Michael Wolf: iseeyou @Silverstein

JTF (just the facts): A total of 31 color photographs, each framed in black with no mat, and hung in the reception area, front room, and main gallery spaces. The show is a mini-retrospective of sorts, with images culled from a variety of projects. The following projects are represented, with the number of prints on view and their details in parentheses:

• Architecture of Density (1, 48x58, edition of 9+2, 2006)
• Night (1, 48x60, edition of 9+2, 2008)
• Transparent City (5, 48x60 or 48x64 or reverse, in editions of 9+2, 2008)
• Transparent City Detail (2, 50x40 and 34x27, in editions of 9+2, 2008)
• Paris Street View (4, various sizes from 27x34 to 60x48 or reverse, in editions of 3+1, 5+2 or 9+2, 2009)
• Manhattan Street View (2, 40x50 or 48x60, in editions of 5+2 or 9+2 respectively, 2009/2010)
• A Series of Unfortunate Events (5, various sizes from 27x35 to 48x60 or reverse, in editions of 3+1, 5+2, or 9+2, 2010)
• Tokyo Compression (11, 42x34 or 10x8, in editions of 5+2, 2010)

All of the works are digital c-prints, except for those from the Tokyo Compression series which are archival inkjet prints. A selection of 13 black and white city views by André Kertész from 1954-1978 (curated by Wolf) is on view in the back room.

Comments/Context: Over the past five years or so, the work of German photographer Michael Wolf seems to be on a trajectory toward finer grained detail, moving inward from wide abstracted city scenes of anonymous hives of geometric apartment blocks to specific personal moments found on city streets around the world. Along the way, his images have opened up prickly questions about the pervasive nature of video surveillance and its impact on our evolving definition of privacy, encouraging and exposing our own implicit voyeurism.

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In his newest body of work, Wolf has given up the use of his own camera and instead mined the endless stream of digital images being captured by Google's automated car-mounted cameras for its Street View product. While these pictures were taken to document buildings in a relentless block by block manner, given the number of people in these big cities, they consistently, if inadvertently, capture pedestrians and passersby. Wolf has appropriated these robotic photographs and then interpreted them via cropping and enlargement, discovering stolen glimpses of urban life. I found the resulting images random and disconnected: a couple kissing, layered reflections in a bus window and mirror, a man giving the camera the finger, a woman collapsed in the gutter; their durable individual significance was generally lost on me. What I liked best was the fabric of pixelization that covers each blown-up image like a thin screen; the repeated red, green, and blue shards resolve into tiny veiled grids of blocked color, creating an almost Pictorialist textured feel.

My favorite images in this exhibit were from the new Tokyo Compression series, where Wolf has photographed commuters pressed up against subway windows. Faces are smashed against doors, creating fogs of condensation; fingers claw as though trying to break free; people close their eyes or adopt masks of indifference and weary disgust to compensate for the crush of humanity. These images make the breakdown of personal space and the invasion of privacy much more explicit than in the context-free Street View scenes. Here the voyeurism is harsh and physical, and the people protect themselves from the onslaught by closing up.

Taken together, the show sees our world from a variety of distances, forcing the viewer to move back and forth, from close-up to broad scale and back again, always voraciously looking and being watched. I think Wolf's work asks us to consider more fully whether we have entered a 21st century version of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, where the knowledge of being under surveillance has started to influence our behavior. In many ways, these new images are evidence of exactly this outcome, and it is this unnerving line of thinking that makes this show worth seeing.

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Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The larger prints from Architecture of Density, Night, and Transparent City range between $11750 and $15750. The images from Transparent City Details are either $5900 or $9000 based on size. The prints from Paris Street View, Manhattan Street View, and A Series of Unfortunate Events range between $5900 to $15750, also based on size. The large print from Tokyo Compression is $9000, while the 10 smaller prints from the same series are being sold as part of a set of 30 prints, together $20000. Wolf's prints have only recently entered the secondary markets, with a few large prints from Architecture of Density finding buyers between between $20000 and $26000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: New Yorker (here), New York (here)
• Interview: The Morning News (here)
• Aperture show, 2009/2010 (DLK COLLECTION review here)

Michael Wolf: iseeyou

Through December 24th

Bruce Silverstein Gallery

535 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Michael Wolf: The Transparent City @Aperture

