Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective @Guggenheim

JTF (just the facts): A total of 69 color photographs and 5 videos, variously framed and matted, and hung in a winding series of rooms on the four floors of the annex galleries. All of the photographs are chromogenic prints, made between 1991 and 2009. Physical dimensions and edition information were not available on the wall labels. The show was curated by Sandra Phillips of SFMOMA and Jennifer Blessing of the Guggenheim. A hardback exhibition catalogue is available the museum shop for $55 (here). (Installation views of Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, June 29–October 8, 2012 at right, courtesy of David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.)

Dijkstra's works can be easily categorized by subject matter. For each series, the title of the series is followed by the number of photographs/videos on view and their details:

Annex 2nd Floor
Beach Portraits: 13 photographs, framed in dark brown and unmatted, 1992-1998
Bullfighters: 4 photographs, framed in dark brown and matted, 1994, 2000
Tia: 2 photographs, framed in light brown and matted, 1994
New Mothers: 3 photographs, framed in light brown and matted, 1994

Annex 4th Floor
Olivier: 7 photographs, framed in dark brown and matted, 2000-2003
Almerisa: 11 photographs, framed in brown and unmatted, 1994-2008
The Buzz Club: 3 photographs framed in brown and unmatted, 1995, 1 2-channel video (26 minutes 40 seconds), 1996-1997
Chen and Efrat: 5 photographs, framed in white and matted, 1999-2005
High School: 1 photograph, framed in white and unmatted, 1994
Self Portrait: 1 photograph, framed in brown and matted, 1991
Annemiek: 1 video (4 minutes), mounted into gallery wall, 1997

Annex 5th Floor
Parks: 8 photographs, alternately framed in brown and matted/unmatted, 1998-2000, 2005-2006
Ruth Drawing Picasso: 1 single-channel HD video (6 minutes 33 seconds), shown in darkened room, 2009
I See a Woman Crying: 1 3-channel HD video (12 minutes), shown in darkened room, 2009

Annex 7th Floor
The Krazyhouse: 4 photographs, framed in white and unmatted, 2008-2009, 1 4-channel HD video (32 minutes), shown in darkened room, 2009
Israeli Soldiers: 7 photographs, framed in brown and matted/unmatted, 1999-2003

Comments/Context: Rineke Dijsktra's brilliant mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim is proof positive of just how consistently smart her twenty year investigation of photographic portraiture has been. In series after series, she has rigorously probed the edges and boundaries of the genre, producing a body of work that shows a continuing progression of increasingly original conceptual innovations. For the first time, I was able to trace the evolution of her underlying ideas, and to see how she has refined and evolved those constructs over time. It's nothing short of a bravura performance, and I came away deeply impressed with the precision of both her observation and her thinking.

Unfortunately, the wacky configuration of the annex rooms at the Guggenheim makes following in her footsteps nearly impossible; the flow of the show is frustratingly broken up by the space again and again. While the exhibit might be characterized as roughly chronological, the limitations of the rooms lead to a few time jumps and misorderings that are distracting. To try to clarify the action, I've created a simple timeline that lists each project/series on view and the years in which Dijkstra made the pictures (small type, I know):

Dijkstra's small self portrait, taken poolside in 1991 after a grueling rehab training session, is the "aha" moment that kicks off her career as an artist and holds the flash of insight that has informed her work ever since. In it, she stands exhausted and unadorned, with an almost feral intensity, unable to pose for the camera or compose herself. For the first time, Dijkstra had found a way to make a portrait of someone with their guard truly down; like Halsman's jump portraits, this is not a fake smile or a pretend posture - it is the real person, open and honest, and it is mesmerizing.

