Sara VanDerBeek: To Think of Time @Whitney

JTF (just the facts): A total of 29 color works, framed in black with no mats, and hung in the single room gallery on the first floor of the museum. All of the works are chromogenic prints, sized 20x16, and made in 2010. This is the photographer's first solo museum show. The Whitney does not allow photography in the galleries, so unfortunately, there are no installation shots of this show. The single images at right are taken from the Whitney website. (Sara VanDerBeek, Foundation, Reynes Street, 2010, at right.)

Comments/Context: Sara VanDerBeek's small solo show at the Whitney is modulated and meditative, an atmospheric exercise in muted color. In a departure from her photographs of carefully constructed conceptual sculptures of appropriated/collaged images, these works rhythmically alternate between images of pitted concrete foundations unearthed in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, angular, geometric sculptures made in her studio, and details found in her childhood home of Baltimore. The entire project is wrapped in the mantle of Walt Whitman, borrowing its group titles from Leaves of Grass.

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While this exhibit has all the trappings of a deeply personal investigation of time and memory, it somehow falls flat in terms of showing us something new. I found the images of gritty, textured poured concrete to be the most aesthetically interesting, with their all-over abstractions in scratched grey and blue, but it would be hard not to see obvious connections to the explorations of surface by Aaron Siskind and Minor White here. VanDerBeek's pared down studio sculptures of roughly hewn nested rectangles, chevrons, and boxes have been photographed with moody shadows (a little reminiscent of Brancusi's photographs), in the same washed out palette as the images of concrete; the effect is subdued and quiet, the works isolated and drained rather than elevated. These two groups of images are then intermingled with a handful of more personal icons (in the same natural light tonalities), and then sequenced into juxtaposed groups that repeat around the room. (Sara VanDerBeek, Blue Caryatid at Dusk, 2010, at right.)

In general, while these works have a lovely pale serenity, I think the overall experience misses the mark a bit. My enjoyment of the soft, diffused feeling of the photographs was disrupted by an underlying sense of the artist trying too hard, of a self-conscious, conceptual artiness that seemed too contrived. But this same knock could be leveled at any number of inward looking, mystical or symbolic photographers across the decades (Szarkowski's "mirrors"), especially those who have regularly employed abstraction. These new works do successfully create a mood, I'm just not sure it is one that we haven't felt before.

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Collector's POV: None of the images in this museum show are for sale. Van DerBeek is represented by Metro Pictures in New York (here, with some installation shots) and Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco (here). Her work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point. (Sara VanDerBeek, Foundation, Dorgenois Street, 2010, at right.)

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

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)
• Feature: NY Times (here)

Sara VanDerBeek: To Think of Time
Through December 5th

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021

Lee Friedlander: America By Car @Whitney

JTF (just the facts): A total of 192 black and white works, framed in white and matted, and double hung nearly edge to edge in a pair of adjoining gallery spaces on the fifth floor mezzanine level of the museum (down the back stairs). All of the works are gelatin silver prints, 16x20 framed square, and made between 1992 and 2009. There are 65 images in the first room and 127 in the second room. A monograph of this project has recently been published by DAP/Fraenkel (here). The Whitney does not allow photography in the galleries, so unfortunately, there are no installation shots of this show. The single images at right are taken from the Whitney website. (Lee Friedlander, Texas, 2006, at right.)

Comments/Context: As I came down the stairs into the funky, low ceilinged mezzanine space at the Whitney and got a first glimpse of the newest Friedlander show, I couldn't help but chuckle. Once again, the prolific Friedlander seems to have gotten his way - it's a densely packed installation of more pictures than any other normal photographer would dare to hang in such a cramped space.

What I found most interesting about this particular body of new work is that it feels a little like a victory lap. Friedlander has gone back out on the road, traveled through the truck stops and big cities of this great land once again, and made pictures of nearly all the same subjects he covered earlier in his career. There are mountain and desert landscapes, images of monuments, chaotic urban cityscapes, witty jokes made from vernacular architecture and roadside signage, self-portraits, and angular juxtapositions of abstract geometries in flat picture planes. There's even some chain link fence for those of you who want to go back to the early 1960s.

