“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”—Audre Lorde

One might assume that the power of the artist lies in his ability to create his subjects. The series of portraits shown in Barkley L. Hendricks’Heart Hands Eyes Mind, however, finds its unique authority in the artist’s capacity to allow his characters to define themselves. Rather than dictating the terms of their appearances, Hendricks seems to paint his subjects as they themselves would elect to be seen. The result is exhilarating; there is something fundamentally liberating in the decision to give over such a significant measure of control.  

Upon first glance at the paintings on the walls, the majority of which are dated ’11 - ’13, I was unable to discern a connection between the people represented in this new body of work and those of earlier paintings, with whom I am familiar. Where is the self-assured queen depicted in Hendricks’ iconic portrait, Lawdy Mama (1969)?^[1] What does the bold, Afro-rocking woman painted during the height of the Black Panther movement have in common with Hendricks’ newer, contemporary black woman who wears blue contact lenses and a bedazzled "SYREETA" name plate belt casually dangled across her nude waist? What do these women share with me? As I stared deep into the unabashedly deceptive eyes of Sweet Señorita Syreeta (2012), it dawned on me: the dominant thread that ties together Hendricks’ subjects is the power of self-expression. If we examine each portrait as a mere fantasy of the artist’s mind, no connection will be made. It is only when we understand that Hendricks grants his subjects the freedom to “speak” for themselves that we locate continuity in his work – that is, the self-possessed, internal gaze of his subjects, who candidly present themselves as they are. 

Barkley L. Hendricks, Triple Portrait: World Conqueror, 2011, Oil, aluminum leaf, variegation leaf, and combination gold leaf on linen canvas, 60 x 40 inches; Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

This is the artist’s first solo show with Jack Shainman Gallery and he’s been granted both the 20th Street location (which they have inhabited for sixteen years) and the gallery’s brand new space on West 24th, which opened just this month. In addition to paintings, Hendricks is showing photographs. A series that hangs in a small room of the 24th St. space makes an interesting commentary on race and identity politics. The arrangement begins with a photograph portraying the word "Pure." Next, the artist presents amateur street art depicting boxing legend, Jack Johnson, along with the caption, "Black Jockeys Won the Kentucky." This photograph is then, quite unexpectedly, juxtaposed against a picture depicting a white Jesus, and yet another that contains an image of Marilyn Monroe. Finally, the last photo in the series reads, simply, "FIN." The varying media of the exhibition begin to cohere thematically when we return from these photographs to the first portrait one encounters upon entering the gallery, Triple Portrait: World Conqueror (2011). Here, a racially ambiguous woman takes a drag of her cigarette, one hand slipped confidently into her hip pocket, while sporting high-heeled shoes with the image of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe painted on the toes. Again, Hendricks reminds us that there is no singular or correct expression of a black identity. How we each choose to define ourselves is a personalization of the seemingly forced dichotomy of races, and the artist permits his subjects to assert blackness in individualized ways.

Through the element of surprise in the organization of Hendricks’ photographs, combined with his objectively painted portraiture, the artist forces his viewers to interrogate the black and white binary into which race is socially constructed. The imposed limits of race run deeper than the surface of the skin, his subjects suggest, and can, therefore, be challenged. In the most subtle, yet subversive ways, Hendricks’ subjects defy the narrow constraints of racial dichotomies, blur the boundaries, and define racial identities independently – on their own terms.

—Alexandra Giniger

Associating John Stezaker's work with the movies feels like an obvious fit; his aesthetic, in general, is one of another era of high cinematic splendor – a silver-screen photofit populace, cut-up from Hayworth's hair, and Cary Grant's jawline. The famously-symmetrical are typically used for slashed-up perversions of every golden rule about beauty; all myth about ideal proportion. Even the landscape postcards – the canyons, the rivulets and the mountains – which Stezaker uses are somehow anachronistic in their simple sweeping beauty, and their fantastic aura. That said, it's rare that the artist works in moving image proper, despite its immediate connection to his source material: Blind, at The Approach, is one of Stezaker's first shows of this kind (of new material, at least), for some time. The stills are collaged from his private collection.

John Stezaker, Imposter XI, 2013, Collage, 48x57.6 cm, 18.9x22.7 ins; Courtesy of the Artist and The Approach.

The blindness referred to in the title of the work is the aching result of a kind of visual overload – a breakneck optic fever dream. The frames, at twenty-four per second, sweep dizzingly past the viewer, leaving him or her with the vague impression of Hollywood hallucination. Blind recalls the hypnotic power of cinema, yes, but also alludes to its mystery – its unknowable fast complexity. Every movie scene which lingers with the viewer – however powerfully it affects them – is a little obtuse, because of its ephemeral composites. Generally, the frames of a film are inaccessible to us on an image by image basis; they come to us as an overall visual wash. The effect is apparent enough when these frames are designed to run consecutively – when they are each individual entities, things become more alarming still, and approach disorientation. Stezaker’s video piece affords the viewer a vaguely different interpretation every time, as the eye – as it is wont to do – settles on new images every second by second. Blindness is a common theme in his collage work – the eyes of his subjects are often doubled, removed, distorted, or otherwise damaged; the eyes, after all, are not only the conduits through which we absorb our cinematic idols – they are also the means by which those idols tell us their stories.

