her back to the camera or a mirror between her and you. Barriers take many forms, and they belong to artists that you may never see.

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1.3.24 — A Shot of Whiskey

When an artist leaves the big city for the Hudson River Valley after thirty-nine years, he might be in search of a new life. For Andrew Moore, it was just another good reason to pick up his camera and revisit American art.

Four years later, it is a show in Chelsea as well, as “Whiskey Point and Other Tales,” at Yancey Richardson through January 6. It should have anyone asking where he has been all these years and what he has found. It could be a stage in his life or a point of origins for American art. Andrew Moore's The Aurora, Brush Park Neighborhood (Queens Museum of Art, 2008)Now in his sixties, he is still on the lookout for both—and I work this together with past reports of photography in the city and country as a longer review and my latest upload.

It might seem a strange move. Thirty-nine years is a long time, long enough for many a career and long enough, too, to mark him as a city boy. Past series have taken him to Times Square theaters and the factories of Detroit. And the first thing he did after his student days was to head for New Orleans to record patterns of change in urban life. Come to think of it, many of those factories had fallen into disuse or decay since Charles Sheeler painted and photographed them starting in 1927, and Moore took care to compare and contrast their views. Decay will always have its appeal as the picturesque, but Moore knows enough to temper sentiment with precision.

Still, he had left town before to photograph the Great Plains, and he cites the influence of his great-great-grandfather, an artist who followed the course of the American railroad. As that suggests, he might wonder, too, if he had at last returned home. He grew up in one of the fanciest parts of Connecticut, and now he had moved up the Hudson to the Catskills, where residents relish their distance from the city. As a rural dweller might boast, he might even wonder if he had found paradise. It might have helped that he moved just in time to escape shuttered galleries after Covid-19. At the very least, his latest could pass for a fantasy.

Could clouds take on the deep reds of sunset in broad daylight, and could they descend anywhere like this, like jigsaw pieces to fit the buildings below? Could mists nestle into a valley as if arising spontaneously from the ground, much as they enveloped houses in Moore’s Detroit? Other mists deepen a grove of bare trees, while lending branches a perplexity of line and color. More light glows on the waters behind them, while other photos make it hard to know what is water and what sky. Sheep cluster for protection beneath more bare trees, while a dog keeps its distance. The dog knows enough to herd them while letting them feel free.

Like a proper paradise, this one has little need for people, but it does have room for him. Moore seems to have found a way to photograph himself at a fair distance as well, immersed in the stillness of landscape, but no: he had spotted a fellow explorer behind a camera overlooking a lake. Was it a follower of the Hudson River School updated for art’s media today? (The gallery cites a woman known for fantastic light and colors, Susie M. Barstow, along with Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and Asher B. Durand in the nineteenth century.) Appropriately enough, Moore shares the gallery with Yamamoto Masao from Japan, whose spooky creatures depend on old-fashioned glass negatives.

So what has he been doing all along? For starters, he has always had a weakness for utopias, like old accounts of blue collar America and the settling of the American West, but with awareness of how things can go wrong. Other series have taken him to Cuba and Russia, with failed utopias of their own. For another, he has often found those utopias in past American art. Last, he sees in them an interchange between past and present. You may not need a shot of whiskey before joining the interchange—and settling into the confidence of wealth and class.

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11.22.23 — Taking Part

Once again, allow me to use a holiday week to catch up with some posts that never made it to the blog. It has been a busy fall.Tracey Rose loves a pose. Her work at the Queens Museum takes no end of pleasure in putting on a show, but the actors and their roles are not so easy to pin down.

Women put on makeup and snarl for the camera—one, a title explains, on behalf of the KKK. Others dress up a bit much for propriety or not at all. The camera may close in a standing figure or step back, to reveal a stage set or forest landscape as welcoming and puzzling as they. Just do not expect this notably political artist to score much in the way of political points, through September 10.

Rose plays her part in a costume drama that is itself hard to pin down. One may not even guess correctly where it begins or ends. She gets the central open area for an enclosure that might be left over from Xaviera Simmons the season before, give or take a fresh, seriously bright paint job. She shines brighter still on surrounding walls. So which belong to Ciao Bella, which sounds like a love song, and which to Lucie’s Fur, which puns on Lucifer? No matter, with so content an all-woman cast.

Naturally the woman from the KKK, in whiteface but with a black eye or two and badly smeared black on her lips, belongs to neither one. Naturally, too, one cannot exactly enter the enclosure for a place to call home. Could that leave one in the forest, along with a woman on horseback with a preposterous top hat and another woman gesturing toward nothing that one can see? Could either be Lucie, which also puns on Lucy, the prototypical human being? One dare not call them primitive or in need of fur. They generate their own warmth, for those willing to play along.

One of two side galleries has room for work from twenty-five years, enough for a midcareer retrospective. Rose calls it “Shooting Down Babylon,” a bit odd, perhaps, for a show that cultivates voices. There the South African artist turns down the poses just a notch and admits men. There, too, the story coheres even less, except when it is too obvious for words. The white train of a bridal dress stands tall, but for what ceremony? A loose knit in the colors of the African National Coalition covers what might be black tomato with text that she alone can read.

In the show’s earliest photo, a man in performance etches his words into the wall of an arts institution that long barred blacks. Here the text is more cryptic still, and he might be sentenced to write it out like a schoolchild in need of a lesson. But then a biracial couple enacts The Kiss, after the sculpture by Auguste Rodin. There the lesson is clear—all the more so because the couple departs from Rodin’s pose to become intimate but relaxed. Is Rose too politically correct or not nearly enough for a modicum of coherence? Either way, these could be fragments of a story waiting for her to find an ending.

Either way, too, this is one politically correct museum, which has its uses. It devotes its other gallery to Aliza Nisenbaum, who has had a residency at the museum and a commitment to teaching art to the Mexican American community in Corona. Indeed, the show’s hanging and bright colors can suggest a schoolroom. (It adapts its title, “Queens, Lindo y Querido,” from a pop song in which the beautiful and beloved is Mexico, not Queens.) It also depicts members of the community, including workers at a food pantry and LaGuardia airport—a taxi driver and security guard included, along with pilots and flight attendants. A couple shares the Sunday New York Times.

The large paintings run to a loose perspective that enhances its diversity and color. Like poses for Rose, that has its pleasures. Both are well-intentioned, and their intentions can still get in the way. Rose speaks of her art as about the body, performativity, post-colonialism, healing, and rituality. Have I left anything out, and has she? Maybe it would work better as a photograph.

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