Sam Samore, 1973 @Team

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung in the main gallery space and the smaller back room. All of the works are gelatin silver prints, taken in 1973 and printed recently. The images come from two series (The Suicidist and The Murdered Brother), each of which is made up of a total of 17 images (not all are on display in this show). Each print is sized 14x22, and comes in an edition of 1+1AP. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: Visiting Sam Samore's new show is like setting your time machine for 1973 and stepping out in the heydey of bushy facial hair and quirky photoconceptualism. The exhibit pairs an old favorite (The Suicidist) with a previously unknown body of work (The Murdered Brother), both from the same year. The two projects revel in dark, black comedy, taking death (and its stand ins) to new heights of absurdity.

 

The Suicidist is likely familiar to many readers here, as its catalog of death fantasies have become a classic of the era. The series features Samore himself posed in a variety of cinematic crime scenes, a scruffy protagonist in an endless stream of increasingly ridiculous events. The deaths begin with the commonplace: a fall down the stairs, a knife, an overdose of pills, run over by a car, a plummet to the street from an apartment window, but quickly turn to the weird and wonderful: vacuum in the mouth, arrow in the chest, strangled by the phone cord, impaled on a music stand, crumpled at the base of a child's slide, head in the toilet, buried in a sandbox. The images mix a goofy desperation with a calculated smartness, the taxonomy of corpses both clever and haltingly funny.

 

The Murdered Brother riffs on many of the same themes, albeit in a more abstracted and indirect way. The dead body in these images has been replaced by a curious white rubber glove, partially inflated and poking out from any number of puzzling and inopportune locations. It's stuck in the oven door, creeping out of the dryer pipe, wedged under the toilet seat, trapped in the piano, stuffed in a boot, and trying to escape from the vacuum. The stories in this series are much more obtuse and unknowable, more open for interpretation, but still playfully melodramatic and inventive.

 

I'll admit to being a sucker for the precocious wit of 1960s and 1970s photoconceptualism. I never seem to tire of the visual jokes and brainy games of Baldessari, Wegman, Cumming, Nauman, Ruscha et al., and these projects by Samore fit right into that same intellectual mind set. This show was a good reminder for me that deadpan need not mean boring or dull, and that there ought to be a larger place in contemporary photography for the crackling and the cunning.

 

Collector's POV: Each of the prints in this show is priced at $20000. Samore's photographs have become more available in the secondary markets in recent years, with prices ranging between roughly $4000 and $16000.

 

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

 

Transit Hub:

• Review: TimeOut New York (here)
• Exhibit: MoMA PS1, 2006 (here)

Sam Samore, 1973

Through October 27th

 

Team Gallery

83 Grand Street

New York, NY 10013

Photography at the 2012 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 1 of 3

In a single audacious shot across the bow, Frieze New York has decisively, at least in my mind, challenged the Armory as the king of the local contemporary art fairs. There is no changing the visual overload or the wearying onslaught of "merch" inherent at such a place, but the organizers have at least made a real attempt to get the surrounding details right. The overall art-seeing experience in meaningfully better: the halls are wider and less cramped, the booths are roomier and more open, and the light is bright and airy. Even when the fair got more crowded and the sun came out to raise the temperature and cook the occupants during my visit Friday, every few yards a blast of arctic air conditioning would whoosh up from a grate under my feet for a shuddering moment of relief.

Photography-wise, the key thing to note about this fair is that there are NO photography specialist galleries included. Not one. So the available photography is broadcast throughout the fair population like tiny seeds, to be searched out and discovered amidst the rest of the contemporary art. There are also very few secondary market photographic trophies on offer (unlike the parade of Shermans in seemingly every booth at the Armory). This is first and foremost a primary market show, with galleries and dealers showing (for the most part) the work they represent.

For each gallery below (grouped by color coded section, starting near the North entrance), I've listed the photographers/artists with work on view, with the number of images on display in parentheses. In some specific cases where something caught my eye, I've added additional information, pricing (watch for different currencies), and installation shots.


Blue Section

Wilkinson Gallery (here): Anna Parkina (3), Laurie Simmons (1), Jimmy DeSana (1)

Anton Kern Gallery (here): Anne Collier (1)

Art:Concept (here): Jeremy Deller (1)

Galerija Gregor Podnar (here): Ion Grigorescu (1), B. Wurtz (1, with paired sculptural object)

Simon Lee Gallery (here): Hans-Peter Feldmann (1 set of 70). A classic of 1970s conceptual ordering, showing the entire wardrobe of a woman, from shirts on hangers to pairs of shoes. Priced at €35000.

Friedrich Petzel Gallery (here): Robert Heinecken (9)

Team Gallery (here): Sam Samore (2), Cory Arcangel (1), Ryan McGinley (6). Death at the foot of a playground slide never looked so wacky and offbeat (Samore's 1973 image from The Suicidist, priced at $20000.) In a side room painted yellow/orange, a series of new cut photo collages by McGinley has a small solo show. The works are densely covered in his signature young men and women, Xacto knifed into a exuberant sea of tiny faces and bodies; this one was priced at $35000 and already sold.