(Something about this filmic collage is reminiscent of Kenneth Anger – perhaps its retro aesthetic, or maybe the way in which each separate image is so considered; so utterly belonging to a particular visual school. Either way, the association is one which presents itself immediately, though this is less an inauguration into the pleasure dome, and much more cinematic phosphene.)

John Stezaker,Imposter V, 2013, Collage, 48x57.6 cm, 18.9x22.7 ins; Courtesy of the Artist and The Approach.

There are non-moving-image works, too: a series called Imposter, in which characters are superimposed, via montage, into other scenes. The actor, of course, is imposter by nature – so too, in a way, is the artist whose work relies on re-appropriation and mock-up. Seeing Blind, the viewer feels like something of an Imposter, too, attempting to decipher an impossible language: the language of memory, of history, and of cinema. A language decoded only in part by the eye; to the rest, the viewer is blind.

—Philippa Snow

(Image on top: John Stezaker, Imposter IV, 2013, Collage, 48x57.6 cm, 18.9x22.7 ins; Courtesy of the Artist and The Approach.)

Spanish-born artist Libia Castro and Icelandic-born Ólafur Ólafsson investigate the subjects of universal injustice, inequality, and power relations employing a variety of media in their quest to highlight imbalances in present-day political, social and economic realities. Asymmetry at TENT Rotterdam is the Rotterdam Berlin-based duo’s first retrospective in the Netherlands. Curated by Adam Budak, the show features work spanning a ten-year work period including video installations, sound and sculptural pieces, photographs, and objects.

In the hands of Castro and Ólafsson the revealed history of inequality begins in ancient times. Revisiting drama texts by Ancient Greek authors, the artists comment on the legacy of xenophobic and sexist views inherited in legal systems. Women and foreigners were denied rights to citizenship in the Athenian polis. Under Greek law citizens were also prohibited from marrying and having intimate encounters with foreigners for fear of introducing racial impurities. Exorcising Ancient Ghosts (2010-11) is a sound installation, which features two couples citing texts in Italian and English while having sex. The pairs are of mixed origin. The contemporary reading of these injustices against different people within a community has been taken quite literally.

Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, Il Tuo Paese Non Esiste (Your Country Doesn't Exist), 2011; Courtesy of the artist and TENT Rotterdam.

Castro and Ólafsson are well known for their campaign-based works, a number of which are shown at TENT, including the videos Caregivers, Lobbyists, and Il Tuo Paese Non Esiste (Your Country Does not Exist). The three works are powerfully displayed on big screens with specifically composed musical accompaniments played over an amplified sound system. Contrary to the humoristic approach employed in the former two, the later work, Caregivers, is rather upsetting documentation of the labor force movements within continental Europe. Nowadays more and more workers are looking for opportunities in other countries, with some finding their way to the homes of handicapped and elderly people. The video depicts the relationship between immigrant-caregivers from Eastern European countries with their patients, particularly commenting on the historical concentration of female labor in the Rovereto region in Italy. Il Tuo Paese Non Esiste, on the other hand, is an ironic operetta performed by a soprano and two musicians on a gondola ride through Venetian canals. The professional singer and musicians play quotes from texts about the work. The artists satirically reflect on issues of national belonging or non-belonging and the collapse of the nation-state. The project has taken different forms including presentation on billboards, neon signs, and advertisements in various countries such as the Netherlands, Austria, Italy and Bosnia-Herzegovina. National pride is reduced to a mere slogan, which questions the modern state in a multicultural and global world.

In most works the artists intertwine humor and irony with the highest degree of seriousness. In the video-work Lobbyists, which received the third prize in the Dutch Prix de Rome competition in 2009, a reggae singer narrates the story of powerful groups active in the grey domain of European Union policy making. The film presents these decision-makers grotesquely in their natural surroundings and there is a kind of contradiction between the subject matter’s sincerity and the reggae vibes and lyrics used to narrate the story.

Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, Asymmetry installation view;Courtesy of the artist and TENT Rotterdam/ foto Job Janssen & Jan Adriaan.

Castro and Ólafsson’s work is based on meticulous research where central questions remain as to who has ThE riGHt tO RighT and ThE riGHt tO WrOnG. In 2012, on occasion of the 7th Liverpool Biennale, the artists displayed a big neon sign with which they wanted to question fundamental and universal human rights. In collaboration with British writer and philosopher Nina Power, they designed the Partial Declaration of Human Wrongs. A free newspaper introduces the visitors to the pillars of their manifesto. The constitution revises basic rights, substituting the right with the wrong. What appears to be rightful is rewritten as a non-given right, as in Article 23: Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (Note: there are no jobs.)