JTF (just the facts): A total of 43 color photographs, 1 video, and 1 sculpture, generally framed in black with no mat, and hung throughout the main gallery space (with two interior dividing walls), against white and dark blue walls. Since neither wall labels nor a handy exhibition checklist was readily available, the usual detailed information about sizes, dates, editions, formats, and even titles was not present; what follows are my assumptions or simply rough guesses. The chromogenic prints came in three general sizes: large (approximately 4x5 feet or reverse), medium (approximately 16x20 or reverse), and small (approximately 8x10 or reverse); the exhibit contains 13 large prints, 15 medium prints, and 13 small prints, intermixed on the walls. The first wall of the exhibit contains a prelude of sorts, two images and a wooden stool from Wolf's previous Hong Kong project, Architecture of Density. In the middle of the gallery, a video interview runs in a loop, across from a pedestal containing a selection of Wolf's books. A monograph of this work is available in the shop for $60. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Michael Wolf's new images of Chicago skyscrapers and the diversity of life that goes on inside them are fundamentally oriented around the idea of telescoping space, of seeing something from a multitude of distances, from far away to right up close, zooming in and out to to see different layers of meaning.

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From ten feet away, Wolf's large nighttime architectural studies look like any number of dense city scenes you've seen before; the sky is cropped out, flattening the picture plane into a gridded wallpaper of geometric lines and patterns, created by the formal repetition of the windows and vertical structure of the buildings. While the scale is larger here and the prints are in color, fundamentally, these are modernist visual ideas that go back all the way to the 1920s. The difference comes in the ability to walk right up to the frame and continue to delve into deeper layers of detail. Try that trick with a classic vintage image and you'll get an eye full of grain and blur; in this case, individual stories resolve themselves in each pane with startling Rear Window voyeurism.

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Certainly new technologies play a part in enabling this kind of storytelling, and in some cases, there are echoes of the grand gestures of Andreas Gursky in these pictures. But it is this ability to go from abstraction to documentation in the same frame that is exciting. Up close, the boxes and grids become a warren of lighted offices and apartments, each inhabited by workers and everyday people.

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This idea of changing and uncertain distance is amplified by the small, pixelated images of anonymous faces and bodies that are intermixed with the large architectural views. Each one was drawn from one of the big studies and blown up, the pixelation creating another layer of uncertainty; the pictures are indistinct and textured, forcing the viewer to move back and squint to resolve the details. Many of these works were made during the first weeks of the banking crisis, so there are plenty of anxious and worried looks, faces buried in hands, stressed thinking, and subtle gestures of fear. Others have a more pensive and lonely feel, as isolated apartment dwellers watch TV or putter around aimlessly. While I appreciate the impressionistic aspect of the pixels and understand their ability to leave the image more open for interpretation (rather than a strict viewing of truth), I'm not sure that most of the individual close up images can really stand that well on their own; that said, they do provide an important contrast to the larger city shots, and successfully highlight the back and forth changing of scale that is a vital part of Wolf's artistic approach.
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In many ways, these images connect me of the earlier city scenes of Kertesz, where the small details of a cat, or a boy swinging, or a boat on a windowsill suddenly come into view when viewed up close, ultimately changing the feel of the picture. I can imagine a collector having one of these large Wolf architectural views on a big wall, and continually bringing visitors right up to the frame to show them some captivating little detail buried in an office. But while Kertesz' vignettes have the light touch of humor and romance, Wolf's small stories seem more emblematic of the trials and tribulations of these depressing economic times. And so perhaps that will be the ultimate fate of these images: to rest as unexpected artistic documents of this particular point in 21st century history.
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Collector's POV: Since the images in this show are not for sale, no price information was offered. Michael Wolf is represented by Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York (here) and Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco (here). Wolf's images have only recently begun to find their way into the secondary markets. As such, the pricing history is likely too small to be particularly representative; that said, the few works that have sold in the past few years have ranged between $20000 and $26000, all of the prints being of the largest size from Architecture of Density.

For our specific collection, one of the larger patterned architectural studies would likely be the best fit, even though we would struggle to find a place to hang it.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• MoCP exhibit, 2008 (here)
• Video interview @Conscientious (here)
• Features/Reviews: Artforum (here), Lens (here), LensCulture (here)

Michael Wolf: The Transparent City

Through January 21st

Aperture Gallery

547 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001