Dijkstra's now iconic Beach Portraits were the first photographs she made building on this newly discovered approach to photographic authenticity. She placed her subjects on the sand at the shoreline, standing in nothing but their bathing suits against the minimal backdrop of the sea and sky. Dijkstra consciously chose adolescent boys and girls for these images, avoiding older people who were already adept at concealing and protecting themselves in front of the camera. The result is a series of pictures that are intimate and personal, mixing timidity with gawky confidence, awkwardness with self-conscious striving. American kids try a little too hard, imitating the curvy pose of a fashion model or the male swagger of long hair and cut off shorts, while the Eastern European kids seem less spoiled, standing unapologetically in their underwear or a dated speedo, fidgeting and looking for a place for their hands. At nearly life size and with a strict attention to detail, the prints offer nowhere to hide; all the imperfections come through. The differences in how these teens present themselves are fascinating sociology, but each one tells the same uncomfortable story of a child trying to figure out who he or she is going to be.

1994 turned out to be an important year in Dijsktra's early career. While working on the Beach Portraits, she was also simultaneously pursuing several other conceptual approaches to getting her sitters to reveal themselves more fully. One was an extension of the idea found in her self portrait: the exhaustion and conflicted emotion of an extreme physical experience. In her series of Bullfighters, she made pictures of the forcados just as they left the ring, their faces bloodied and their brocade jackets sweaty and torn. And in her series of New Mothers, she captured women naked with their newborns, just after they had given birth. In both cases, the portraits are alive with a kind of wide eyed shock, where pain and pride mix together with euphoric intensity. Another approach from this same year involved using an expanded idea of the element of time to uncover changes in a sitter's personality. On a small scale, Dijkstra's portraits of Tia (another new mother) taken five months apart show the minute, barely observable changes taking place, from her hairstyle to the freshness in her eyes. On a larger scale, Dijkstra's multi-year (and ongoing) portrait of Almerisa tracks more complex adaptations. It chronicles both the growth from young girl through teenager to young mother, and the more subtle changes in clothing, appearance, and attitude coming in her transformation from lost refugee to assimilated Dutch citizen.

In this same year, she also began a preliminary investigation of uniforms, via portraits of high school kids in Liverpool, and soon afterward, she expanded and evolved this concept in her first video piece, The Buzz Club. In many ways, this video is the combination of several of Dijkstra's existing conceptual threads, with a few new ideas thrown in for good measure. Club kids stand against a stark white background, dancing, smoking, drinking beers, chewing gum, and making out, while the soundtrack of the techno music thumps overhead. The girls and boys follow obvious patterns in outfitting themselves (thus the connection to "uniforms"): the girls have long hair and wear skimpy, come hither dresses (mostly black), while the boys have shaved heads and sport zipped up tracksuits. Instead of using still frames across time as she had done with Almerisa, Dijkstra has transitioned to video, creating a "moving" portrait that waits to uncover moments when authenticity intermittently shines through the role playing. Music is used as device to both relax the sitter and as something to focus on and get lost in; dancing becomes a way to break down the formality of the session. The overall effect is a swirling mix: shyness, boredom, swaying and hip shaking, bobbing heads and punching arm moves, staring down the camera and looking away in a trance. It's an exercise in controlled appearances (slinky females, tough guy males) and the split second breaking down of inhibitions.

Through the end of the decade, Dijkstra continued to refine many of her original ideas: Annemiek was another video piece, where a lip synching girl in braces timidly alternates between being painfully self-conscious and being absorbed by the music, and the Parks series used calm groups of young people in leafy natural settings to look for glimpses of honest connection. Three new projects dominated the first years of the next decade and further evolved the time-based concepts from the Almerisa-series, but with a tighter focus on people undergoing a specific life-changing process or rite of passage. Twin sisters (Chen and Efrat) are followed year to year through puberty (with an echo of Nixon's The Brown Sisters), young enlisted recruits in the Israeli army are seen side by side in their army uniforms and later in civilian clothes, and a young man in the French Foreign Legion (Olivier) is followed from his first day (and his subsequent military haircut) through to his emergence as a hardened, serious soldier three years later. In each series, nuanced shifts in maturity can be seen only by comparing the adjacent portraits; we see their emotions and personalities shining through in the cracks.