—Teodora Kotseva

(Image on top: Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, Asymmetry installation view;Courtesy of the artist and TENT Rotterdam/ foto Job Janssen & Jan Adriaans.)

 Nothing is Absolute: A Journey through Abstraction at the Jehangir Nicholson Gallery of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sanghralaya, a show of abstraction in Indian art curated by artist Mehlli Gobhai and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote, is rich with indigenous ideas that existed around modernity and abstraction in a post colonial India.

Twenty-eight paintings from the Jehangir Nicholson Collection are arranged such that, in a quick glance, one can take in a substantial story. A layered, partitioned display cutting into the rectangular open gallery space horizontally perhaps would have allowed for more space around each work – much needed in abstract art. Here, however, the distraction of paintings hung close doesn’t allow the eye to follow an illusion or suspend oneself in suggestion – both rife in these paintings.

Modernism, for writers, filmmakers, artists and architects, in an optimistic post-independent India, was fraught with uncertainties. Did they look to and follow the movements in the West or go back to precolonial art forms? In a Nehruvian modernity, the search for a unique idiom abounded. But for artists working in abstraction at the time there were no Indian forebears to go by. In the West it was well entrenched, and early abstractionists like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, while forging new styles, were profoundly influenced by Eastern thought. This show however, focuses more on the inward look that Indian artists took; even as the form followed Western abstraction, the root inspirations, the cultural theorist and artist in dialogue here point out well, were very much indigenous.

Akbar Padamsee, Mirror Image,1994, Oil on canvas, 109.5 x 220 cms; Courtesy of the artist and Jahangir Nicholson Museum of Modern Art.

Identifying these root sources of visual abstraction – the yantras (formal abstract diagrams used for meditation), wayside shrines (natural or found formations given significance by human daubing of paint or drape) and yoga texts and Islamic tiles (from the museum’s collection) exploring sacred geometry – Gobhai includes items from his personal collection of objects with singularly Indian forms. Showcased are oil lamps and incense burners, boxes, inkpots, hookah bases, ladles and spatulas, all with a spartan, sculptural form, almost a three-dimensional silhouette of function, much like abstract art tries to achieve.

In losing representation, abstraction tries to find a language through symbols and relationships of colour and light, and the emerging form bears its own kind of reality. Gobhai’s work on paper is texturally worked and the figure in elision is represented linearly; in a dark work, a defined yellow line marks the centre, a presence marked. Akbar Padamsee, who was one of the first Indian artists to explore geometrical and abstract forms economically yet hypnotically in animation, in his video SYZYGY, is represented here with a ‘metascape’ diptych. In bold colours and brush-work, it dominates midway through the hall.

V S Gaitonde, Untitled,1972, Oil on canvas, 178 x 101.5 cms; Courtesy of the artist and Jahangir Nicholson Museum of Modern Art.

V.S. Gaitonde on the other hand is all subtlety; forms emerging and receding – like wayward calligraphy formally laid down in planar waves on a sea of blue-green – influenced by Zen Buddhism, it has a mystical presence. Nicholson’s favourite Laxman Shrestha is represented by two paintings as is S.H. Raza – one, a ‘Bindu’, a large black seed circle, is a strict, simple composition. Like a planned mandala, the painting here is a sparse one compared to other multilayered ones in his ‘Bindu’ series.

What emerges in this show of abstract Indian art are the diverse styles, as diverse as the inspirations Indian painters sought. From Gobhai’s strict planar form to Swaminathan’s vivid orange and yellow reductive forms (reminiscent of Pahadi school miniatures); from Madhao Imartey’s whimsical watercolour to Kolte’s dripping colour fields; it covers a gamut of exploration in no chronological order. It is a substantial overview of early abstract art in India.

Where are the sculptures though? And more women artists, also working in abstraction? Works by Pilloo Pochkanawala or Meera Mukherjee would have added to the oeuvre of exploration happening alongside painting. The minimalism of a Nasreen Mohammedi work would have marked the distillation of pure form, an abstraction in Indian art that had come of age, and it would have completed this journey through abstraction.

—Deepika Sorabjee

(Image on top: Mehlli Gobhai, Untitled , 2000 , Acrylic & mixed media on paper , 125 x110 cms; Courtesy of the artist and Jahangir Nicholson Museum of Modern Art.)

