Zwelethu Mthethwa, Inner Views @Studio Museum in Harlem

JTF (just the facts): A total of 17 color photographs, hung in the main gallery space on the ground floor and in an adjoining side gallery. All of the works are chromogenic prints, either mounted on plexi and not framed or framed in blond wood; many are printed in large, object quality proportions. The exhibit was organized by Associate Curator Naomi Beckwith. The Studio Museum in Harlem does not allow photography in the galleries, so unfortunately, there are no installation shots for this show; the images that accompany this post were taken from the museum website. The recent Aperture monograph (here) is on sale in the museum shop. (Untitled from Interiors, 1997, at right.)

The exhibit includes work from three different series. These projects are listed below, with the number of photographs on view in parentheses:

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Interiors (11, from 1997-2003)

Empty Beds (3, from 2003)

Common Ground (3, from 2008)

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A supporting exhibit entitled Inside the Collection: Interiors from the Studio Museum shares the smaller side gallery with the Mthethwa show. It includes photographic works by Adia Millet, Carrie Mae Weems, Mickalene Thomas, Frank Stewart, James VanDerZee, and Malick Sidibé.

Comments/Context: South African photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa has been doing a splendid job of building awareness for his work here in New York in the past 18 months or so. Starting with a solid show of new images at Jack Shainman last spring (review here), he has followed that up with the events and book signings surrounding the release of his terrific Aperture monograph earlier this year (review here), and with a solo museum show at the Studio Museum in Harlem this summer. It has been a well orchestrated effort in building momentum and name recognition. (Untitled from Empty Beds series, 2002, at right.)

The Studio Museum exhibition is in many ways a perfect foil for the Shainman gallery show. It covers three photographic projects that focus on interior scenes, while the more recent work was all taken outside - there is no overlap of images on display, so the combination of the two shows provides a decently comprehensive view of Mthethwa's career (except for the excellent but missing Sugar Cane series). At the simplest level, the pictures in this show can be thought of as a contemporary form of social documentary photography. Following in the footsteps of Riis, Evans, Lange and others, Mthethwa has made images of the domestic lives of migrant workers, capturing the unexpected personalization of their single room spaces. He has also documented the aftermath of natural disaster, homes ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans or the wild fires of Cape Town, making the destruction interchangeable and universal.

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Mthethwa's private spaces are dense with details, low ceilings bearing down on sparse, makeshift furnishings, often cobbled together and scavenged from found materials. In Interiors, the inhabitants pose amidst their surroundings, actively participating in the creation of their portraits, almost as if they were in a formal studio. Simple items (a tricycle, a group of ceramic dogs, a large watch, matching plaid jackets) give us glimpses of individuality and clues to personality, each a tiny narrative of self. In Empty Beds, the rooms are quiet and solemn, the beds neatly made, the washcloths draped over wire hangers, evidence of inhabitants who are trying to make their austere rooms livable. In Common Ground, while the interiors are also empty, they are the opposite of the carefully controlled bedrooms; instead they are filled with wreckage and disorder, lost in mud spackled walls and taped windows.

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What makes these pictures explode off the wall is their dramatic use of vibrant, saturated color. Wallpapers made from newspaper advertising supplements, wine labels, or patterned plastic sheeting are layered in chaotic, overlapping combinations. Each setting has its own color highlights and experiments: bright blue paint, green linoleum, red shoes, yellow walls. The painterly color fills the frame with crackling energy and life, in images that might otherwise be sullen or gloomy. In some works, the thickness of the color nearly drowns out the content, making the images almost abstract; in others, the color merely turns up the volume, transforming a simple scene into something more inspiring. When printed at mural sized scale (as a few of the images are), the interiors shimmer with visual stimulation.

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All in, even if you saw the earlier Shainman gallery show or have pored over the monograph, this exhibit provides an overdue summary of some of Mthethwa's best projects, shown off the way they were meant to be seen: in large, dynamic, up close color.

Collector's POV: Zwelethu Mthethwa is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York (here). His photographs have just begun to enter the secondary markets in the past few years, with a small handful of lots selling between $8000 and $14000. (Untitled from Common Ground series, 2008, at right.)

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), Village Voice (here, scroll down)
• Interview with Larissa Leclair (here)

Zwelethu Mthethwa, Inner Views

Through October 24th

The Studio Museum in Harlem
144 West 125th Street

New York, NY 10027

Book: Scott Schuman, The Sartorialist

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2009 by Penguin (here). 512 pages, with a roughly equivalent number of color images. Includes a small number of short captions by the photographer. The book itself is small and thick, with the most of the images printed all the way to the edges. The works in this book were made between 2005 and 2008. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: I've been thinking about Scott Schuman's The Sartorialist for a while now, trying to put my finger on why his daily images have become such a pop culture phenomenon, why they seem to capture the spirit of our times so well. On first glance, it would be easy to dismiss these pictures as the straight forward snapshots of a fashion obsessive, of people watching taken to some logical extreme. But I actually think the reason these pictures are so successful is that they combine ideas from a variety of photographic genres and place them in a new 21st century context, riding the coattails of a wave of interest in authentic individual expression. This book gathers together a gargantuan sample of images taken from Schuman's popular blog, and provides a terrific summary of his aesthetic approach.