The difference here is that he has upended this personal retrospective by making each and every one of these pictures through the obstructed window of his rental car. Not content to make the same pictures twice, he has given himself a new challenge, with a new set of aesthetic mechanisms to break up his vision. The features of the cars provide him with a variety of complex compositional tools: square frames, borders, and dark slashing lines (from the car frame itself), sinuous curves (from the steering wheel and molded plastic dashboards), and picture in picture effects (from the reflections in the side mirrors, echoing a similar motif from the 1960s). Friedlander uses these structural devices to create additional disorienting layers of juxtapositions and perspectives that make the old subjects new again. (Lee Friedlander, Montana, 2008, at right.)

The show itself is carefully sequenced into loose groups of common subject matter that flow into one another. Stop signs become broad landscapes, which become road signs, which become portraits, which become industrial views, which become echoes of circles, which become trucks, which become roadside memorials, and so on and so on. Patterns repeat and replicate, blossoming into new ideas that morph once again. The commonality of the framing device becomes a bit monotonous across so many images, but it is altogether amazing that Friedlander can take such a simple, almost boring idea (pictures taken through the car window) and explode it into something so multi-faceted and original. His voracious eye takes the organizing principle and then extends it to its limits, creating an entirely new vocabulary out of the obvious. He does all this with impressively consistent joy; jokes, puns and ironies are to be unpacked and discovered everywhere.

Overall, I think this is a highly accessible and likeable body of work, that entertains on the surface and rewards a deeper and more thoughtful examination. The crowded rooms were full of "did you see that one?", "look over here" and smiling pointed fingers, from school groups and adults alike, all equally fascinated to see the world through Friedlander's restless eyes.

Collector's POV: Of course, none of the images in this museum show are for sale. See our review of the recent Friedlander gallery show at Mary Boone (here) for details about current price levels. As a reminder, Friedlander is represented by Janet Borden in New York (here) and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco (here). (Lee Friedlander, Alaska, 2007, at right, via the Whitney website.)

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker Photo Booth (here), Wall Street Journal (here), Vanity Fair (here)

Lee Friedlander: America By Car

Through November 28th

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Whitney Museum of American Art

945 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10021

Whitney Biennial 2010

JTF (just the facts): A large group exhibition of 55 artists, installed on four floors of the museum. (Since no photography is allowed in the galleries at the Whitney, there are unfortunately no installation shots for this show.)

The following 10 artists/photographers have photo-based work in the exhibition. Details for each are below:

• Nina Berman: 18 pigment prints, each 10x15, made between 2006 and 2008
• Josh Brand: 5 chromogenic prints and 1 gelatin silver print, either 8x10 or 11x14 or reverse, made between 2007 and 2009
• James Casebere: 2 digital chromogenic prints, each 72x96, in editions of 5, made in 2009
• Babette Mangolte: 441 vintage photographs, 2 decks of vintage photo playing cards, and 1 video, as one installation, made in 2009
• Curtis Mann: 1 bleached chromogenic print with synthetic varnish, 65x153, made in 2009
• Lorraine O'Grady: 4 pigment print diptychs, each individual print 47x38, in editions of 8, made in 2010
• Emily Roysdon: 2 sets of 3 digital chromogenic prints, one with silkscreening, made in 2010
• Stephanie Sinclair: 9 digital prints, each 17x22, made in 2005
• Ania Soliman: 1 digital montage, variable dimensions, made between 2007 and 2009
• Tam Tran: 6 digital prints, each 24x16, made in 2008

Comments/Context: What more is there to say about this year’s Whitney Biennial that hasn’t already been said? Virtually every major art critic in America has already weighed in on the succinctly titled 2010, and as usual, there has been a healthy mix of both supportive praise and scathing derision, peppered with lists of favorites and highlights. Many have connected the show to the momentum for change and redefinition embodied by the election of Obama, others have centered on the majority of women artists included in the exhibit, and still others have latched on to its pared down, recession-friendly curatorial approach. But none of these esteemed writers has comprehensively looked at the photography in the show and tried to consider about what the inclusion of these specific photographers and their work might mean in the larger context of the medium. So that’s what we’re going to try and do here.

Even if we go along with the PR line that this exhibit is not a survey of contemporary American art, but simply an edited sampler or cross section of the diversity of work produced in the past few years, the show clearly has the ability to set out a straw man, pick out some trends, and frame the conversation about what’s been relevant and/or important in the past two years. As such, 2010 should have some compelling things to tell us about the state of contemporary photography, and indeed, this year’s exhibit contains quite a bit of photography in various forms. Since this is not an inclusive biennial of photography, but rather a biennial of contemporary art which includes photography only on its merits, we should be able to see some patterns in where photography is being placed in the larger narrative of new art, or at least analyze how the show’s curators seem to be judging and categorizing what they have found to be new in photography. This does not of course lead to any sort of ultimate truth, but simply a snapshot of how one set of curators has tackled the problem of making sense of it all; so while there are an infinite variety of other ways to approach this same problem, I think a close look at how they seem to have structured their choices can tell us something about how the larger art world is seeing contemporary photography.

