Claire Beckett, Simulating Iraq @Wadsworth Atheneum

JTF (just the facts): A total of 18 large scale color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in a single room gallery space on the first floor of the museum. All of the prints are archival inkjet prints, sized 40x30 or reverse. The images were taken in 2008 and 2009. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Claire Beckett's recent photographs turn on the idea of upending our expectations. Taken at specialized military training sites around the US, her smart, sometimes dissonant images document artificial, stage set versions of Iraq and Afghanistan, staffed with "soldiers" and "civilians" and used for simulations and training exercises. Nearly every picture is an inversion or a breakdown of reality as we know it, each one undermining our ability to impose our now ingrained stereotypes.

Her images of these fabricated towns look plausibly real from far away, but up close, the makeshift mosques are made of rough plywood and the warrens of interlocking alleys and buildings are cinderblocks painted the color of sand. Simplistic forms and fake brickwork provide an illusory backdrop for small narratives and role playing exercises played out by the soldiers: Al-Qaeda terrorist cells making IEDs, Taliban fighters hoarding machine guns, nurses and injured marines, and unsuspecting locals and civilians drinking tea in the village square. Beckett's portraits of these "actors" have an even more surreal quality. Marines and locals from nearby American towns dress up in tunics, robes and headscarves and are given Iraqi or Afghani names and elaborate backstories, but their blue eyes, fair skin, and work boots provide incongruous cultural mixtures and contrasts. Fresh makeup and perfect nails adorn a young "Iraqi nurse" and fake carcasses hang from a "butcher shop". Everything is a visual approximation, a window-dressed stand-in for the real.
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I like the fact that these pictures are free from a specific point of view; they aren't slanted or pushing a particular agenda. Their matter-of-fact conceptual oddity is part of what makes them so successful - they are open for any number of complex interpretations or conclusions. Beckett's photographs capture a different side of these conflicts than we have seen previously, broadening the ultimate story of our approach to these long running wars.

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum exhibition, there are, of course, no posted prices. Beckett's photography has no secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only viable option for interested collectors at this point. She is represented in Boston by Carroll and Sons (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Interview: Big, Red & Shiny (here)

Claire Beckett, Simulating Iraq
Matrix 163
Through March 4th
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Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
600 Main Street
Hartford, CT 06103

Patti Smith: Camera Solo @Wadsworth Atheneum

JTF (just the facts): A total of 70 black and white photographs, generally framed in black and matted, and hung in a series of four connected gallery spaces. All of the prints are gelatin silver prints taken with a Land 250 Polaroid camera, available in editions of 10; dimensions were not available. The images were taken between 1995 and 2011. The exhibit also includes 1 sculpture, 1 video (in a separate darkened room), and 4 glass cases containing poems, drawings, books, letters, Robert Mapplethorpe's slippers and marble cross, a prayer cloth, a stone, contact sheets, a camera, a portrait of Baudelaire, Pope Benedict's slippers, and her father's china teacup. A monograph of this body of work was published by Yale University Press in 2011 (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Patti Smith's photography is full of ghosts. Not the scary spectral beings or spooky monsters of a horror movie, but the gentle, ephemeral imprints of lives now gone that have remained deeply resonant for her in one way or another. Her pictures are brimming with objects infused with personal significance, together a kind of artistic diary or the map of a life long journey, where ideas and influences pile up like loose memories and everyday objects become a source of spiritual inspiration.

The vast majority of the photographs on display are deceptively simple, sometimes dull, black and white still lifes or interior scenes, often taken in the available light and left grainy and shadowy, full of subtle beauty and immediacy. The show reads like a parade of heroes or a puzzle of aesthetic (I hesitate to use the word "poetic") connections: Rimbaud's fork and spoon, Keats' bed, Woolf's cane, Nureyev's slippers, Tolstoy's stuffed bear, Hesse's typewriter, Bolaño's chair. As if communing with the dead, she earnestly searches out countless graves and tombstones: Sontag, Whitman, Blake, Baudelaire, Shelley, Modigliani, Brancusi. Other pictures document her children, her guitars and workspace, religious icons and cherubs, landmarks from Paris and Vienna, with treasured items from her life with Robert Mapplethorpe never far from view. Every item is symbolic, every seemingly insignificant thing a talisman or relic.

In the hands of one less talented, these same pictures might have been cloying, pretentious and suffocatingly arty; instead, Smith's images are modest, sincere, and surprisingly lyrical. She seems altogether unaware of the danger of cliche, walking right up to the line and somehow coming away with pictures that are altogether genuine. There is a sense of deep respect and honor in these photographs, of mundane personal effects made special, and of an intense, meaningful pilgrimage made to linger in their presence and to be moved by their strength.

This is one of the more inward looking shows I have seen in quite a long time, and there were moments where I felt a little claustrophobic being allowed in so close. Together, these images are the visual journal of a solitary artistic life, each item a tiny fragment of her searching persona. I can almost image the collectors of this work placing the same kind of obsessive energy into these prints, capturing a piece of the essence of Patti Smith in the pictures, to be placed on a shelf like a beloved shrine.

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum exhibition, there are, of course, no posted prices. Smith's photography has virtually no secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only viable option for interested collectors at this point. She is represented in New York by Robert Miller Gallery (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews/Features: Guardian (here), BOMBLOG (here), Neon Tommy (here), Style.com (here), Hartford Courant (here)
• Interviews: Vogue (here), ARTINFO (here)
• DLK COLLECTION review of Just Kids (here)

Patti Smith: Camera Solo
Through February 19th

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
600 Main Street
Hartford, CT 06103