Dijkstra's most recent works have once again returned to video, pushing further toward moments of intense concentration to look for unguarded personal revelations. In both Ruth Drawing Picasso and I See a Woman Crying, Dijkstra follows school children as they participate in art exhibitions. In their grey sweaters and red ties (uniforms as a motif once again), they engage the art through drawing and group discussion, and in both cases, the action starts out slow and tentative and builds to a crescendo of intense fixation and inventive, exuberant brainstorming, where hidden individual personalities start to take shape. The Krazyhouse reprises many of the the themes from The Buzz Club, but narrows down to explore the intensity of dancing more deeply. As I said in my original review of 2010 show at Marian Goodman (here), this is one of the most exciting pieces of contemporary art made so far in this century. Each of the longer length portraits of the five club goers has something to slowly reveal, and there is contagious joy to be found in the thrashing hair, the ecstatic air guitar, the sultry swing of arms, the frenetic chopping of hands, and the biggest smile you've seen in ages (not that any of the dumbfounded deadpan drones watching the video in the museum while I was there seemed to notice). Each dancer finally gives in to the music, lets go, and the flimsy walls of controlled self-presentation come down in triumphant warmth; it's hard not to be amazed and inspired by such an intimate spectacle.

What I found most impressive about this consistently superlative body of work is how Dijkstra's underlying ideas about the nature of portraiture have been evolving. While much has been made of her historic ties to Sander and Arbus, I think Dijkstra's portraits start with these influences and then quickly move somewhere new. There is an enormous amount of experimentation and innovation visible here, all of it closely clustered around the challenge of getting people to show their true selves. Look closely and there are half a dozen important and original ideas: the aftermath of an intense experience, elapsed time and personal adaptation, the use of video as a patient way to let hidden nuances reveal themselves, uniforms and how personalities are influenced by them, the trance inducing power of music and how to incorporate it into portraiture, etc. etc. Don't be fooled by the seemingly endless stream of classic-looking portraits - there are as many pyrotechnics to be seen here as in any photographic show in recent memory. For me, this retrospective helped me to see the entire spread of Dijkstra's genius (not just her greatest hits) and to more fully appreciate just how much she has successfully challenged and expanded the traditions of photographic portraiture.

Collector's POV: Given this is a museum retrospective, there are, of course, no posted prices. Dijkstra's photographs have become generally available in the secondary markets in the past few years, with prices ranging from roughly $4000 to $180000, with a sweet spot between $10000 and $50000. Dijkstra is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in New York (here), Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin (here) and Galerie Jan Mot in Brussels (here).

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), Village Voice (here), Wall Street Journal (here), New Yorker (here), American Photo (here), TimeOut New York (here), Capital New York (here)
• Interview: ARTINFO (here)
• Exhibit: SFMOMA, 2012 (here)

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective

Through October 8th

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

1071 Fifth Avenue 

New York, NY 10128

Francesca Woodman @Guggenheim

JTF (just the facts): A total of 125 photographic works, variously framed and matted, and hung in a winding series of rooms in the 4th floor annex galleries. The majority of the prints are vintage gelatin silver prints, made between 1975 and 1981. Physical dimensions range from roughly 3x3 to 40x40; the diazotype (blueprint) works are much larger, some as large as 37x92. Additional videos and artist's books are also on view. The show was curated by Corey Keller of SFMOMA. A hardback exhibition catalogue is available for $50 (here). (Installation views of  Francesca Woodman, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, March 16–June 13, 2012 courtesy of David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)

The exhibition is divided into four chronological groups. For each section, I have listed the title and the number of works included:

Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1978
58 gelatin silver prints
1 video screen (11 minutes of selected videos)

Italy, 1977-1978
31 gelatin silver prints
1 case (1 artist's book, 5 pages displayed)