In many ways, Schuman's images lie at the confluence of three photographic styles: frontal portraiture, fashion photography, and street photography. While the full body or three-quarters frontal portrait goes back to the beginning of art history, its photographic roots are often laid at the feet of August Sander and his monumental effort to document the people of the 20th century. Since that time, we have seen photographers as diverse as Irving Penn, Thomas Ruff, Rineke Dijkstra, Hiroh Kikai, and Albrecht Tübke use the straightforward portrait to explore types and categories of people, the oddities and eccentricities of individuals, the evolution of personalities, and even more abstract conceptual topics (often with deadpan facial expressions). What's interesting here is while Schuman has borrowed the traditional form, he is using it an an entirely different manner. His search is for those moments when the choices and combinations of color, texture, volume, and contrast found in our attire suddenly manifest themselves as a coherent personal style, when the parts come together in surprising and unexpected harmony. His portraits are intensely individual, but in a way that is universal; we can all look at these pictures and imagine incorporating some small piece of what we see into our own self-image, where the cut of a coat, the silhouette of a dress, the angle of pocket square, or the fabulousness of a pair of shoes can represent a piece of our own personality.

Schuman's pictures are of course at some literal level fashion photographs. But his pictures have not been staged or constructed in an effort to highlight the dramatic elegance of a couture evening gown or the simmering beauty of a model, in the manner of an Avedon or Penn. Even when these greats of fashion photography worked in the streets, everything was minutely controlled to achieve the desired look: the pose, the lighting, the backdrop, the styling, every detail was tuned to achieve maximum glamour. While Schuman's subjects are clearly collaborating with the photographer, and some effort has obviously been made to improve the overall composition or lighting of the found environment, for the most part, it seems the goal is not perfection, but more a genuine documentation of the uniqueness of the subject. In some sense, it is an exercise in one artist capturing the subtle originality of another.

The final piece of the artistic puzzle is the energy of the streets, the act of discovery that is the hallmark of great street photography, the recognizing and picking out of something exciting amidst the chaos that passes by in every moment. Schuman's subjects are mostly "found objects", chance encounters and random connections, here now and gone in the blink of an eye, hiding in plain sight, bustling by on the sidewalk. It takes a tuned eye to discern the patterns of fashion inspiration in a split second, to see the new or innovative and separate it out from the noise.

All of these photographic threads come together in Schuman's deceptively simple images. But what I think has most influenced his meteoric rise is his timing; his artistic approach came along just as we entered the Facebook era, when the cult of the individual and the democratization of fashion came fortuitously together to make celebrities and reality show stars out of everyday people. Suddenly, it was entirely acceptable to get an authentic view of personal style from a well dressed stranger, perhaps even preferable to employing one cooked up by fashion editors who were far too removed from everyday reality. Schuman's images have become an outlet for more voices in the fashion conversation, a way for diversity, quirkiness, and vitality to be more easily integrated into any one person's view of fashion. There is something vibrant and liberating about seeing fashion in this way, and it's likely the reason his approach has spawned so many imitators - it's really a new genre that he has created.

Regardless of whether curators and collectors ever see Schuman's works as part of the continuum of great photography (fashion or otherwise), there is something infectious and relentlessly positive about this body of work. Pick up this book and you'll be hard pressed to put it down without picking favorites, while perhaps discovering some new ideas for finding your own individuality along the way.

Collector’s POV: Scott Schuman is represented by Danziger Projects in New York (here). Schuman's work has not yet become available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors. Given how prolific Schuman is, I expect that print prices are generally quite reasonable.

Transit Hub:

• The Sartorialist blog (here)

South African Photographs: David Goldblatt @Jewish Museum

JTF (just the facts): A total of 150 black and white photographs, framed in blond wood and matted, and chronologically/thematically displayed through a winding series of adjoining gallery spaces. The prints cover the period from roughly 1948 to the present. The Jewish Museum does not allow photography in the galleries, so unfortunately, there are no installation shots for this exhibit; the images that accompany this post were taken from the museum website.

