Summer 2010 Snapshot: Guggenheim & Museum of Modern Art & Photographic Methods

Guggenheim:

“Haunted,” elegantly installed in the rotunda, 2 galleries, and the pristine reversed corkscrew spiral of the Guggenheim Museum, includes the work of over 60 artists who utilize the multifaceted image making techniques of photography. “Haunted” by the past, memory, history, and art history, the exhibit includes films, photographic works in series, single photographic images, mixed media, video projections, and performance.

 

Tacita Dean: Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS

 

Organized by Jennifer Blessing, curator of Photography, and Nat Trotman, Associate Curator, its arching conceptual construct allows the curators to display works from the Guggenheim collection ( to the show’s credit, many of the same artists are also in MoMA’s highly recommended current exhibition “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography”) as well as their new acquisitions, and “work created since 2001 by younger artists.” Showcasing men and women with considered equality, I supposed “younger artists” means that the Guggenheim feels there is a distinction?

Covering the 1960’s until now, a somewhat uneven quality doesn’t tarnish many stand-out choices that were made from the 100 works exhibited. The show also provides a basic catch-up lesson on the evolving concerns of contemporary art and/or photography, and raises questions, in my mind at least, about the difference between the two. To equalize the playing field, and I will pass over the artists who are the “usual suspects.”

“Haunted” is loosely organized into categories, starting with “Appropriation and the Archive.” A discreet wall label explains how these artists forswore the individualized and heroic artist ego to share images as a communal information source bank. Here, Indris Kahn’s re-sampling or layering of the iconic images of Bernd and Hilla Bechers' “Water Towers’ from 1980 evokes restraint and grace in its homage to these seminal trailblazers, who used formal photography to explore form, time passing, cultural context and the photograph as data. To appreciate Kahn’s appropriation requires historical awareness of the Bechers' contribution to conceptual photography. This imbues Kahn’s work with its own conceptual power while allowing us appreciation of the formal time-lapsed elegance of Kahn’s “souped-up” image. It is especially important to note that Khan credits his source. Also recommended in this section is Sarah Charlesworth’s intelligent use of absence in her commentary on visual language.

 

Bernd and Hilla Becher - Water Towers, 1980

 

“Landscape, Architecture, and the Passage of Time” plays off the classic use of photography as a tool to document; especially in photographic journalism. These artists explore documenting sites of the aftermath of a significant past or present event. An-my Le ‘s large format and exquisitely detailed photographs depicting realistic re-enactments of the Vietnam War in Virginia by amateur weekenders, raises enough questions about American pastimes and our morbid attraction to war. However, the artist is Vietnamese, and once that is absorbed, the photographs take on a wealth of political, cultural, and personal import. Sally Mann, whose work is more immediate in its lush and interpretative orientation, also displays gorgeous debauched and decaying images of desolate fields left behind from Civil War battle zones.

 

Sally Mann . Virginia from the Moher Land Series - Guggenheim

 

The next area called “Document and Reiteration” contained work by various performance artists who use photography to complement, document and reiterate the original performance so that the photograph becomes the real object or relic. Sophie Calle's work “Father Mother” was particularly successful in capturing the nuances of this idea, as was Joan Jonas’ “Mirror Piece 1”. Ana Mendieta’s work is also (as always) painfully evocative. Markus Hansen’s work “Curtain,” created by dust, varnish and breath on glass, reiterated the act of photographing a curtain. Reminiscent of Vic Muniz, whose work is not featured in this exhibition, it is a commentary how a photograph can inspire or otherwise be a third step in the process of object/performance, photograph, and final medium. This piece looked exactly like a photograph and one wouldn’t know it wasn’t - without reading the label on the wall.

“Trauma and the Uncanny” addresses the use of photography to reconfigure the original experience; re-framing the personal memory into something “other.” The use of the word “trauma” in the title refers to this practice when coping with traumatic events such as 9/11. This section was somewhat disappointing because the work seemed either unconnected to this idea, which is a good one, or just not that rewarding as an art experience. I personally do not enjoy watching the sadistic efforts of exhibitionist artists hurting themselves, whether reenacting or fantasizing. I would have enjoyed an intelligent “John Waters” interpretation of a family photo album. There were valiant attempts here, but they needed more development. However, I did enjoy Adam McEwen’s “Untitled”, a reiterated a newspaper page which contained a fully written obituary of Richard Prince - who isn’t dead, by the way. How will the real obituary be absorbed into this reiteration? Will the real obit result in “Post Haunted” ?

 

MOMA:

Drawn from its permanent collection, the work exhibited in MOMA’s exhibition “Pictures by Women” - organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator; Sarah Meister, Curator; and Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography - is a testament to the intelligence and creativity of women photographers since the 1930’s. It is also a testament to MOMA’s efforts to include more women in their collection after the brou-ha-ha in 2007 when Jerry Saltz commented that out of 400 works on display on two floors, only 14 were by women. Early gems include Julia Margaret Cameron and Gertrude Käsebier soft focused romantic pictorialism. Benjamin Johnston and her 'Stairway of the Treasurer's Residence: Students at Work’ demonstrated high sophistication in composition and concept. Most impressive is that these women were able to create this work with such a high level of expertise, despite lack of birth control and subsequent demands on woman in the repressive eras in which they lived.

Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s infamous propaganda documentarian and “Triumph of the Will” director, has several rousing works as does Tina Modetti, who has her own Stalinist political agenda. Diane Arbus’ picks are a welcome expansion on the typical focus given to her misfits and monsters. A later show stopper is Carrie Mae Weems, Selection from From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995.

Contemporary photographers Laurie Simmons, JoAnn Verburg, Tina Barney and Rineke Dijkstra comment about their work in web embedded movies on Moma’s website. With the rightful inclusion of women, these two museum exhibitions chronicling Modernism, Pictorialism, and beyond to Post Modernism, show that the history and use of photographic mediums is strong, bold, and still awaits deeper exploration - clearly, there is more from where this came from.

For artist and Broadthinking,org co-founder Chris Twomey's thoughts on Chris Twomey, view her talks on photography and her recent solo shows "Astral Fluff" ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXMlbHjs1Kg ) and
her mid-career retrospective http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5tneMNVlBU ).