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Curator Naomi Beckwith’s latest exhibition, Color Bind: The MCA Collection in Black and White, currently on view through April 28, is a dynamic and engaging mix of works from the MCA’s collection. Conceived from the examination of the formal, conceptual and sociopolitical ideas associated with the colors of black and white, the exhibition provides viewers with the opportunity to reflect upon their own attitudes toward and notions of these contrapositive shades. Composed of works that span from the likes of Jaume Plensa, the artist who created Chicago’s Millennium Park Crown Fountain (2004), to widely lauded photographer Barbara Kruger to native son and burgeoning art star Theaster Gates, the works offer a fresh perspective on the supposed values associated with black and white. The exhibition allows viewers the opportunity to contemplate how the works speak individually and cooperatively.

Installation view, Color Bind: The MCA Collection in Black and White, MCA Chicago; Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

A work that I found quite provocative was Adam Brooks’ Strategy #1 (1990), which is a compilation of double-sided, black, industrially produced signage with white lettering that recalls office labels. Dispersed throughout the exhibition, the signs are not only one body of work, but in some ways also provide context for each section within Color Bind. Each side has one word and—depending upon the viewing angle—common euphemisms emerge, such as pyrrhic/victory, unnatural/bias, or groundless/criticism. Strategy #1 (1990) explores the complexity within the form and use of language and how its connotations can change by the simple addition of another term.

Installation view, Color Bind: The MCA Collection in Black and White, MCA Chicago; Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

A key pairing of the exhibition, located within the entrance to the gallery, is Glenn Ligon’s White #11 (1994) and Imi Knoebel’s Untitled (Black Painting) (1990). Both works are approximately the same size, within the 48 x 72 inches range. Black envelopes the surfaces of both. Moreover, both pictorial planes feature specific markings that are representational of the artist’s interaction with, and purpose for, the canvas. They also display formal and informal qualities associated with abstractionism. Ligon, whose work is widely known for its basis in text, uses text in this painting to illustrate passages from an essay by Richard Dyer that explores representations of whiteness on film.

…Read the rest on sixtyinchesfromcenter.org

—Rehema Barber

(Image on top: Glenn Ligon, Untitled (Study #1 for Prisoner of Love), 1992 , Oil and gesso on canvas, 30 1/2 x 20 in. (77.5 x 50.8 cm); © Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, gift of Sandra P. and Jack Guthman, 2000.11 © Glenn Ligon 1992 / Regen Projects, Los Angeles Photo © MCA Chicago.)

White Columns in New York just opened the first solo exhibition in the United States by the New York-based Norwegian artist Sverre Bjertnes. The show is titled If you really loved me you would be able to admit that you’re ashamed of me, and has been developed by Sverre Bjertnes in collaboration with the artist Bjarne Melgaard. The exhibition presents new paintings and works on paper by Bjertnes, as well as earlier works. Furthermore, the show includes collaborative works made with both Melgaard and the artist’s mother Randi Koren Bjertnes, as well as a group of painted furniture works by the maverick furniture dealer and artist Robert Loughlin (1949-2011.)

Find out more on Vernissage TV

(Image on top: Sverre Bjertnes, Installation view; Courtesy of the artist & White Columns)

Here’s a show whose reception seems to have been preempted by the mounds of publicity preceding it. The narrative, though likely familiar from one or another of the articles touting Llyn Foulkes’ resurgence, bears repeating here, this time in line with the chronology established by the retrospective itself. 

A Los Angeles artist since forever ago, Foulkes began by working through influences both global (Rauschenberg, Dalí, de Kooning) and local (notably Richards Ruben, whose imprint is unmistakable in early abstract works like 1959's Untitled). His rise to recognition came through paintings exploring the iconography of the American West, in postcard-parody landscapes like Death Valley, USA and portraits of livestock like Cow, both 1963. Applying paint with a rag, Foulkes created textures that rarely fail to captivate, and this unique and impressive technique contributed to the first prize in painting awarded him at the 1967 Paris Biennial.

Yet, as the artist recounts in an interview in this January’s Modern Painters, this moment marked the beginning of a crisis period, leading Foulkes away from the subjects and style that had brought him fame to pursue a decidedly untrendy mixture of Pop Art and Expressionism. This trajectory defines his painting from the early seventies to today and his retrospective.

Writ large across the show is the particular difficulty of writing about this second period. It’s possible that curator Ali Subotnick intentionally mocks the bad faith of one’s furtive glance from art to wall text through captions describing the adjacent whatever in terms so literal as to be redundant. If so, she ably enhances the frustration effected by Foulkes’ heavy-handed paintings. Even many among those prepared to bewail how this country’s gone to shit will struggle to relate to the simple-mindedness of using Mickey Mouse and McDonald’s as symbols of commercialism, as Foulkes does innumerable times in this latter corpus.

On the other hand, the form of these works may ironize the embarrassing ressentiment expressed by their content. Working with mixed media, the key to these paintings is their extension into the third dimension. Self-portraits, stages, rocks and real sweaters jut inches past low-relief, supplanting their canvasses’ lack of allegorical depth with literal depth. Needless to say, this technique, which prioritizes presence, runs directly counter to the endlessly reproducible, essentially dimensionless images, like Mickey Mouse, through which mass media saturates our lives.