While it seems unlikely that the curators deliberately built a taxonomy of photographic approaches and placed various contemporary photographers in specific locations (they are not photo-specialists after all), the artists who were included in the show can quite easily be placed into one of four “buckets” based on their use of the medium (with a little cross pollination in some cases). I’ve provided a diagram below to make my line of thinking a bit more clear; I'll cover each group in more detail below.

The 2010 representatives of the documentary/straight approach to photography pack such an emotional wallop that they seem to be saying: make the content extreme or just go home. Stephanie Sinclair’s desperate images of Afghan women charred by self-inflicted burns are bloody and horrifying, so much so that the exhibition room was filled with gasps, “My God”s, and uncomfortable intakes of breath; the suffering and violence that is depicted is harsh and shocking, but entirely unforgettable. Nina Berman’s images of the hometown life of a disfigured soldier (including his thoroughly alienated wedding day) are similarly tragic. Both bodies of work depict the realities of war, and explore the downstream personal effects of our current day social/political choices. As the only two examples of “traditional” photography in the whole show, I was reminded of Paul Graham’s recent comments about the state of medium (here), and the ensuing discussion of the value of capturing unique moments with a camera. If these two photographers are any indication, the contemporary art world isn’t looking for subtlety in its straight photography, it’s looking for outright reaction-provoking challenge.

Four photographers included in the show fit loosely into the performance/staging category, although each is using photography in different ways to document or enable their ideas. James Casebere has made a career out of photographing tabletop constructions, and his two images here satirize a fabricated community of pastel colored houses; his timing couldn’t be better, in terms of being a biting look at the ridiculousness of the housing bubble. Tam Tran’s images depict the performances and imagination of childhood; dressed in Spiderman pajamas and a cape, her nephew uses a long stick to fight invisible evildoers, well aware of the presence of the camera. Emily Roysdon’s photographs are documents of public locations to be used in future performances. An array of chairs (alternately covered with dots and silkscreened dancers) and wood pilings of abandoned piers in the water are both spaces/stages that have been and will be transformed by theatrical action; the sense of being part of the audience is palpable. And Babette Mangolte’s installation of 1970s/1980s photographs and video is less about any specific picture and more about the process of perception and interaction with imagery; composites, variations and patterns of images are seen on a huge gridded wall, while a video overlays sounds from the flipping and shuffling of cards and the tearing of paper. The entire environment is a reflective performance about the how we experience photographs.

While neither Lorraine O’Grady nor Ania Soliman might usually be considered a “photographer”, both are using the recontextualization of appropriated photographic imagery as the basis for the art included in this show. O’Grady’s works juxtapose found images of Charles Baudelaire and Michael Jackson in varying color tones, wryly commenting on the ups and downs of celebrity. Soliman layers a wide range of found images of pineapples into a photomontage alphabet stuck directly to the wall, merging text and photographs into a hybrid historical survey reminiscent of Dada collages. With these examples, it is clear that we have moved beyond the irony of simple appropriation/mashup and on to more complicated and conceptual combinations of images with social/political overtones.

The last group of artists is thoroughly embedded in the technical processes of photography, reveling in the details of the darkroom, the chemical properties of prints, and the object quality of end product photographs. Curtis Mann's grid of photographs begins with appropriated images from the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah (and so ties him to the appropriation group described above). But Mann is more interested in the photographs as objects than in composing pictures from behind the camera: he has subsequently used bleach and varnish to selectively manipulate/destroy the original images, leaving whitewashed expanses of nothingness populated by glimpses of small details, like a cloud of dust obscuring our vision. Josh Brand has opted for making camera-less images in the darkroom, creating abstract photograms of the details of his everyday life.