The exhibit is divided into seven thematic groups, along with a separate room devoted to a film about Goldblatt, a South African historical timeline, and 7 photography books that were influential for Goldblatt. These sections are listed below, with the number of photographs and other ephemera in parentheses:

Early Work (12)
On the Mines (17, 2 books)
Afrikaners (25, 8 books, 1 magazine)
Bantustans (18)
Boksburg (28, 2 books)
Structures (17, 2 books)
Johannesburg (33)

Comments/Context: In the past couple of years, New Yorkers have had an amazing opportunity to learn about the superlative work of South African photographer David Goldblatt. There was a large exhibition at the New Museum last summer (here) that paired some of his older work with more recent large color images, a tightly edited gallery show of vintage 1970s work at Howard Greenberg earlier this year (here), and now this retrospective-style exhibition covering a handful of his most successful projects and books. Given how little overlap there is between these three shows, we've really been exposed to the sweep of Goldblatt's varied artistic output, over a career that spans more than 50 years.

The show is organized into discrete groups of photographs categorized by subject matter, often echoing or sampling from photo essays or books that Goldblatt produced. A selection of works from his 1973 book On the Mines (in collaboration with author Nadine Gordimer) chronicles life in the South African gold mining regions, juxtaposing men in hard hats at the bottom of mine shafts with concession store clerks, abandoned mill foundations, and shadowy bunks in dormitories. His pictures capture the not-so-subtle racial divisions (black workers, white owners) that were commonplace in these regions, embedded in the fabric of the business. (Boss Boy at the Battery Reef, Randfontein Estates Gold Mine, Randfontein, 1966, at right, top.)

Goldblatt's images of Afrikaners are filled with contrast and subtle contradiction. Some are filled with quiet sympathy, chronicling the hardships of farm life, the fierce commitment to the church, and the general ordinariness of the people, with a dignity reminiscent of Walker Evans. And yet underneath, the undercurrents of racism, nationalism, and extremism give the pictures a heightened sense of anticipation and anxiety, of emotions simmering beneath the surface. Farmers with craggy faces make pine coffins, wear their Sunday best, and sit blankly at kitchen tables. I particularly liked the image of an older woman playing a fancy organ in a dark dining room, with the riot of flowers on the table; it seems so perfectly emblematic of the traditions of the Afrikaner life. (On an ostrich farm nead Oudtshoorn, 1967, at right, middle.)

The Bantustans section of the show collects images of everyday life in the black puppet states, where houses of sticks, mud, rock and wood provide traditional shelter for families. (Landscape with 1500 lavatories, Frankfort, Ciskei, 12 July 1983, at right, bottom.) The most powerful pictures in this group are those of commuting workers waiting for the bus, clustered in crowds at stops in the middle of the night, strafed by the glare of headlights. Images from the white suburban community of Boksburg are a direct contrast, with well dressed, middle class ladies meeting at home for bible study, walking by shop fronts, ballroom dancing or attending military ceremonies, living in a kind of fantasy world where the apartheid system lies out of sight.

The pictures of Structures provide yet another set of back and forth contrasts: heroic Afrikaner monuments and churches followed by destroyed houses and shacks under construction, perfect gardens next to nomadic sheep shearers. In one image, a black family lives in a house with no walls, where the bed and table are jumbled together, surrounded by rubble. The final section of images from Johannesburg finds these same themes embedded in the everyday life of the city. A menacing dog guards a parade at a soccer match (with the classic Life is Great slogan on the side of a car), children play on the top of a junked car frame, a white baby lies on a blanket tended by three black nannies, and a shoemaker plies his trade behind a jungle of razorwire.

All of these projects and photo essays have a commonality of feel, a sense of understated delivery, where similarities and differences are given equal weight, where subtleties of injustice and ironies of experience are highlighted without the hectoring of a heavy hand. Goldblatt's compositions are crisp and often sparse, picking out a single facet from the sea of contradictions around him. Perhaps the best way to describe the works is that they are implicit rather than explicit; they force the viewer to discover the back story, rather than shouting the obvious.

All in, this show applies a more traditional retrospective framework to Goldblatt's long career, and as such, provides a more coherent sense of chronological background and progression than the other shows of his work we've seen in New York recently. Even if you caught those other two exhibits, this one is worth a visit to provide a more thoroughly constructed historical foundation for his ideas and to fill in some photographic gaps with excellent projects you may have overlooked.

Collector's POV: David Goldblatt is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York (here) and Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg (here). Even with the activity surrounding his recent New York museum shows, his prints have not yet become widely available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the best option for interested collectors at this point.

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

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Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), Village Voice (here), New York Review of Books (here)

South African Photographs: David Goldblatt

Through September 19th

The Jewish Museum

1109 5th Ave at 92nd St

New York, NY 10128

The New York MoPP

A recent reader comment expressing concern over the idea of museum curators as taste makers (here) has been bubbling around in my head for the past day or so, along with interconnected snippets of ideas from the Summer issue of Artforum (which takes on the idea of museums more generally, here) and lingering, tangential ideas from a post I wrote several weeks ago called Is Anyone Trying to Lead the Conversation? (here). They have all led me back to thinking about the central idea of how public museum collections are traditionally built and managed.