MacDowell Colony, Peterborough County, NH, 1980
8 gelatin silver prints
1 diptych
1 triptych

New York, 1979-1981
17 gelatin silver prints
4 blue diazotypes
3 brown diazotypes
2 chromogenic prints
1 case (1 artist's book, 10 pages displayed)

Comments/Context: Early on in this comprehensive retrospective of Francesca Woodman, there is an image of the artist from 1975, standing in an abandoned room with two doors, wearing a flowered frock with a petticoat underneath, her arms and hands angled like she is casting a spell. My reaction to this picture was like a lightning strike: my God, I thought, look at how young she is. At this point, she is 17, in her freshman year at RISD. This show covers the next six years of her life: her years at school, her junior year abroad in Rome, a summer in New Hampshire, and her first few years trying to make it as an artist in New York, before she kills herself at the age of 22. Everything happens so fast, and suddenly she's gone.

The mythology that has grown up around Francesca Woodman since her death is as dense as a thicket. She has been adopted by an entire spectrum of academics and scholars, who have found nuggets of what they wanted to find in her many enigmatic pictures. She has been labeled a feminist, a Surrealist, a narcissist, a child prodigy, a Victorian Goth girl, a spiritualist, and a mature and gifted artist born fully formed. Having spent some time parsing a selection of these essays and thinking more carefully about the works on view, my conclusion is that she belongs in a Stieg Larsson title: The Girl Who Was Hijacked By Critics. The visual and subject matter seeds of these various theories are all there, it's the vehemence of the competiting and often contradictory arguments that seems over-reaching to me, given her short period of art making.

Corey Keller from SFMOMA has done a fantastic job of editing the work down into a clear and concise chronological summary, with well defined periods and coherent transitions. Her lucid catalog essay doesn't take sides, but offers a valuable sense of historical context. I resonated strongly with her connection to the 1978 MoMA show Mirrors and Windows, and placing Woodman in a line of psychological self expressionists going back to Minor White. I also found Rosalind Krauss' original analysis of the 1986 Wellesley/Hunter show to still be right on the mark. Her thesis is that Woodman's experimentation with space, with serial imagery, with formal elements and symbolic items, and with herself as a gestural nude model are all byproducts of the student problem sets she was doing (both assigned for class and self imposed).

As I traveled through the chopped up galleries, which do more to confuse the flow of the show than to support it by the way, I could see Woodman taking an idea and pushing at it, making it more personal, testing its edges. She climbs into glass cases, plays with plastic wrap and taxidermy, disappears into scraps of flaking wallpaper, and flits in and out of shadows like a blur. She casts herself as angels and demons, re-envisions empty space, and uses mirrors as both a space modifier and an introspective vehicle. More importantly, I had the strong impression that she didn't have it all figured out - she was searching and experimenting, and doing so with a level of youthful intensity, vulnerability and openness that makes her work refreshing. I was fascinated by her performative interactions with fly traps, eels, and splashes of black paint, and by her odd birch bark arm coverings from the summer interlude.

But let's be clear, she wasn't an artistic genius in college. She was undeniably talented, but still raw and unfinished (which is part of her allure). This is what makes her later work (just a few years later mind you) so achingly sad. In those final years, she was exploring a number of truly interesting directions. Her artist's book with rough shapes inserted into an Italian geometry text (an almost square, the curve of a chair) have the feel of a more cerebral Conceptual path. The large diazoptye collages of bridges/tiaras or zig zag arms seem to follow toward Rauschenberg (albeit in a personal, not obviously postmodern, way). Her two small color photographs buried on a side wall are much more mature in terms of her use of layers of angled space and striping; perhaps she might of had a career headed toward formal abstraction. And her experiments with lingerie, furs, and jewelry might have led her to a more aggressive feminism. I really was left with a sense of wow, given more time, she might have taken any or all of these roads to go somewhere strikingly new. She had all the raw material, but the story is incomplete.