In terms of sheer "memorableness", I found the work of Sinclair, Berman, Casebere, and Mann to be the most compelling and likely to lead somewhere exciting or new. Many of the others seem to be working in styles that we have seen before (in the inbred world of photography), but have yet to coalesce into wholly original lines of thinking. Taking a straight photograph, documenting a performance, appropriating an image, or mastering a process are not enough to make it in the 21st century art world; there are some forgettable photographs here I'm afraid. The photographic works I found most thought-provoking in this show were those that are built on layers of outward looking ideas and realities, that took on the larger forces in our society at this particular moment in time, rather than those that were overly self-conscious or inwardly reflective. The disruptions I saw were based in the context of the times, rather than the fabric of ourselves.

If I take the Whitney Biennial 2010 at face value, it is the straight photographers who are out on the bleeding edge of photographic art, pushing our collective consciousness, and the others who have heretofore considered themselves to be cleverly innovative and conceptually original that are being found to be lagging behind a bit. That's a wholly unexpected and surprisingly refreshing photographic conclusion, and the single best reason to go and see this show.

Collector's POV: Discovering which galleries represent the artists and photographers in this show isn't terribly easy. I've listed below those that I have been able to find; I'm hoping diligent commenters can point us all toward the rest.

• Nina Berman: Jen Bekman (here)
• Josh Brand: Herald St. (here)
• James Casebere: Sean Kelly Gallery (here)
• Babette Mangolte: Broadway 1602 (here)
• Curtis Mann: Kavi Gupta Gallery (here)
• Lorraine O'Grady: Alexander Gray Associates (here)
• Emily Roysdon, Stephanie Sinclair, Ania Soliman, Tam Tran: unknown

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: New York Times (here), New York (here), Village Voice (here), Washington Post (here)
• Feature/Curator Interview: Interview (here)
• Nina Berman artist site (here)
• Josh Brand artist site (unknown)
• James Casebere artist site (here)
• Babette Mangolte artist site (here)
• Curtis Mann artist site (here)
• Lorraine O'Grady artist site (here)
• Emily Roysdon artist site (here)
• Stephanie Sinclair artist site (here)
• Ania Soliman artist site (unknown)
• Tam Tran artist site (here)

Whitney Biennial 2010
Through May 30th

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021

Alfred Stieglitz Photographs in Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction @Whitney

JTF (just the facts): The main Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit contains over 125 paintings, drawings, and watercolors, spread across several large adjoining rooms and galleries. In a small side room, a total of 13 black and white photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, taken of O'Keeffe, are variously framed and matted and hung against medium brown walls. 9 of the images are gelatin silver prints; the other 4 are platinum prints. All of the works are from the period 1918 to 1922. A single glass case includes issues of Camera Work, 291, other books and related ephemera.

The Whitney does not allow photography in the galleries, so unfortunately, there are no installation shots of this show. The image at right, of O'Keeffe's hands from 1918, is via the George Eastman House website, although a print from this same negative is on view in this show.

Comments/Context: The scandalous relationship between Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz is a minor back story to the expansive abstraction show of O'Keeffe's work now on view at the Whitney. While famously flaunting convention and living as lovers (out of wedlock) after WWI, the two passionate artists collaborated on a series of iconic photographic portraits and nudes of O'Keeffe that have been included in the show in a side gallery. The images have nothing to do with abstraction or O'Keeffe's place in the pantheon of painters; they do however have something to say about O'Keeffe's powerful and confident personality and about Stieglitz' talents as a photographer.

All of the photographs in this small adjunct show come from the early part of their audacious relationship. Many of the images are close-up fragments of O'Keeffe's strong body: her hands/fingers, breasts, and torso are willingly posed in a variety of artful compositions - arms swoop above her head, hands grip her own breasts, expressive bent fingers clutch and turn, the curve of her wiry torso stands silhouetted against a window. The other images are portraits in a more traditional sense - head and upper body shots of O'Keeffe, nearly always with a serious and penetrating glare on her face, directly confronting and overtly rejecting the implied criticisms of the surrounding world. For their times, these were pretty startling pictures, both radical in their content and lyrical in their execution; here was a woman laid bare to the camera, and yet defiantly beautiful in her own powerful sexuality.

It is a testament to both photographer and sitter that these images remain so potent after almost a century. Few nudes (particularly of hands) have reached this pinnacle of success in all of the intervening years. So while the main focus of this major exhibit is O'Keeffe's abstract paintings, don't fail to miss the side gallery of Stieglitz' photographs of O'Keeffe, as they rightfully belong among the great works in the history of the medium.