When we peel back all of the scholarly rhetoric, one way to think about the original, underlying function of a museum is that it is designed to be a safe repository for those items the public considers worth preserving. In the case of an art museum, its first role of the museum is to select, acquire, protect and conserve works of art that are deemed important, and as a downstream activity, to display those same artworks in ways that educate, entertain, and inform us about our cultural heritage.

Whether we like it or not, the public at large has currently ceded the selection of works that are to be preserved in public art museums to two types of people: experts (in the form of curators and scholars) and rich people (in the form of museum trustees, board members, and donors). These two groups collaborate to decide which works will be acquired/accepted (either by purchase or donation) and later, which works will be deaccessioned. With every single small in/out decision, this inner circle defines an individual museum’s collection, and by default, what we as a culture are tacitly saying we value. (And for the most part, even if we carefully track the accessions and deaccessions on an annual basis, the decision making process is generally opaque to all but the participants.) Everyone will agree that from an artist’s perspective, having your work in five important museums is altogether different than having it in five random private collections. Being included in a museum collection is an overt validation that the work is worth saving and studying in the long term. As such, I find it hard to believe that museum curators, who often lead/control the process of accessions and deaccessions, aren’t taste makers; in actual fact, that is exactly what they are (even if they hide behind academic scholarship) – they are making choices on behalf of the public about which art is most worthy in the long run. We put our artistic history in their capable hands.

So let’s say for a minute that this reality is somehow unsettling to us, that we have become worried that we don’t want to give up that much cultural control to a relatively small handful of people, even if they are potentially the most qualified to do so among us. One idea that came up in the earlier discussion was that somehow the “market” in the abstract is the default leader, that the aggregation of thousands of individual decisions (a crowd-sourcing) eventually leads to a consensus on what art is most important or valuable. So let’s play that idea out a bit further, in the form of a thought experiment.

Imagine we have a new public museum in New York, conveniently called the Museum of Popular Photography (MoPP for short). For the purposes of argument, let’s assume that it has roughly 50000 members (big enough to have some scale and resources). In building and managing its diverse collection of photography, it however uses a radically different set of methods and procedures than all other museums. Every single card-carrying member of the museum has voting rights. What this means is that all members have an actual voice in every single accession/deaccession decision that museum makes; it is after all a museum by and for the people.

Here’s how it would work. Any museum member or employee could propose a specific individual work for acquisition. As an example, Member 1 decides that she thinks the museum should acquire Irving Penn’s Cuzco Children, and using the social connection tools we are now so familiar with, posts an image of the work on the museum’s website with a short rationale for why it should be acquired. (The museum’s curators would use the same mechanism for advocating potential acquisitions.) All other members then have the opportunity to vote yes or no on Cuzco Children, with each vote worth 1 point. There would be no anonymous voting – every member would be named (to avoid gaming the system with phantom votes), and comments could be added to the voting stream. Over time, as a proposed artwork reached a minimum of 5000 net points (or roughly 10% of the membership in favor of the acquisition), it would become an active acquisition target for the museum staff. Assuming the funds were available or a donor could be discovered, the work would be added to the collection.

Such a system would create a priority ordered list of what the membership wants to see saved in the museum. Those photographs with the highest scores would be those most coveted by the museum and the most actively pursued by museum representatives. At any one time, there might be hundreds or even thousands of individual works under consideration by the members, all with a score based on their current level of support. In some cases, an image that the membership wants may not be available; perhaps a large number of members would like to have Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent II as part of the collection, but either the work is not available or too expensive for the museum’s limited acquisitions budget (all museum budgets are limited). This work would then stay on top of the acquisitions hit list until such time as it could be acquired or was donated; maybe it would never be possible to acquire a print of this work, so in the meantime, it would also be on top of the list of works to get on loan for temporary exhibition.

So at any one time, the museum’s holdings (both actual and desired) could be rank ordered by popularity with the members (thus the name of the institution itself), and potential donors would have complete transparency in terms of what the museum really wants/needs. On an annual basis, the museum would put on a show drawn from the permanent collection called The MoPP 100, displaying the top 100 works in the collection according to the members’ preferences, shown in priority order. Additionally, it would put on shows of loaned works that rate highly in the members’ minds.

Once a work entered the collection, on an annual basis the entire membership would be asked to participate in revisiting the collection. Members could change their original votes based on the passage of time and the changing of preferences. Works that fell below the 5000 point support threshold would be deaccessioned. Again, curators could make deaccession recommendations to the membership based on duplicates, condition, relative importance, depth of holdings etc., but the final choices would be up to the collective membership.