 

Llyn Foulkes, Deliverance, 2007, Mixed media, 72 x 84 in. (182.9 x 213.4 cm); Courtesy the artist and Kent Gallery, New York/Photo by Randel Urbauer.

 

Because of this, however, it seems as though Foulkes positions his work not so much against as alongside Hollywood's, embracing a certain isolation from the circulation of culture that art, in its less commercialized forms, appears to have to endure anyway. This suggests that his paintings be viewed neither as offering solutions (the obviously facile gesture of Foulkes shooting Mickey Mouse dead, in 2007's Deliverance, is belied by the fact that Foulkes appears in this work as merely a white outline) or even critiques, but rather act as metonyms of the problem itself, channeling the very diabolical energies that demand differentiation at the price of our humanity.

This structure is most clearly expressed in The Awakening, 1994-2012, a painting that evidently took as long to complete as did Foulkes' divorce. The theme of impotence is perhaps most profoundly expressed by the mirrored lamp; if Foulkes' goal in executing these dimensional works is to make it appear as though light emanates from them, as he stated in his Modern Painters interview, the fact that both the lamp and its reflection are plainly lit from inside the painting by separate bulbs reads as a biting mockery of this ambition.

Whether this kind of Woody Allen-esque pathos is one's particular taste is neither here nor there. What interests me in this retrospective is the skepticism it expresses towards the notion of activist art. For Foulkes, changing the world seems a foregone possibility, and painting is only a means to tunnel deeper into the marrow of the difficulty. After years of picking, these works feel less completed than simply sloughed off like an old scab.

—Jared Baxter

(Image on top: Llyn Foulkes, The Awakening , 1994-2012, Mixed mediums, 102.2 x 111.8 x 17.8 cm; © Private collection/ Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.)

Alexandra Rowley's current show at Dina Mitrani Gallery brings together photography, ceramics and sound to create an appealing, personal meditation on the many small acts of transformation that make up our daily lives.

The first two images that greet the viewer are a striking pair of larger-than-life photographic prints, each depicting a colorful, ornate plate enlarged against a solid black background. These decorative plates are shiny and attractive, but what is most interesting about them is that several large pieces have broken off from each one. The pieces have been arranged next to each plate in the careful manner of an archeological re-construction. No clues are provided as to what caused the breakage—whether accidents or acts of violence. Only the large scale of the photographs suggests that whatever did occur was important somehow. In addition the exhibition checklist informs us that the plates belong(ed) to specific family members, hinting at a special personal significance but offering no further details. I found this non-story to be a bit intriguing at first, yet ultimately there was just not enough to sink my teeth into.

Fortunately, the main body of work on view offers more to feast on, both visually and conceptually. After having presented us with two images that were immediately recognizable, the artist switches gears with a series of absorbing works that at first glance might appear to be abstract paintings. Upon closer inspection it becomes apparent that these works are greatly enlarged photographs, richly detailed close-ups of various metallic surfaces that have different types of substances on them. But an air of mystery remains. What exactly are these fragments of reality? That puzzle is integral to the works' charm, and I won't spoil it for you. Thankfully, the specifics are available on the exhibition checklist. Suffice it to say that all the images in the series depict residues of certain routine domestic activities that we usually take for granted. Instead of showing the intended results, Rowley focuses her lens on the unplanned, inconsequential by-products. She captures the instances of unintentional beauty that have been left behind, and by blowing up these images to nearly monumental proportions, she reminds us of the importance of process over product—that what truly matters in life may not be the goal but the journey.

To me these enlarged matte photographs are the strongest works in the exhibition, particularly the four that have more subtle color schemes. I found myself hungry to see more such work. Yet instead, interspersed among the larger pieces are several smaller, related projects that are less compelling. There are four photographs of bright-red stains on white paper—blood, unsurprisingly. Obviously images of bloodstains are generally used to represent violence (although blood can also be seen as the essence of life) but despite such potential symbolic overtones, these antiseptic images lack both the compositional strength and the transformational punch of the others. There is also a series of twelve snapshot-size photos that appear to depict drips, splashes and other random residues of work and life activities. These images are more interesting than the bloodstains, but, as tiny and glossy as they are, they too lack the power and splendor of the large, intricately-textured pieces.

Alexandra Rowley, Broken plate blue, 50 x 40 inches, Archival pigment print; Courtesy of the artist and DINA MITRANI GALLERY.

In the center of the gallery is something completely different—a table with forty-nine modest ceramic vessels. None of them are particularly impressive as individual objects, but as a collective installation they do have a convincing presence. Their round shapes and uneven, semi-translucent glazes—all various shades of white, beige, and light grey—reflect a sort of Zen simplicity, in contrast to the chaotic compositions and colors in the more ephemeral, process-oriented photographs.