Collector's POV: Alfred Stieglitz' portraits and nudes of Georgia O'Keeffe are among the most rare/valuable photographs ever made. Most of these works are safely housed in museum collections. From time to time, these images do however come into the secondary markets. In the past five years or so, a handful of these vintage works have come free, finding willing buyers between $250000 and $1500000.

Of course, many of these spectacular images would fit perfectly into our own collection of female nudes. The unfortunate reality is that they are far out of reach for us; we'll just have to wistfully covet and enjoy them from afar.

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

A few words on this particular rating: in general, the quality of the photography in this exhibit easily deserves three stars, hands down. But since this exhibit is primarily about O'Keeffe and her abstract paintings (with the photographs as a tangential afterthought), I can't in good faith give the show a three star rating and recommend going out of your way to see it just for the photography. If the show was a separate entity, with more prominent credit to Stieglitz for the photographs, and some scholarly discussion of their history and importance in the context of both photography and their personal relationship, it would easily merit three stars. As it is, I can reluctantly only give it two.

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), New York (here), TimeOut (here)

Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction
Through January 17th

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021

A Few Frames: Photography and the Contact Sheet @Whitney

JTF (just the facts): A total of 38 black and white and color works, variously framed and matted, and hung in a single room gallery on the Mezzanine level of the museum (down the back stairs). A total of 15 photographers are represented in this group show, with works ranging from 1936 to 2007. In addition to the framed images on the walls, there is one glass case at the back of the room, with several contact sheets and books on display. The Whitney does not allow photography in the galleries, so unfortunately, there are no installation shots of this show.

The following photographers are included in the exhibit (with the number of works on view in parentheses):

Bernd and Hilla Becher (4)
Wallace Berman (1)
Harold Edgerton (4 as 1)
Robert Frank (2)
Ellen Gallagher (1)
Rachael Harrison (1)
Silvia Kolbowski (8 as 1)
Paul McCarthy (3)
Ray Metzker (2)
Duane Michals (9 as 1)
Ed Ruscha (10 mockups, 5 sheets, 2 books)
Collier Schorr (1)
Andy Warhol (4 as 1)
David Wojnarowicz (1)
Francesca Woodman (1)

Comments/Context: I think the title of this exhibit is a bit misleading; if you pay your $18 and come to this exhibit with the expectation that this will be a show of grease pencil covered photographic contact sheets (which I did), you will be somewhat disappointed. While there are a handful of actual contact sheets on view, the show reaches for a broader thematic construct, connecting the idea of working contact sheets to sequential images, typologies, photographic series, and the like. As such, it is less about hits and misses or the process of editing, and more about multiple related images seen together in various forms.

The works by Duane Michals, Harold Edgerton, Robert Frank and Paul McCarthy are all sequential stories, narratives taking place over the the elapsed time of the images. The Becher cooling towers, Silvia Kolbowski's grid of appropriated faces and body fragments, Ray Metzker's pair of positive and negative torso composites, and even the Warhol stitched photographs all consider repetition and the typology, working with multiples and the idea of comparison. Others take these ideas one step further, into areas of collage and rework.

From a pure process point of view, the Ed Ruscha materials in the back of the room are the most enlightening. They show his work on the book A Few Palm Trees, starting with the original contact sheets of photographs, complete with his grease pencil selections. Paper mock ups of several of the resulting pages are then shown, with his cropping and layout choices made clear. Final copies of the books are on display as evidence of the finished product.

Perhaps the over-arching point here is that even as the digital world slowly drives the old style contact sheet to extinction, many of the ideas embedded in that working process will continue to be reconsidered in new ways. Fair enough. Just don't visit this show thinking you're going to get a tutorial on the ways notable photographers made their images from frame to frame, or how they selected the best out of a sea of variants. This exhibit flies higher, choosing the longer term thematic ideas over the down and dirty details.

Collector's POV: As direct matches for the genres in our particular collection, the works by the Bechers and Ray Metzker would be the best fits. I also continue to enjoy Warhol's stitched photographs; we just need to find one with just the right subject matter (this one is bicycles).

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

Transit Hub:

• Features: Slate (here), NPR blog (here)

A Few Frames: Photography and the Contact Sheet
Through January 3rd

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021

Photoconceptualism, 1966-1973 @Whitney

JTF (just the facts): A total of 139 images/works (it is not always clear when a group of images is one work or several, so we have counted everything), various framed and matted, and hung in the single room gallery on the mezzanine level of the museum. All of the works were created during the period 1966-1973. (Since the Whitney does not allow photography in the galleries, there are no installation shots of this exhibit.)