At face value, this entire scheme is a thoroughly wacky and revolutionary idea. So let’s think about what outcome it might produce. It seems quite likely that the MoPP would end up with a holding of photography’s greatest hits, works that a large percentage of the community could agree were worth preserving. It also seems plausible that depending on the composition and sophistication of the membership, the selections would be relatively risk averse; difficult, challenging, unknown and obscure works would be less likely to attract a wide enough support base to get over the 5000 point threshold. It would also take time for new contemporary work to become exposed to enough of the membership to achieve the required level of consensus.

On one hand, this collection, even over time, might end up being a dumbed down, lowest common denominator reflection of our aggregate tastes: boring, obvious, vanilla choices that are quickly seen to be neither innovative nor thought provoking. But if you give the membership credit for intelligence, perhaps this outcome could be avoided, and the museum’s holdings would be an accurate reflection of the art that really does move us, that is meaningful and relevant to our local community, without all of the chaff that currently fills up museum storage facilities, of interest to only a minuscule number of members. The Berlin, Amsterdam, and Shangahi outposts of the MoPP (we have to keep expanding and building fabulous buildings to stay relevant, don’t you know) would have their own permanent collections, selected and managed by their own members; these collections would almost certainly have different flavors based on local tastes. This would be exciting; imagine comparing what the members in New York and Shanghai think is important – perhaps we can all agree on some things photographic, or perhaps there is wide divergence of cultural tastes. Instead of all international museums converging to one, antiseptic and familiar norm (is this white cube in Oslo, Rome or Tokyo?), the MoPPs would splinter, fragment and diverge.

So I throw it open to you. Is a photography museum for the people, by the people, a viable idea? Can the “market” actually make good choices? Would such a museum reflect who we are, or miss what’s subtle but important? Would the “long tail” of art be overlooked? Or would the crowd be smart enough to single out the deserving winners, even among the lesser known?

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

Book: Joachim Brohm, Ohio

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2009 by Steidl (here). 120 pages, with 55 color images. Includes essays in English and German by Thomas Weski and Vince Leo. The images from this project were taken between 1983 and 1984. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: In the early 1980s, German photographer Joachim Brohm took a Fulbright year at Ohio State University in Columbus. This tightly edited monograph gathers together the work he made during his stay and introduces another voice into the discussion of the early development of color photography.

Brohm's images of Ohio seem to have a mix of influences and connections (the celebration of vernacular American culture as captured by Walker Evans, the ugly underbelly of development as exposed by the New Topographics photographers, and the exploration of new color ideas by William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld), all tied together and synthesized with a slightly more aloof German aesthetic. Most of these images have a dingy, muted palette, and have been composed at eye-level, with an almost snapshot-like directness. Brohm pointed his camera primarily at back alleys and forgotten urban landscapes: parking lots, chain link fences, dated cars, dumpsters, dog runs, and clusters of overhead telephone wires, pausing to take in the array of junk left on a dashboard, a rubble strewn vacant lot, an unused basketball hoop, a window reflection, a defunct drive-in, or a car engulfed in flames. The pictures are consistently understated and unassuming, but the guard dogs, Keep Out signs, cinder blocks and broken fencing leave a lingering sense of emptiness and subtle threat.

What I found interesting here is that if Brohm had made these pictures in black and white, they would have had a stronger sense of abstracted, formal elegance. But the introduction of the often drab, cheerless color has the effect of heightening the reality of the depressed mood of the environment; it's not color for the sake of color, or color as an exercise in showing-off, but color masterfully used in a supporting role to achieve the desired temperament. Then look again, and suddenly, the red of a Cadillac tail light, the yellow of a dog house, the brown of a painted railing, or the pale green of a garage seem like perfectly calibrated eye-catching details.

For those of you busy praying to the pantheon of American gods of color, I'd thoroughly recommend taking a closer look at this body of Brohm's early work, as it attacks many of the same aesthetic questions, but upon patient inspection, offers surprisingly different and satisfying answers.

Collector’s POV: Joachim Brohm is represented by Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica, CA (here, on artnet) and Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer in Cologne (here). Brohm's work has become somewhat more available in the secondary markets of late, particularly at the German auction houses. According to the notes in the back of the book, prints from Ohio are available in two sizes (24x30cm and 50x60cm) on Kodak Ektacolor paper (vintage) and Fuji Crystal Archive paper (modern).

Transit Hub:

• Book review: Conscientious (here)
• Ohio at Museum for Contemporary Art Leipzig, 2008 (here)
• Fotografie at Kunsthalle Mainz, 2009 (here)
  

Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography @Met

JTF (just the facts): A total of 31 works, in mixed frames and mats, hung in a single divided gallery on the 2nd floor of the museum. This group show includes images/videos from 24 artists and photographers, made between 1966 to 2009. All of the works on display have been drawn from the permanent collection of the museum; most were acquired in the last decade. (Installation shots at right.)