Lastly, don't overlook the unassuming installation that sits in one corner of the gallery. On the wall are two rather mundane photographs of the hair on the top of someone's head—the artist's young son, we are told. But it's the sound art in front of the images that is worth paying attention to. Put on the headphones and you hear two things simultaneously: a child (Rowley's son) laughs loudly and playfully, while in the background President Obama gives a press conference in his usual measured tone. Surprisingly, I found the boy's laugh to be more riveting than the President's words, which I had to strain to hear at first. Yet it was worth it to attempt to listen to both at the same time, especially as it became clear that the press conference had been held not long after the devastating impact of superstorm Sandy had altered the national conversation on climate change. It is a simple pairing: our top political leader talking about the long-term problem of protecting our planet's environment, juxtaposed against the innocence of a small child, representing the future of the planet. Yet it is elegant and effective, reminding us not only how important it is to care for the earth, but also how vital it is to treasure a child's ability to laugh and enjoy life. What an apt coda to a stimulating exhibition that invites us to notice the incidental transcendence in the everyday.

—Eduardo Alexander Rabel

[Image on top: Alexandra Rowley, Untitled (Foil after roasting beets 65), 2010, Pigment print on archival cotton rag paper Edition of 3, 80 x 60 inches; Courtesy of the artist and DINA MITRANI GALLERY.]

How we use images and information is changing, therefore, copyright is changing. The image has migrated away from an object of economic value towards one of heightened cultural capital. Social media has developed in such a way that sharing information has become synonymous with sharing images. Infinite copies of images act as citations to shared opinions and data points. Yet the image is not always tied to the fate of a descriptor, it has also been freed from its referent. The image is loose and free to form its own meaning in the slurry of an image-sopped society. As artists, you are at the forefront of this evolution in societal structure. This article examines how a culture of prosumers (producing-consumers) fueled by rapidly evolving technologies of reproduction are changing how we use and reuse images, how this usage is in conflict with the historical development and lawful applications of copyright and finally the alternatives to copyright that have developed to bring our modes of production back in line with our codes of law. 

A New Use of Imagery

Once a tightly controlled representational thread of information, images are traded freely and openly, often without regard to the copyright bearer thanks to technological advances in reproduction. Counter-intuitively, this has produced a kind of golden-era in image production over the past half-century and even more so today. Image aggregators such as Tumblr have paved the way for new practices in curation that have ultimately begun to create new aesthetic trends and tensions. One instance of this is the arts tumblr Jogging, a stream of images which has built its own aesthetic sourced from a community of users. Jogging represents a specialization of the practice that has become a normal mode of functioning for many internet denizens. Another force of image alterity comes in the form of machine generated imagery such as new media art, glitch art, 3-d modeling art and the like, something which has come to be termed the New Aesthetic. This alteration in the production and reception of imagery of course leads to concerns over value, both economically and substantively.

Adam Ferriss, Caelulum, 2013; Courtesy of the artist.

Bruce Sterling in his essay on the New Aesthetic (linked above) says of machine generated imagery, “Valorizing machine-generated imagery is like valorizing the unconscious mind. Like Surrealist imagery, it is cool, weird, provocative, suggestive, otherworldly, but it is also impoverished.” There is a fear of loss, naturally, yet I remain optimistic that this “impoverishment” is merely a reaction to the change in the status of the image, a change which will be dealt with and recodified through common agreements such as copyright (or hopefully something else more in tune with contemporary practices). While it may be true to say that images which have been removed from their original context and realigned with a new set of meanings dependent on the context within which they are shared have lost something, let’s remind ourselves that these images are still very reliant on the affect of the viewer in activating their meaningful potential. We don’t live in a world of meaningless images; we do, however, live in a world where the meaning of images is free to shift and realign as they traverse context after context online. It’s a good thing.

Lessig’s Refrain

Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard Law professor and founder of the copyright alternative Creative Commons. At the beginning of one lecture he gave on the history of copyright in 2002, he started with developing an operational refrain for contemporary production: “Creativity and innovation builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past and ours is less and less a free society.” Image-makers/takers and archivists must be aware of their position in the imagistic society in order to fully appreciate their rights and obligations. First, let us take a quick look at the history of copyright to see how it has been used and how it is currently used before we look at alternatives.

A Short History of Copyright (uncited)

Copyright was first codified in 1557 as a state-sanctioned monopoly of printing rights. At the time, Queen Mary, a Catholic in a newly Protestant land, ascended the throne and implemented copyright as a way to prevent the publication and dissemination of Protestant literature. Following her short reign, Queen Elizabeth retained the copyright decree but switched the object of repression to Catholics instead of Protestants. So began a centralized form of censorship and control with a few loopholes to maintain creative production such as fair use. Copyright tends to remain on the side of large organizations and companies even today. Companies such as Disney ruthlessly defend their copyrights even though many of their characters were appropriated from fairy tales in the public domain. Disney has gone so far as to push to extend copyright protections as they currently exist in order to prevent their material from entering the public domain. Mass technologies of reproduction (the Internet) have complicated the centralized control of information (images included) and increasingly made the notion of copyright a vestigial notion with legislation scrambling to keep up.