In the end, I came away with a clearer conclusion about the messiness of Woodman's short artistic career. While this sounds contradictory, I found her both less impressive and more impressive than I had previously given her credit for. Less, in that I think the mania/cult of personality around her has clouded our judgment about her student work, and more, in that her best works are evidence of the beginning of something that might have been transformative. Of course, the story has no ending, except for the one we imagine, so there is no way to say whether she would have flown high or flamed out. So the debate will continue, with its extreme allusions and scholarly arguments, none of which can ever be proven wrong. It is my hope however that the crisp, even handedness of this well-constructed show will remind us that Francesca Woodman was a talented young woman with an entire artistic career ahead of her, and what we have as souvenirs of her life are small, preliminary fragments of what might have been.

Collector's POV: Given this is a museum retrospective, there are of course no posted prices. Woodman's work has been intermittently available in the secondary markets for more than a decade, with a handful of lots coming up for sale each year. Vintage gelatin silver prints have ranged from roughly $5000 to $45000 in recent years. I could only find one public diazotype sale in the last decade, at $52000. Collectors should also be aware of posthumous prints made in 1999, in editions of 40. Woodman is represented in New York by Marian Goodman Gallery (here), who has a small show of her diazotypes on view in the gallery's 3rd floor project space. In the recent run of art fairs, vintage Woodman GSPs seemed to be consistently retailing in the mid 30s. Also, Woodman's massive (and spectacular) Temple diazotype collage is on view in the Spies in the House of Art show at the Met (here).

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here) 

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Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), Slate (here)
• Exhibit: SFMOMA, 2011 (here)

Francesca Woodman
Through June 13th

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

1071 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10128

Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance @Guggenheim

JTF (just the facts): A large group show of photography, video and film, displayed in the entry space, on five levels of the darkened rotunda, and in two annex galleries off to the side. The exhibit includes work by 58 artists and photographers, spanning the period from roughly the 1960s to the present. The show was curated by Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman, and a hardback exhibition catalogue is available for $45 (here). No photography is ever allowed at the Guggenheim, so unfortunately, there are no installation shots for this show. Specific images have been taken from the Haunted exhibit website (linked from here). (Paul Chan, 6th Light, 2007, at right.)

The exhibit is divided into four loose thematic groups, following a generally chronological order. This is not however a rigid organizational structure; works listed under various themes are often intermixed and taken out of strict order, likely due to the vagaries of display constraints. Each of the sections is listed below, with the artists and photographers included and the number of works on view in parentheses:

Appropriation and the Archive

Bernd and Hilla Becher (grid of 9)

Sarah Charlesworth (26)

Thomas Demand (1 video)

Douglas Gordon (1 video)

Rachel Harrison (1 photograph, 1 sculpture)

Luis Jacob (set of 84)

Idris Khan (1)

Barbara Kruger (1)

Sherrie Levine (set of 12)

Christian Marclay (3 cyanotypes, 1 video)

Allan McCollum (1)

Richard Prince (1)

Robert Rauschenberg (1 painting, 3 lithographs)

Sara VanDerBeek (2)

Andy Warhol (1 painting)

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Landscape, Architecture, and the Passage of Time

Walead Beshty (2)

James Casebere (1) (James Casebere, Garage, 2003, at right.)

Spencer Finch (set of 7)

Ori Gersht (1)

Roni Horn (grid of 64)

Luisa Lambri (2)

An-My Lê (4)

Sally Mann (3)

Hiroshi Sugimoto (5)

Janaina Tschäpe (1 video)

Jeff Wall (4)

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Documentation and Reiteration

Marina Abramović (1 four-channel video)

Christian Boltanski (1 installation)

Sophie Calle (set of 2)

Tacita Dean (1 six-channel film)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (set of 8)

Markus Hansen (1 drawing on glass)

Anthony Hernandez (2)

Joan Jonas (1)

Robert Mapplethorpe (1)