The following artists/photographers have been included in the exhibit, with the number of works on view in parentheses:

Vito Acconici (12 black and white images framed as 1 work)
Doug Aitken (1)
Darren Almond (1 video)
Lothar Baumgarten (1)
Matthew Buckingham (1)
Rineke Dijkstra (6)
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1)
On Kawara (47 postcards framed as 1 work)
Svetlana Kopystiansky (3)
Richard Long (1)
NASA (1)
Bruce Nauman (1 video)
Dennis Oppenheim (1 diptych)
Allen Ruppersberg (9 paired prints/texts framed as 1 work)
Ed Ruscha (1 book)
Fazal Sheikh (1)
Erin Shirreff (1 video)
Robert Smithson (4 images framed as 1 work)
Thomas Struth (1)
Anne Turyn (1)
Unknown (1)
VALIE EXPORT (1)
Jeff Wall (1)
Weng Fen (1)

Comments/Context: Apart from the times when the gallery has been subsumed into a larger exhibit (like the Pictures Generation), the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography on the second floor of the Met has become a consistent venue for thematic group shows, organized to highlight topics and subject matter of relevance to the practice of contemporary photography, almost always drawing exclusively from the museum's permanent collection. It's a low cost way to feature some terrific works which would otherwise be locked away in storage, to have a voice in the contemporary debate, and to providing some larger art historical context for some of the important ideas that are percolating around the community.

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The newest iteration in this series takes on a broad intellectual construct that could loosely be called "travel", but really contains many more abstract, amorphous and obtuse ideas: the elusiveness of place, the globalization of experience, the sense of being a refugee, the passing of time, and the dislocations and displacements that have become commonplace in our modern world. The first half of the exhibit goes back to the 1960s and 1970s and explores these ideas primarily through the lens of Conceptualism. Vito Acconci makes flash photos of audiences in theaters, On Kawara sends time stamped postcards, Ed Ruscha documents the Sunset Strip, and Bruce Nauman jitters across his studio.

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Fast forward a few decades, and dry, academic wit has been exchanged for a more pervasive, everyday globalism, less theoretical and more grounded in the nuances of what we now call normal. Doug Aitken peers out an airplane window, Thomas Struth captures a museum crowd studying a projection of a Delacroix, Weng Fen watches a bustling Chinese skyline, and Rineke Dijkstra follows the growth of a Bosnian refugee. My favorite piece in the show was Erin Shirreff's Roden Crater, a video that appears to capture the changing light conditions at James Turrell's famous monument. In fact, it is a series of still photographs of the crater, where Shirreff uses different glares and lighting effects on the surface of the appropriated image to create a startling spectrum of hues and colors; what looks like the smooth gradients of light waxing and waning across the hours of the day are in fact computer effects smoothing out the transitions between stills. Once you catch on to the trick (look for glare and surface grain), the inversion makes for a thoughtful comment of the experience of time.

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The progression from the earlier work to the images from the past decade is quite jerky, a bit too "before" and "after", rather than a building up and evolution of ideas. While everything does in the end connect into the larger thematic undercurrents of the show, this is the most cerebral curatorial effort we've seen in this gallery space; it takes some active thinking and wall-text parsing to bring it all together - I doubt that the wandering, fly-by viewer will succeed in teasing out all of the references.

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While I certainly enjoyed seeing many of the works on display in this show, I remain unconvinced that these thematic exhibits are either memorable in a larger, long-term sense or successful in being a driving force in the contemporary dialogue. Part of this comes from holding the Met to a higher standard than most other venues, and part of it is a maddening sense of lost opportunity, of fantasizing about what could have been shown in this space in these long blocks of time that might have really been spectacular. All in, this is a thoughtfully constructed and generally well-executed effort, it's just that I continue to hope for more.

Collector's POV: There really weren't too many great fits for our specific collection on view in this show. That said, I particularly liked Felix Gonzalez-Torres' intimate image of a chain link fence and strips of barbed wire across a grey sky from 1985.

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), NY Photo Review (here)
• Erin Shirreff artist site (here)

Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography

Through February 21st

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

Book: Doubleness: Photography of Chang Chien-Chi

JTF (just the facts): Published by Editions Didier Millet (here) in conjunction with a 2008 mid-career survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Singapore (linked below). 80 pages, with a total of 59 black and white images. Includes a foreword by Lee Chor Lin and essays by Vicki Goldberg and Xiang Biao. The work in the catalogue is divided into three projects: 21 images from Double Happiness, 24 images from China Town and 14 images from The Chain. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: I think it would be overly easy to label the work of Magnum photographer Chang Chien-Chi as social documentary or photojournalism, to wrap his efforts up under the umbrella of "concerned photographer" and to therefore fail to see the powerful art that lies within his deft explorations of social bonds. Luckily, this slim volume seeks to deliver a deeper investigation of Chang's photography by gathering together images from three separate but surprisingly related projects/essays and providing a useful sampler for those who may be altogether unfamiliar with his work.