Anthony Reynolds Gallery (here): Paul Graham (1 diptych, 3)

Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle (here): Thomas Ruff (2), Thomas Struth (2), Candida Hofer (1), Goshka Macuga (1). A all-over composition of pipes and pumps by Struth, from his recent series of scientific labs and facilities, priced at €85000.

Green Section

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (here): Uta Barth (1), Gillian Wearing (1), Phil Collins (1 set of 32). Wearing as a creepy rubber masked August Sander, priced at £35000.

Hauser & Wirth (here): Roni Horn (1), Rodney Graham (1 diptych)

Tomio Koyama Gallery (here): Mika Ninagawa (4). Ninagawa's unorthodox use of vibrant color continues to astonish. From her recent series Noir, priced at $1200.

Harris Lieberman (here): Matt Saunders (2), Lisa Oppenheim (3). The delicate lace photogram gets an update by Oppenheim, folded over again and again into a layered progression of increasing complexity. One from the recent series of five, priced at $6500.

Galleri Nicolai Wallner (here): Joachim Koester (6)

Galerie Sfeir-Semler (here): Wael Shawky (8), Akram Zaatari (1), Yto Barrada (1). A haunting set of portraits of crusader puppets by Shawky, priced at €6000 each.

The Approach (here): Lisa Oppenheim (4), John Stezaker (1 set of 3 collages, 3 collages)

Almine Rech Gallery (here): Taryn Simon (3), Curtis Mann (1). Unlike Mann's previous bleached images, in this recent work, he has scraped thin wavy lines across the surface of the emulsion in a completely abstract striped design, a bit reminiscent of Marco Breuer. Priced at $8800.

Timothy Taylor Gallery (here): Susan Hiller (1 set of 9)

Lehmann Maupin (here): Robin Rhode (1 set of 12). I'm a big fan of Rhode's set piece wall drawings. Here cartoon chairs and a curled piece of white tubing provide the raw materials for a flip book story. Priced at $70000, with a solo show at the gallery coming in 2013.

Galerie Jocelyn Wolff (here): Guillaume Leblon (1)

Broadway 1602 (here): Penny Slinger (2 collages)

Air de Paris (here): Sturtevant (5), Jospeh Grigley (3)

Altman Siegel (here): Trevor Paglen (3). A long exposure image of the striated trails of dead satellites and space junk flying across the nighttime sky. Priced at $12000.

Galerie Thaddeus Ropac (here): Robert Mapplethorpe (2), Gilbert & George (1 set of 9)

Galerie Lelong (here): Alfredo Jaar (1 set of 5, 1 set of 3), Helio Oiticica (3), Cildo Meireles (1), Ana Mendieta (2). A Mendieta mud sculpture, printed large and priced at $75000.

Taka Ishii Gallery (here): Yuki Kimura (1)

Annet Gelink Gallery (here): Wilfredo Prieto (1), Yael Bartana (1 diptych), Ryan Gander (1)

Sies+Höke (here): Kris Martin (1 set of 10), Etienne Chambaud (1 set of 3)

Andrew Kreps Gallery (here): Goshka Macuga (1), Roe Ethridge (4)

Miguel Abreu Gallery (here): Liz Deschenes (2), Eileen Quinlan (3), Pamela Rosenkranz (1)

Part 2 is here; Part 3 is here.

Sam Samore: The Dark Suspicion @D'Amelio Terras

JTF (just the facts): A total of 7 large scale color photographs, framed in white and not matted, and hung in the main gallery space. All of the works are archival ink prints on rag paper taken in 2011, each 34x60 or reverse, in editions of 2+1AP. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: We've all heard the metaphor of the multiple faces that each of us has, the masks we wear in different situations, or the many facets of personality that are contained in one single person. Sam Samore's new photographs try to capture this subtle multiplicity via impressionistic images of women's faces, piled on top of each other in intersecting planes.

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The fragmenting that Samore employs is almost Cubist in its approach: faces are seen from multiple angles and distances, mixing near and far, profile and frontal, all at the same time; most are covered in washes of soft painterly color and dominated by enlarged grainy close-ups. These multiple partial images create a sense of fleeting cinematic motion, of wisps of personality flashing and disappearing. In the best of the works, the many faces seem to coalesce into one, multi-dimensional portrait; in others, the faces separate into a kind of disconnected intertwined chaos. A few of the pictures effectively employ the 1980s Robert Palmer whitewash and red lipstick look for a heightened sense of unreal contrast.

In the end, these images don't depict anyone in specific, but a kind of dreamworld woman, caught in a series of psychological iterations and multi-step fantasies. As such, they seem ephemeral, a momentary glimpse of a variety of female roles and personalities, collapsed into one.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $22000 each. Samore's works have been available in the secondary markets from time to time, with recent sales coming between $4000 and $16000.

My favorite image in the show was The Dark Suspicion #1, 2011; it's the horizontal image on the right in the middle installation shot. I like the way the overlapping faces are shown at three different distances, creating a multi-layered composition of echoes.

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

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Transit Hub:

• Exhibit: The Suicidist @MoMA PS1, 2006 (here)

Sam Samore: The Dark Suspicion

Through February 19th

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D'Amelio Terras

525 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011