The following artists are included in the show, with the number of images/works displayed in parentheses:

Vito Acconci (1)
Mel Bochner (12, 1 set of notecards)
Dan Graham (2, framed together)
Michael Heizer (1)
Gordon Matta-Clark (2)
Bruce Nauman (11, 4 artist books)
Dennis Oppenheim (74, framed together)
Adrian Piper (14)
Ed Ruscha (4, 1 artist book)
Robert Smithson (8, framed together)
William Wegman (4, framed together)

Comments/Context: In the early days of photoconceptualism, as chronicled in this small but well curated show at the Whitney, the boundaries of the medium were being aggressively explored, merging traditional photography with elements of performance, language and frame breaking ideas.

Bruce Nauman gets meaningful attention in this exhibit, with a large group of his images of linguistic puns (Eating My Words, Waxing Hot, Bound to Fail etc.), 2 artists books of LA Air and Clear Sky (unbounded images of the sky), an additional book of sculpture in a gallery, and my favorite, an artist book response to Ed Ruscha's Various Small Fires and Milk called Burning Small Fires, where Nauman documents the systematic burning of each page of Ruscha's book. All of these works are witty and ironic, using new perspectives to get at unexpected and original ideas.

Mel Bochner's images of colorful shaving cream and Vaseline spread on a flat surface take on the age old issues of painting versus photography, using these mundane ephemeral materials to create transparent and opaque forms and abstract patterns. While they are of course photographs, they have a gestural quality, full of movement, almost like "brushstrokes".

A group of four artists are lined up together one wall, all using architectural motifs in one way or another as the raw material for their riffs. Ed Ruscha is represented by a group of four of his aerial parking lots, while Gordon Matta-Clark is shown cutting a gaping three dimensional hole in the interior of an abandoned building. There is a Dan Graham diptych of a house and a fast food restaurant interior, and a group of four black and white images of a door by William Wegman, taken from both inside and outside the nondescript entrance of a brick building. All of these are wholly unlike traditional architectural photography, and push at the edges of how these places can be used in making art.

Other highlights in this exhibit include Adrian Piper's dark and murky series of self portraits in a mirror, Robert Smithson's images of snow melting, and Dennis Oppenheim's huge array of small prints of an adult swinging a child around and around in circles.

While we have all been inundated with the cool detached style of conceptualism as practiced by the Becher school disciples in recent years, this kind of warm, funny, even goofy conceptualism is much less often seen these days. This exhibit is a great reminder that conceptualism doesn't have to be airless and formal to be exciting, and that little bit of cleverness applied in small doses can not only make the viewer smile, but also scratch his/her head and step back and think.

Collector’s POV: For our collection, the Matta-Clark and Ruscha works would fit best, and both remain on our going forward hit list, Matta-Clark especially. His works have not been widely available at auction, and those that have come up for sale have sold between roughly $20000 and $120000. Ruscha's parking lots tend to be sold in groups at auction, which makes finding a single great image a bit more difficult. Truth be told, I have also always been a closet fan of William Wegman's early conceptual work (pre-Weimaraners), so the series of doors shown here would also be a potential welcome addition.

One sidenote question: why wasn't Robert Cumming included in this show? He seems like an obvious candidate to join this group. Perhaps he was working in a slightly later time period, or maybe he just isn't represented in the Whitney's collection. In any case, if anyone has insights here, please put them in the comments.

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

Transit Hub:

• Bruce Nauman wins Golden Lion at 2009 Venice Biennale (here)
• Dan Graham, Beyond @Whitney (here)

Photoconceptualism, 1966-1973
Through September 20th

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021

Artists Making Photographs @Whitney

JTF (just the facts): 5 sets of works by John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, Lucas Samaras, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol, displayed in the small Gilman Gallery on the mezzanine level of the museum. (No photography is allowed at the Whitney, so there are no installation shots.) Here's the breakdown:

Chamberlain: 1 sculpture and 1 color photograph
Rauschenberg: 1 large painting and 3 black and white silver prints
Samaras: 1 sculpture, 1 mixed media piece, and 6 Polaroids
Ruscha: 1 drawing and 2 black and white photographs
Warhol: 1 painting and 6 black and white photo booth strips

Comments/Context: While most artists confine their exploration to mastering the nuances one medium, a growing number use a variety of different tools and approaches (often intermixed) to make their art. The current show at the Whitney steps back into the historical record of the 20th century to look at how artists who were best know as painters or sculptors also used photography to examine their ideas.