Left, a Rastafarian from Patrick Cariou's, Yes Rasta. Right, an appropriation from Richard Prince's Canal Zone series.

The most recent case in the art world that has brought copyright to the center of attention is the infamous Cariou vs. Prince case. Richard Prince, a prolific appropriation artist who has been working in methods of appropriation such as rephotography since the mid-70’s was sued by photographer Patrick Cariou over his use of images taken from Cariou’s book Yes Rasta. Prince altered twenty-eight images from Cariou’s book for his body of work entitled, Canal Zone. Canal Zonebrought in over $10 million dollars for Gagosian Gallery, 60% of which went to Prince. Ultimately, the courts decided in favor of Cariou, rejecting Prince’s fair use defense. The reasoning behind this ruling many attributed to the manner in which Prince defended his use. This view is typified in an article in the Fordham University School of Law Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Journal by law student Joshua Steinberger: “Richard Prince said this in an interview: ‘I had limited technical skills regarding the camera. Actually, I had no skills. I played the camera. I used a cheap commercial lab to blow up the pictures. . . I never went into a darkroom.’ What is a judge to do with a statement like this?” This is a perfect example of the divide between the codification of image sharing and the art world. While many artists will see this statement as a valid description of a conceptual practice, the code of copyright maintains that technical skill, a craft, must be inherent in original work, paradoxically eliminating considerations of intellectual originality. This is the crux of the issue. As the object becomes more fluid, more vaporous, it is more and more important to take into account the conceptual nature of use as the prime source of creative production rather than the object.

Alternatives to Codified Ownership

Copyright must change to maintain relevance and perhaps it’s more productive to think of copyright alternatives than to try to work within the system of copyright and fair use. Thankfully, alternatives are being developed and are coming into vogue amongst creative professionals and artists. Foremost among these is Creative Commons, a form of copyright that primacies attribution and share-alike freedoms as opposed to use restrictions. Used often in image and moving-image communities such as Flickr and Vimeo, Creative Commons accounts for contemporary modes of cultural production while maintaining freedom for the producer and the consumer to determine the future of the cultural artifact. CC licenses can still allow for non-commercial or commercial applications. Creative Commons comes out of the craft tradition of home computer building and coding. In this milieu during the 1970’s, the term copyleft was developed to designate a form of intellectual property protection that encouraged development and enrichment while preventing the monetization of the project at any point in time. Copyleft is still very popular among developers in the GNU and Linux communities and is increasingly becoming a viable alternative to artists whose work lends itself to development (executable art, for example). The final alternative to copyright is public domain. Public domain functions within the existent system and is the state of ownership that intellectual property falls into once copyright has lapsed. Within the public domain, an object is free to be used, remade, or appropriated for monetary gain. Generally, attribution is maintained solely through courtesy but this is not guaranteed.

Cultural freedom occupies a position that relates to both political freedom and individual autonomy, but is synonymous with neither. The root of its importance is that none of us exist outside of culture. As individuals and as political actors, we understand the world we occupy, evaluate it, and act in it from within a set of understandings and frames of meaning and reference that we share with others.

—Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks

The lesson to take from this schizmatic moment we currently occupy is rather simple. Copyright as it currently is stifles creative production to an extent that current cultural conditions cannot stand. The fact that production moves more quickly and actively opposes current codifications is telling of this. As artists, it is important to recognize oneself as an agent of a larger cultural organism, as a member of the body intellect that can and should be self-aware.

—Joel Kuennen

(Image on top: Will Shea, Shawn C. Smith, Mac Bath, 2013; Courtesy the Jogging.)

I have been thinking a lot about Berlin lately—more as a binary concept, rather than just a city. Berlin is a place that provides for anyone who wants it, but can just as easily take away what has been given. It’s a place for an artist to thrive, but one that also allows for distance and isolation. Berlin is a source of inspiration and struggle, of solace and strife. One can disappear into the crowd or be the darling of the spotlight. It is a city that acknowledges its past and readily folds its memories into the construction of its future. These postulations reached a pinnacle for me recently at Isa Genzken’s current presentation at Galerie Buchholz.

Here the artist is showing a selection of early works, as the title of the exhibition aptly suggests, produced in the late 70s and early 80s. The centerpiece of the exhibition takes an unassuming form: a prototype of an artist book produced from black and white photographs mounted onto cardboard titled Berlin (1973). Protected under a Plexiglas vitrine, the book is “conceived by Isa Genzken as her first artistic work relevant to her practice.” The two pages on view depict angular renditions of empty streets and non-descript buildings. The graphic tonal qualities of the prints evoke the grayscale shapes of other works on view in the exhibition, such as the collection of gouaches in The form develops out of the fact that each of the five colours touches each of the other colours (1973)and Parrallelogramme (1975). The works highlight Genzken’s burgeoning interest in architecture as a societal construct, a theme that resonates throughout her career. 