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Double Happiness chronicles the complicated brokering of marriage matches between Taiwanese men and Vietnamese women. Using consistent framing and composition, Chang tracks each step of the transaction, from the superficial lineup where the women are chosen, to the bored counseling sessions, the anxieties of the visa application window, and the awkwardness of the final staged kisses. It's thoroughly painful to watch, knowing how unlikely that it is that these couples will ever find any kind of connection (remember, they don't even speak the same language); in fact, they already seem to know that they are trapped, resigned and numbed to their unhappy fates.

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China Town comes at the idea of the marriage bond from a different angle. In these pictures, Chang follows men from Fuzou who leave their families and come to New York to earn money, living in ramshackle overcrowded dormitories and working anonymous menial jobs in Chinatown. He juxtaposes black and white images from their claustrophobic, chaotic rooms (where they lounge in the sweaty underwear dreaming of the future), with color images of their wives and children back home, who are waiting to be sent for. These families are divided by the circumstances of their lives, making separate sacrifices in an effort to improve their lot in life; some have not seen each other for years or even decades. These pictures have a sad poignancy to them, a crushing sense of the hard reality that is testing the hopes of these people.

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The final group of pictures, from a series called The Chain, is perhaps the most shocking and sobering. In these images, Chang has made straightforward portraits of pairs of mental patients at the Long Fa Tang Temple, where a stable patient is chained together with one with more severe problems in an unorthodox kind of bonding therapy. While the patients wear simple uniforms and stand quietly, the tiny nuances of their gestures and facial expressions tell volumes about their mental states and their relationships. More importantly, they ask hard questions about the nature of what it means to be sane, and about how we treat those with mental illness in human society. They are agonizing, unsettling, powerful, and unforgettable.

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Overall, this is a consistently impressive body of work, both in its aesthetics and its underlying ideas, and one well worth exploring via this tightly edited exhibition catalogue. Chang Chien-Chi is clearly a photographer we should all be following more closely.
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Collector’s POV: Chang Chien-Chi appears to have neither permanent gallery representation in the US nor any meaningful secondary market history (please add information in the comments as appropriate). My guess is the only option for interested collectors is to follow up directly via Magnum to inquire about potential prints for sale. That said, I think that either a mini-retrospective/survey show or a focused exhibit of portraits from The Chain should to be undertaken by some gallery in New York, as this work clearly merits being shown more broadly in the world of contemporary photography. (The Chain #14, 1998, at right, via artnet.)

Transit Hub:

• Magnum site (here)
• Exhibit: National Museum of Singapore, 2008 (here)
• Reviews: Asian Art (here), C-Arts (here)
• Book review of The Chain: lensculture (here)

Bruce Gilden, Coney Island @Amador

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 black and white images, framed in black and matted, and hung against cream and grey walls in the main gallery spaces. All of the works on display are vintage gelatin silver prints, made between 1976 and 1986, with dimensions 16x20 or reverse. A monograph of this body of work was published by Magnum Editions/Trebruk in 2002. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The density and diversity of humanity that descends on the beaches and boardwalks of Coney Island in the summertime heat has long been a favorite subject of photographers. There is something about the combination of swimsuits and bare skin, the closeness of the mixed crowds, and the sideshow carnival atmosphere that makes for great visual discoveries and juxtapositions.

Bruce Gilden's images of this now familiar landscape have an edge of black humor, an enjoyment of the everyday oddities and weirdness found amongst the throngs of people. There are plenty of misshapen bodies, bulging and drooping out of swimsuits or slathered up in shiny oil. A dizzying array of hats, sunglasses, and sun-protecting nose covers make ordinary folks look surprisingly strange. Add in a healthy dose of eccentricity, from the older woman lounging in her lingerie, to the nuns walking in front of the Wild Swamp Man mural, from the woman covered in a huge pillow-like blob of cloth, to the leathery skin of a woman carrying a folding chair and suddenly the whole beach seems like an eye-catching parade of freaks and deviants.

