The Permanent Way @Apexart

JTF (just the facts): A total of 30 black and white and color photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung in the two room divided gallery space. The show combines work from 5 contemporary photographers with railroad maps, hand colored wood engravings, vintage photo postcards (from the collection of Luc Sante) and other ephemera. The exhibit was curated by Brian Sholis. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers have been included, with information on the number of works on view and image details for reference:

• Jeff Brouws: 3 archival pigment prints, each 37x44, from 2010 and 2011
• Justine Kurland: 3 c-prints, each 15x30 or 40x50 (or reverse), from 2007, 2008 and 2012
• Mark Ruwedel: 19 gelatin silver prints, each 8x10, from 1995-2005
• Victoria Sambunaris: 2 chromogenic print, each 39x55, from 2007 and 2010
• James Welling: 3 toned gelatin silver prints, each 18x22 (or reverse, from 1990 and 1991

Comments/Context: When we think about history in an academic, tell us the truth about the past sense, the one genre of photography that tends not to be considered particularly relevant is fine art photography. Without a second thought, we rely upon photojournalism and documentary photographs of various kinds to provide evidence for our backward looking interpretation of historical events, but we normally don't include photographs with art as a first purpose in this analysis. Perhaps we assume they are too subjective or slanted to be instructive. This collective bias is what makes The Permanent Way such an unexpected show - it's unabashedly a history lesson, and yet, the reasoned argument put forth is supported by fine art photographs as primary source material.

With the passage of the Pacific Railway Act 150 years ago this year, the US government unleashed what would become one of the most ambitious transformations of the American landscape ever undertaken. Land grants and rights of way enabled massive, industrial scale earthworks - bridge building, canyon cutting, rock blasting, path clearing, and track laying with a unprecedented scope. It was a fifty year whirlwind of engineered nation building, with commercial friendly rail lines spreading like blood vessels to every corner of the uninhabited West. Fast forward a century, and these railways are now permanently embedded in our landscapes, reshaping the way our towns and cities evolved, how our economy grew and developed, and how we see the land and its natural marvels. Along the way, the entire genre of American landscape photography was similarly remade.

Curator Brian Sholis has smartly mixed 19th century maps, photo post cards, and other vernacular material from the period with recent photographs made by five contemporary artists, each photographer employing a different approach to documenting the trains and railway infrastructure. None of these artists is a "train photographer" in the way that we might label O. Winston Link as such an artist; instead, the assembled group takes a broader view of the impact the trains have had (and continue to have) on the land and the communities that have grown up near the tracks. Victoria Sambunaris uses elevated views of bending arcs of freight cars and straight arrow tracks to tell complex, layered stories about the borderlands between the US and Mexico and the landscape of the Utah desert. Justine Kurland is perhaps more interested in the hobo subculture that has developed around the train system, and her images of the slow S curve of tracks that follow a river through the California mountain wilderness or the broad flat plains dominated by sky are quiet and lonely, measured by the contrast in scale between the rootless riders and the immensity of the land. Both Mark Ruwedel and Jeff Brouws examine the train system as a pattern of ruins; Ruwedel sees the formal Becher-style repetition in sharp V shaped cuts through rock and the dark holes of abandoned tunnels, while Brouws follows the empty railbeds as the thin paths vanish into the encroaching forest. And James Welling makes low angle black and white "portraits" of engines, evoking feelings that are alternately heroic and grimy.

Together, these photographs provide a varied, surprisingly unsentimental picture of the impact of the railroads on the American landscape. It's an effective proof that the downstream effects of the decisions made some 150 years ago still reverberate in increasingly complicated and nuanced ways, even when the trains have long since ceased to run in many cases. Most importantly, I think this show is a fabulous reminder that fine art photography can be a vital resource in helping to interpret the complexities of our collective past; we ought to thoughtfully mix history and art more often.

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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are not for sale. The contemporary photographers included in the exhibit are represented by the following New York galleries:

• Jeff Brouws: Robert Mann Gallery (here)
• Justine Kurland: Mitchell-Innes & Nash (here)
• Mark Ruwedel: Yossi Milo Gallery (here)
• Victoria Sambunaris: Yancey Richardson Gallery (here)
• James Welling: David Zwirner (here)

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews/Features: Modern Art Notes podcast (here), Artforum (here), Daily Beast (here)
• Interview: Design Observer (here)

The Permanent Way
Through July 28th
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Apexart
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013

Jeff Brouws, Typologies @Richardson

JTF (just the facts): A total of 63 color photographs arranged into three typologies/grids, each image individually framed in white and matted, the sets hung in the small single room Project Gallery in the back. All of the prints are archival pigment prints. The 15 images of storage units were made between 2001 and 2010 and are roughly 9x11 each; the typology is available in an edition of 11. The 24 images of signs were made between 2003 and 2007 and are 7x7 each; the typology is available in an edition of 9. And the 24 images of drive-ins were made between 1990 and 2002 and are 7x7 each; the typology is also available in an edition of 9. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: As a foil to the larger Baltz, Becher, Ruscha exhibit on view in the next room (here), this small show of the contemporary work of Jeff Brouws provides concrete evidence of the continued use and popularity of the typology as a photographic form. Like Evans and Christenberry before him, Brouws has an eye for vernacular America, tracking down a broad catalog of abandoned drive-in theaters, broken roadside advertising, and one-story storage units with rolling steel doors.