Ana Mendieta (1)

Annette Messager (1 installation)

Gina Pane (1 installation)

Susan Philipsz (1 sound recording)

Cindy Sherman (2)

Robert Smithson (set of 9)

Lawrence Weiner (1 installation of words)

Zhang Huan (1)

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Trauma and the Uncanny

Paul Chan (1 video)

Anne Collier (2)

Stan Douglas (1 two-channel film)

Anthony Goicolea (1 video)

Karl Haendel (1 installation)

Adam Helms (1)

Sarah Anne Johnson (39 as 1 installation)

Zoe Leonard (1)

Miranda Lichtenstein (1)

Nate Lowman (3 paintings, 1 sculpture)

Adam McEwen (1)

Cady Noland (1 screenprint)

Rosângela Rennó (1)

Anri Sala (1 video)

Gillian Wearing (1)
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Comments/Context: The Guggenheim's current exhibition of contemporary photography, video and film (which has been on display since early Spring) is best characterized as an expansive gathering of the museum's recent acquisitions in these related media, tied up under a broad, inclusive conceptual umbrella which can happily accommodate nearly anything pulled out of storage. As a theoretical construct, Haunted offers plenty of leeway to cover everything from appropriation and reuse to history and nostalgia, and from staging and myth making to memory and documentation, covering most of the usual bases in the contemporary photography debate. (Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1-9), 1969, at right.)

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The story begins with Warhol and Rauschenberg (as background) and quickly segues to the Pictures Generation, with iconic but routine stops at Becher water towers, Prince cowboys, Charlesworth newspapers and Levine reproductions, and a few more modern day descendants (VanDerBeek, Jacob). Paul Chan's quietly disturbing falling silhouettes are out of place amongst these works (and annoyingly interrupted by people continually wandering through the projection); this is the first work on view that really woke me up and got my attention.

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The next level of the rotunda moves on to time as thematic element, with shadowy Sally Mann landscapes, An-My Lê Vietnam reenactments, Sugimoto seascapes, and a sparse black and white Casebere garage. I particularly enjoyed seeing Roni Horn's grid of women's changing rooms (somehow not included on the exhibit website), with its repetitions and layers of subway tile, numbered doors, mirrors, and peep holes. Continuing up the ramp, the works become more performance and installation oriented, filled with documents and relics. There are installations by Boltanski and Messager, and performance stills from Zhang Huan, Gina Pane and Ana Medieta. Robert Smithson's late 1960s images of arrays of mirrors placed on beaches, in jungles, and amid gravel were a discovery for me, and the Cindy Sherman of crime scene dirt, complete with teeth, hair, and random fingers and body parts was lovingly creepy. (Cindy Sherman, Untitled (#167), 1986, at right.)

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The last thematic group is centered on memory and traumatic experiences, but is in many ways, more of a grab bag. Anthony Goicolea's video Nail Biter is a manic, disturbing, shock treatment, covered in drool and fingernail fragments. I always enjoy Christian Marclay's unspooled cassette tape cyanotpes, and there are three of these on view in a side gallery, paired with a Thomas Demand video; a group of Jeff Wall images and a Stan Douglas video inhabit the other annex area. The most memorable work in the entire show is Tacita Dean's six screen film of Merce Cunningham performing Stillness to John Cage's 4'33'', displayed on the entire top level of the rotunda. While the space does not lend itself well to the different vantage points of the film (and again, the crowds walk repeatedly walk through the projections), it is a triumph of subtlety and thought: Cunningham sits in a chair, from time to time shifting his arms, all in the noisy silence of his studio.