The pairing of a 1963 John Chamberlain twisted sculpture made of car parts with a 1989 photograph of swirling, distorted, blurred swaths of color was the most surprising and enlightening section of the show for us. We didn't know that Chamberlain was also a photographer, and the works showed a clear commonality in their approach to form and color.

The other four artists (Rauschenberg, Samaras, Ruscha and Warhol) were all more widely known to have been using photography as part of their artistic process, so their inclusion here was more expected. The group of Samaras works seemed most connected by the artist's interest in manipulating and controlling the processes for making the art, to extend the normal boundaries of those mediums. The Warhol grouping of a large multi-panel Jackie painting with several photo booth images was perhaps the most obvious of the pairings, since it is so widely known that Warhol used photographs as the basis for most of his portraits.

The Rauschenberg and Ruscha combinations were the most obscure to our eyes. While both artists had clearly been active photographers, the specific images selected to go with the paintings and drawings were harder to reconcile. We were unable to connect the dots to draw much meaning from these pairings.

So while the concept of this exhibition is an excellent one, the execution is a little uneven. I would have liked to have seen more interrelationships and back and forth between the mediums and more explanation for how photography was used by each of these artists (particularly for Rauschenberg). That said, the Chamberlain alone is worth a short detour.

Collector's POV: Warhol, Ruscha and Samaras photographs are all generally readily available in the secondary markets. Rauschenberg's photography is more scarce at auction. This was the first time I had ever seen a photograph by John Chamberlain, so his photographic work is likely even more hard to come by.

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

Artists Making Photographs
Through Spring 2009

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1968-2008 @Whitney

JTF (just the facts): A total of 159 images (134 color and 25 black and white), along with 2 videos, and 4 cases of miscellaneous materials (books, catalogs, album covers etc.), hung in a series of 10 divided spaces, covering the entire third floor of the museum. (Memphis, 1971, at right.)

Comments/Context: So much has been written about William Eggleston's original 1976 show at the MoMA (scandalous! boring! notorious! ground breaking!) and its subsequent impact on several generations of color photographers that it has taken on a legendary aura. So it is somewhat surprising that it has taken more than 30 years for any New York museum to give him another solo show. The comprehensive retrospective now on view at the Whitney covers the entire span of his career, from his early black and white images, through the famous William Eggleston's Guide project/show, and on through a number of other strong bodies of work, up to the present.

Over the years, the never ending mantra on Eggleston has been his amazing use of color. Ah, the color! Lush color, subtle color, saturated color, color tuned by warm light, glorious color (and a staggering number of bad puns and word games using color: "local color", "living color" etc.). In seeing all this work together for the first time, I came to see the color as part of a larger puzzle, where the real genius of Eggleston lies in composition, in the most mundane of questions about where to put the camera. I imagine his artist's brain working something like this: out on a random walk, shooting pictures, his eye catches a glimpse of a breathtaking (insert color here - green, for example, as in the picture above right). The harder question then becomes, how to turn this mundane, ordinary subject (albeit with a graceful set of colors) into something interesting? Eggleston's vision took him even a step further, where these commonplace scenes (primarily of the rural South) are somehow filled with an intensity of emotion, a Faulkner-esque dread in many cases. While not every image Eggleston has taken is a winner, there are far too many iconic compositions in this show for it to be luck. And while his work is often labeled as having a "snapshot aesthetic", the consistency of his approach, across the years and in work that is lesser known, is the stunning takeaway for me from this exhibit.

All of Eggleston's "greatest hits" are on view here: the tricycle, the red ceiling (Untitled, 1973 at right), the dog licking the puddle, the peaches sign, most of them displayed in the entry or in the cavernous central room (where images from the Guide, the 14 Pictures portfolio and the Troubled Waters portfolio are intermingled). The three galleries on the right side were of the most interest to me. In the first room, Eggleston's early black and white images from the early 1960s are shown. In these pictures, you can see Eggleston experimenting with composition and exploring the everyday American subjects around him (diners, drive-ins, cars), as he refined his approach to the medium. The middle room on the right holds 20 pictures from the Los Alamos series, along with some other ephemera in cases. There were unexpectedly many more tremendous images in this group that I had remembered. In the far right room, Eggleston's black and white video Stranded in Canton is shown on four stations, along with some less than remarkable large scale black and white portraits. The video is a wild, boozy, almost surreal vision of nightlife, fast food and other general weirdness. The scenes near the end of a rowdy group of men biting the heads off of chickens (the heads drop, the headless bodies jerk and twitch) are creepy and unsettling.