This show in particular got me thinking about the rigidity of this specific approach to image making. Just like in poetry, where if you pour the contents of a normal poem into the structure of a sonnet or a haiku the results may be middling or altogether broken, the same can be said for the photographic typology: taking a bunch of pictures of a similar subject and hanging them in a grid doesn't automatically mean they will be an effective typology. This particular form requires exacting rigor, or the theme and variation that is meant to be highlighted gets muddled by too many differences in detail. The Bechers were obviously the masters at reducing the number of visual variables: same camera angles, same framing, same lighting/sky, etc., leaving the simplicity of the architectural forms to come to the forefront. Brouws' typologies are less systematic and ruthless, and color is introduced as another factor to be considered. The overall effect is much looser and warmer, less deadpan conceptual and more celebratory of the idiosyncrasies of American life.

There is of course a limit to the ubiquity of the typology at some point; not every subject deserves such exacting attention. And this show reminded me that the typology is in many ways an originality reducing form; the more it is executed with systematic serial rigor, the less the individual images have a signature style that is obviously attributable to a specific maker. I think this brings us back to a strong dose of conceptualism as the foundation on which this form is built; those who casually hang their pictures in a grid without thinking through what this approach really implies are truly missing the point. Brouws has clearly thought this through and has opted for a more personal approach to the typology, a little less stringent and structured than many, but perhaps a little more comfortable and approachable.
  
Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The storage unit typology is priced at $10750, while the sign typology is $11750 and the drive-in typology is $22000. Brouws' work is not readily available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.
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Of the three typologies on view, my favorite was the selection of broken signs (Signs Without Signification); it's on the right in the bottom installation shot. I liked the way the empty outlines were pared down into the simple geometries of squares, rectangles and circles, almost like line drawings against the backdrop of the sky.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub: 

• Artist site (here)
• Interview: American Elegy (here)

Jeff Brouws, Typologies

Through May 27th

Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Book: Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts, Photographs by Jeff Brouws

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2003 by Chronicle Books (here). 272 pages, with 274 black and white and color photographs (some duplicates). With essays by Diana Gaston, Jeff Brouws, D.J. Waldie, Luc Sante, M. Mark, Phil Patton, Joel Jensen, Mark Frauenfelder, Bruce Caron, Wendy Burton, and Alan Rapp. (Cover shot at right, via Chronicle Books website.)

The book is divided into 11 separate sections, each centered on a single subject matter type. These include:

Freshly Painted Houses
Language in the Landscape
Abandoned Drive-Ins
Farm Forms
Partially Painted Pickup Trucks
Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations
Freight Cars
Signs
Trailers
Bowling
Storage Units

Comments/Context: If you took Walker Evans' love of the American vernacular and threw it into a mixer with the rigorous conceptual ideas of Bernd and Hilla Becher and added a splash of the spirit of the open road, what might emerge is the work of Jeff Brouws. In many ways, Brouws is a collector (just like some of us), cataloging fragments of increasingly obsolete American culture, making careful inventories of the worn, distressed and left behind.

This small, thick book gathers together nearly a dozen photographic projects, where Brouws has selected a single resonant American subject (beat-up partially painted pickup trucks, or railway freight cars, or bowling alleys) and then traveled the country finding multiple examples of this specific form. His images are generally straight-on "portraits" of these places or things, carefully laid out with clarity and order (although somewhat less meticulously rigid and repetitive than the Bechers). The prints are then displayed as typologies, thereby accenting the theme and variation effect found when a number of images of the same subject are brought together on one wall (or page). The result is a visual inventory of American small town culture, an anthropology of the quirks of our American personality which are slowly being lost to the homogenizing forces of global change.

The best of these groups are those that accent the individuality and eccentricities of the subjects: the garishly painted houses that seem overflowing with optimism, the lovingly dilapidated side panels of the work horse trucks, the simplicity of empty drive-ins, and the innovations in graphic design found in paint and neon across the land. I also enjoyed the systematic surveying of abandoned gas stations, as an homage to Ed Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations.

In paging through this book, I found myself wanting more of the projects I found most interesting, and would have willingly given up several of the less successful subjects (Farm Forms and Storage Units were my least favorite) to make room for more depth on a few. That said, the diversity of common subjects creates a broader picture of the peculiar landscape of the American back roads, thereby telling a more complex and whimsical story of vernacular America.

Collector's POV: Jeff Brouws is represented by Robert Mann Gallery in New York (here), Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco (here), and Robert Klein Gallery in Boston (here). Surprisingly, there have been very few examples of Brouws' work in the secondary markets, so interested collectors will need to follow up with the appropriate retail galleries. For our particular collection, a selection/grid of gasoline stations, sign elements or colorful houses would likely be the best fit.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Interview: Conscientious, 2007 (here)
• Approaching Nowhere (here)
• NY Times review, 2003 (here)
• PBS Photo Essay, 2003 (here)