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While the one-size-fits-all flexibility of the exhibit's curatorial approach allows for the incorporation of a wide assortment of working styles and artistic methods, it unfortunately leads to a show that suffers from being much too amorphous and unwieldy. Contemporary photography is of course a jumbled, chaotic melting pot of recursive and recombinant ideas, so charting a course through all the diversity is no easy task. But making sense of it all is why we come to museums; we seek to be educated, to be shown a path through the thicket, to be given a coherent point of view, especially in a survey show like this one. Instead, this exhibit feels like the list of accessions divided up into major conceptual buckets (a good start), but without the more important, driving sense of what the curators really think durably matters. I also felt like many of the specific selections weren't hugely inspiring; I saw far too many ho-hums or lesser examples in a row to generate much positive momentum or energy.

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In my view, the Guggenheim has the exciting challenge of trying to create a distinct museum identity in a New York environment with many strong and capable rivals. But this show leaves me with the conclusion that at least in the realm of contemporary photography, the Guggenheim does not yet seem anxious to step into a leadership role, or is perhaps content to be more of a follower. Yes, there are many terrific works on display here, some well known and others a bit more adventurous. But I didn't discern a consistency of conception among these accessions that tells me someone is guiding the ship with a firm and deliberate hand or that risk taking and innovative thinking are a top priority. If the Guggenheim wants a reputation as a thought leader and taste maker in photography, we will need to see a more comprehensive and well-executed vision. Until then, this show is evidence that the museum is indeed very much active in contemporary photography, albeit without an easily readable point of view.
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Collector's POV: I've already highlighted many of my favorites from this show in the comments above. None is a perfect fit for our specific collection; the Becher water towers would be the likely closest actual match.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

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Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), artnet (here), Another Bouncing Ball (here), Boston Globe (here), L Magazine (here)

Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance

Through September 6th

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

1071 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10128

Catherine Opie: American Photographer @Guggenheim

JTF (just the facts): A total of 177 works, shown in four of the Annex galleries (Levels 2, 4, 5, and 7) adjacent to the main rotunda: 54 panoramic black and white gelatin silver and platinum images of urban architecture on Level 2, 45 color images (primarily portraits, but also interior domestic scenes and house exteriors) through a series of galleries on Level 4, 28 color images (ice houses and surfers) in one room on Level 5, and 50 color images in two galleries (domestic scenes, community images, and television Polaroids in one room, and large scale portraits in the other) on Level 7.

Comments/Context: Catherine Opie's mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim tells the story of an artist who is consistently and intensely interested in human communities: in how we gather together in temporary and permanent groups, how we associate with and identify each other, how we find company and a sense of place from relations with others, and how we organize and structure the world around us to hold these communities. Her body of work spans portraiture, landscape, city/architectural images, and even a kind of social documentary, and is organized into a number of projects or series that are held together as differing strands of the larger exploration she is interested in. Taken individually, they cross a dazzling variety of genres and types, and show an artist experimenting with different ways to approach and explain the world around her.

The exhibition itself is chopped up into four different sections on the different floors and is grouped somewhat thematically rather than chronologically, so there is a little jumping around that happens if you are trying to follow her progression through time. The Level 2 galleries house her various projects depicting urban architecture. The Freeways series from 1994-1995 are intimate platinum prints of Los Angeles freeway overpasses, accenting their monumental scale and intersecting sculptural forms, absent cars or people or humanity of any kind. (Untitled #40, 1994-1995, at right.) These images contrast the stereotype of Los Angeles freeways as congested, smog ridden, dens of frustration with the surprisingly sublime beauty of these engineered structures. These are stunning works, taken with the loving care of a local. The Mini Malls series from 1997-1998 finds Opie out on Sunday mornings, capturing empty moments in transitional neighborhoods, where the architecture itself shows the cultural transformations and mixings going on around her. These large panoramas, shot from the street level, show the changing dynamics of communities inside Los Angeles, even when these subcultures may not be otherwise apparent from the outside. The more recent Wall Street and Chicago projects use this same large format panorama to tackle other cities and architectural identities with somewhat less success (the Wall Street works echo Thomas Struth's slightly smaller images of similar empty downtown streets).