The rooms on the left side and back of the exhibit trace a variety of projects and commissions, picking representative samples and highlights from each. There are works from the Carter commission project, the Graceland commission, the Dust Bells portfolio, the Southern Suite, the Morals of Vision portfolio, the Democratic Vision portfolio, the True Stories project, a selection of new works (printed larger than anything else in the show) and a few portraits. There are winners buried here as well, although in lesser numbers and with lesser overall intensity somehow.

Beyond the work, a few comments on the staging of the exhibit are in order. In general, the structure and architecture of this show are weak, and make the work seem less inspiring than it is. While there is a general chronology at play, it is hidden and needed to be much more explicit. An opportunity to tell a much more linear narrative of the evolution of Eggleston's art was missed. While there are some interesting juxtaposition of images, the scale of the rooms and the expanses of space in the middle tend to encourage scanning the images from 20 feet, rather than getting up close to engage them more intimately, so these interrelationships are lost. There is an aimless, wandering style to this exhibit, and a tendency to see your favorites from afar and "check them off", thus all the works from various time periods wash together and lose definition. And why the Whitney didn't do an audio guide, taking advantage of Eggleston's marvelous gravelly Southern drawl is beyond me (there is a short video of Eggleston on the Whitney website however, linked below).

But putting these distractions and detractors aside, the work in this exhibit is forceful, novel, and memorable, and the retrospective format does a good job of covering all Eggleston's periods of work. Simply put, it is a must-see show of a masterful career.

Collector's POV: The recent auction of the Berman collection of Eggleston images at Christie's is the best proxy for current market conditions for Eggleston's work (preview post here, results post here). In general, demand and prices are both high and consistently strong. At retail, Eggleston is represented by Cheim & Read (site here), although there are 26 galleries listed on artnet that claim to have Eggleston inventory, so his work is spread around the market a bit. Beyond the original color dye transfers, some new digital prints are now available. The Eggleston Trust website can be found here.

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

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1968-2008
Through January 25th

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021

Polaroids: Mapplethorpe @Whitney

JTF (just the facts): 90 small black and white images, all approximately 3 1/2 x 4 1/2 (or the reverse), displayed in two rows, two images high, in white frames, in one room. Found in the hard to get to Mezzanine gallery (up to the top floor, through the permanent collection, down the back stairs by the Calders). Mostly portraits and self-portraits, with a mixture of other subjects as well. (Untitled (Self Portrait) 1973 at right. Copyright held by artist.)

Comments/Context: All of the images in this exhibition are from the period between 1970 and 1975, when Mapplethorpe was experimenting and learning how to be a photographer. Not surprisingly, there are many "exercises" in form, camera angle, framing, and the usage of light. The subject matter is the stuff of his everyday life: his friends, their apartments, their things. The images are intimate, personal, and sometimes lovely. (Untitled (Catherine Tennant's House, London) 1973 at right. Copyright held by artist.) You can also see how Mapplethorpe was beginning to think about paring down an image, to get at its essence, even if that image was therefore a bit more staged.

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As I walked through the show, I kept coming back to the similarities between this early work and the work of Francesca Woodman. (There was an excellent show of her work at Marian Goodman last fall.) Her photographs also have an experimental feel, with a personal, and feminine, point of view. It would be fascinating to see these two shown together.

Collectors POV: As collectors of floral/botanical images, Mapplethorpe is clearly a core artist for us, and adding one of the florals from this early work would help show the evolution of his style of image making. Nearly all the images in the exhibition are held by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation (website here), although a few Polaroids can be found out in the marketplace as well. Given Mapplethorpe's popularity, there are a large number of galleries and dealers who carry his work (42 on artnet); we have had success working with Sean Kelly and Alison Jacques. At auction in the past few years, the Polaroids have been a relative bargain (compared to the iconic work), running in the $3000-7000 range.

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Sylvia Wolf and the Whitney put out a nice monograph of the Polaroids in conjunction with the exhibition. While Mapplethorpe and The Complete Flowers would be Essential Reference on Mapplethorpe, this book is clearly POTS (Part of the Story) and therefore worth adding to your library.
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Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system defined here)

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Polaroids: Mapplethorpe
Through September 7th

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021