If the punishing heat of the city has you daydreaming about summer-themed photography, then this show can provide a much needed glimpse of the beach, in classic New York style: a wild, swirling, comedic mass of the bizarre, the distorted, and the unexpectedly real.
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Collector's POV: The vintage prints in this exhibit are all priced at $6500. Modern prints of these same images (with the same dimensions), in editions of 15, are available for $3000 each. Gilden's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Magnum site (here)
• Reviews: New Yorker (here), WSJ (here, scroll down)

Bruce Gilden, Coney Island

Through August 20th

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Amador Gallery

41 East 57th Street

New York, NY 10022

Hipsters, Hustlers, and Handball Players: Leon Levinstein's New York Photographs, 1950–1980 @Met

JTF (just the facts): A total of 44 black and white photographs, each framed in black wood and matted, and hung in the entry and three small connected rooms on the museum's second floor. All of the works on display are vintage gelatin silver prints, made between roughly 1950 and 1980. A glass case contains four books: 3 US Camera annuals and the catalog from The Family of Man. All of the works have been drawn from the museum's permanent collection. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Leon Levinstein is one of those talented photographers who somehow fell through the cracks a bit and never quite got the art world recognition that he deserved. Unknown to most and categorized by some as a second tier, mid century New York street photographer, Levinstein has always seemed to be an afterthought behind Arbus, Frank, Winogrand, Klein, Levitt and others. This terrific show makes a solid attempt to remedy the situation, bringing together a broad sample of his best work from several decades.

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I think Levinstein's gift lay in his ability to capture the essence of New York's rough, funky cool (particularly in the 1960s and 1970s), without getting overly sentimental or kitchy. Nearly all of his images were taken at close range, often cropping out unneeded heads and body parts, focusing on overlooked subjects and elemental gestures found on the city's streets and sidewalks. His compositions are often angled and dark, and he was particularly adept at capturing the nuances of clothing and fashion as worn by New York's imperfect and eclectic masses, finding the hidden joy in a bold pattern, a wide collar or a tight fitting pair of shorts. The pictures are tough, edgy, sometimes harsh, and always refreshingly real.

As you look more closely at these candid pictures, Levinstein's talent for making the common look uncommon shines through. He finds earthy wonder in a foot perched on a wire trash can, a sweat stained tank top, 70s-era moustaches, a grey pinstripe suit, bulging stomachs and belts, a man fluffing his afro in a window, eating corn on the cob on the beach, tattoos, an overcoat with shiny buttons, kissing on a stoop, and a groovy floral blouse paired with tight leggings. He seems to have been fond of backs and sides, abstracting his subjects into fragments of movement or pose, paring them down into types and moments that were representative of something larger in society.

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While I wish there had been a bit more scholarship or even a small monograph to accompany this show, I think this well-edited, energy-filled exhibit will help to expose Levinstein's under appreciated gritty virtuosity to a much wider audience.
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Collector's POV: Leon Levinstein is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York (here). Levinstein's prints have been available from time to time in the secondary markets in recent years, fetching between $1000 and $9000 when they have come up at auction. Nearly all of the images in this show were donated to the museum by collector Gary Davis.
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Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), Wall Street Journal (here), Village Voice (here), Economist (here), The Year in Pictures (here)

Hipsters, Hustlers, and Handball Players: Leon Levinstein's New York Photographs, 1950–1980

Through October 17th

Metropolitan Museum of Art

1000 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10028

Book: Laurie Simmons, Color Coordinated Interiors 1983

JTF (just the facts): Published in conjunction with a 2007 exhibition by Skarstedt Gallery (here) and Sperone Westwater (here). 56 pages, with a total of 21 color images. Includes an artist interview conducted by James Welling. All of the works in this volume are chromogenic c-prints, roughly sized between 25x25 to 60x45 or reverse, and were made between 1982 and 1983. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: I recently came across this thin catalog from a Laurie Simmons gallery exhibition that I missed a few years ago. The book documents one of her earlier, lesser known projects, where plastic dolls (from Japan, known as the "Teenettes") have been placed in front of various interiors scenes, which have been projected from behind. In each staged setting, the color of the dolls matches the colors of the room with a level of perfection that is altogether unnerving.

While the premise here is pretty straightforward, I found the resulting images to be both witty and powerful, with a Stepford Wives kind of satirical creepiness. Each room has an exacting perfection, an obsessive desire for things to be "just right", with strong ties to hard questions about traditional women's roles and ideals. Many of the rooms have a sterile, dated quality, a feeling that time has passed these people by, even though they are trying so hard to be current and beautiful. The gestures of the dolls made me want to invent some kind of back story or narrative for each picture, where the dining room or the kitchen is the setting for some small but unknown human drama. (Yellow Dining Room, 1983, at right, via the artist's website.)

In general, while Simmons' more recent images of houses, cakes, cameras and guns walking on doll legs might be more familiar to many collectors, I think these earlier works deserve attention as well, especially for their sly reflections on an impossibly controlled life that is both a paradise and a prison.

Collector’s POV: Laurie Simmons is represented by Skarstedt Gallery (here) and Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art (here) in New York. Her photographs have become more readily available in the secondary markets in recent years. Prices have ranged between $1000 and $96000, with a sweet spot between $8000 and $15000, consistently rising over time. (Blue Den, 1983, at right, via the artist's website.)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Review: NY Times, 2007 (here, scroll down)