The works on Level 4 include many of Opie's best known images. Her Being and Having and Portraits series are portraits of her friends in the gay, lesbian and transgender communities, against saturated color backgrounds. Opie has acknowledged the influence of 16th century Northern Renaissance portraitist Hans Holbein the Younger on these works, and the photographs (some full size, others 3/4 or torso) have a simple rigor and formality that enhance the beauty of the subjects. There is a warmth in these pictures that distances them from Arbus' "freaks"; as you wander through these galleries, these are not specimens from some anthropological exercise - they are people whose triumphant individuality (and human vulnerability) is on display in a way that makes you want to meet and know them.

Opie's three self portraits (done as part of this series) are among the most powerful works in the show. One shows her with a kindergarten stick figure image of a family with two moms carved into her back (Self-Portrait, 1993 at right), one shows her with a leather hood, arms covered in piercing needles, and the word "Pervert" carved into her chest, and the last shows her nursing her baby son. Together, they ask all sorts of questions about what it means to have a traditional family, what it is to live a life outside the "acceptable" mainstream, and how our common humanity brings us together, regardless of these differences. These are beautifully crafted works of art, full of hard and real emotion.

Two more projects are found on this floor, Domestic and Houses. The Domestic series chronicles the everyday lives of lesbian families from across America, taken by Opie while out on the road in an RV. While these images have a snapshot quality to them (even though she uses a view camera), there are tensions underneath and they are asking some underlying questions about what "family" means (especially when it isn't a "traditional" family). The Houses images are frontal shots of mansions in Bel Air, where the gates and architectural ornaments have interesting parallels with the tattoos and body piercings of the previous rooms.

On Level 5, a single gallery houses two sets of work, Ice Houses and Surfers, hung on opposite walls facing each other. (Untitled #6, 2003, at right.) Both projects explore the formation of temporary communities (one, fishermen during the short season when the lakes are frozen, and the other, the surfers, clustered together in the expanse of the sea, waiting for the next set of waves). Both groups employ a Sugimoto-like bisecting of the images at the horizon, and the large images dwarf the subjects in the vastness of the environment, the people/shacks often becoming lost or fragmented in the flatness of the fog. Opie has called this combination her Rothko chapel, and together, these works create a meditative environment, where there is quiet waiting and isolation and longing.

On Level 7, Opie's scenes from her family life, In and Around Home, chronicle her own environment, her home, children and family, and the people and storefronts that make up her multi-racial Los Angeles community. These pictures are interspersed with sets of Polaroids taken directly from her television, mostly of President Bush during the 2004 election season. These are subtler pictures, that aren't as directly powerful as some of her other work, but perhaps can be thought of as an evolution in her exploration of gender and community, now from the new angle of parent. In the last room are a series of monumental (larger than life size) Polaroid portraits of performance artist Ron Athey. These are spectacular pictures, that draw on martyrdom images from the ages, shown through the modern lens of body modification and pain. There is a jaw-dropping grace and composure in these pictures, where lush textures intermingle with harsh realities.

If there is any single take away from this tremendous show, I think it must center on Opie's careful and considered approach to her art. All of her work is crisp in detail, formally strong and compositionally meticulous. Like many artists, her subject matter is brought forth from the emotions of her own life and from her own struggles to understand herself and her world. As you look through the body of work she has assembled thus far, the common note is a real and genuine attention to and compassion for those around her, particularly for their attempts to be themselves regardless of what the society around them deems "normal". In sum, this is without a doubt one the best shows of the year. And don't miss the audio guide commentary given by Opie herself, as her thoughtful and grounded approach shines through.

Collector's POV: For our specific collection, we have always thought that a pair or group of the Freeways would fit well and still be representative of her artistic approach. Opie is represented by Gladstone Gallery (here) and Regen Projects (here), and a small amount of her work, from various projects, has been available in the secondary market in the past five years or so.

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

Catherine Opie: American Photographer
Through January 7th

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10128