Isa Genzken, Doppelellipsoid Zwilling, 1982/2013, computer printout on continuous paper, 2 parts, each 37,5 x 606 cm, c-print 15 x 12 cm, wooden table, perspex 75 x 608 x 78 cm; Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz.

This exhibition (I hesitate to call it a retrospective) might come as a pleasant surprise to an audience familiar with Genzken’s haphazard sculptures and brightly-hued installations. The work on display is subdued and calculated, even a bit restrained. These adjectives again call to mind the aesthetic feeling of a Berlin that exists just outside the gallery windows. Computer printouts reference mathematical renditions of sculptures to be produced, while grid-like drawings provide an architectural grounding and showcase the artist’s developing interests in form. Other aspects of this showing might seem recognizable under closer scrutiny. Untitled (1974) and Ellipse no. 1 (1976),Genzken’s first sculptural iterations, are showcased alongside the original computer renderings. Oriented differently than their computed blueprints, these sculptural works act as a balance between the past and the present.

Isa Genzken, Untitled, 1974, 2 parts, oil on wood, 250.5 x 4 x 1 cm and 206 x 2 x 2 cm; Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz.

The most intriguing aspect of this exhibition comes from the artist’s collaboration with the gallery to produce a show that offers a deft re-contextualization of past works from her career. Genzken’s history is rearranged and brought to light—with many aspects being shown for the first time. Mining an archive can be like producing a fiction: only the truths one wants made visible become so. In some ways, this exhibition could be seen as Genzken’s love letter to Berlin. Her relationship to the city through in her artistic foundation is laid bare, charted out, and then repositioned for alterative interpretation. For Early Works, Genzken has managed to pull executions from the past and to present them in ways that are as relevant today as they were when she originally made them.

—Parker Tilghman

(Image on top: Isa Genzken,"Early Works" Installation view, 2013; Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Daniel Buchholz.)

Mounted on a red wall, a large black-and-white photograph of a funeral procession carrying a coffin draped in a hammer and sickle flag greets visitors to The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India since 1989. This striking first visual and the room that follows set the premise and tone of the exhibition with plentiful wall text, reading materials, and documentation to supplement and contextualize the work to come. The exhibition introduces an American audience to an Indian art collective born in the wake of the murder of Safdar Hashmi (1954–1989), a political activist, playwright, actor, director, poet, and Communist who co-founded the street theater group Jana Natya Manch in 1973. Both Hashmi and Jana Natya Manch were dedicated to secularism and egalitarianism in the face of immense class, caste, cultural, political, and religious divisions in India. Hashmi was attacked while performing a street play in Ghaziabad near Delhi and subsequently died of his injuries. In the nationwide outrage against political violence that followed, Sahmat was founded to memorialize Hashmi’s life and carry on his work, being an acronym for the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust and meaning "in agreement" in Hindi.

The key factor uniting the diverse work and members of Sahmat is its secular and progressive mission to defend freedom of expression, battle sectarianism, and promote democracy, tolerance, and pluralistic harmony. Including over sixty artists––ranging from street performers to internationally acclaimed artists like Subodh Gupta––curators Jessica Moss and Ram Rahman structured the plethora of work on view by dividing the exhibition “into twelve case studies of key themes and projects” presented in chronological order. The experience of walking through the show may be more roughly divided into three categories: historical and background narrative, documentation and ephemera from public art projects and performances, and contemporary works of art.

Installation view of Slogans for Communal Harmony, 1992, hand-painted auto-rickshaws with poems about brotherhood.

The exhibition begins as an educational and historical presentation of the collective that, at least initially, could almost fit as appropriately in a venue like the Field Museum. This quickly moves into ephemera and documentation of public projects such as Slogans for Communal Harmony(1992). Sahmat organized a competition for auto-rickshaw drivers in Delhi to paint poetry and slogans about communal harmony and brotherhood on their vehicles, building upon an established tradition of drivers writing personal statements on the backs of their trucks and taxis. Over two hundred participants gave up a day of pay to come together for the competition judged by a jury of writers and artists, and the resultant slogans could be seen on vehicles in Delhi for years to come.

Sahmat operates upon the premise that art may effect social change. To this end, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “Rather than ask, ‘What is the attitude of a work tothe relations of production of its time?’ I should like to ask, ‘What is its position in them?’”^[1] In other words, instead of simply deeming art political because the creator or the overt message claims it is, we must recognize that artists do not stand outside economic, social, or political systems but create work very much from within these systems, from production to reception. This relationship often proves estranged and problematic for politically motivated artists working within the gallery system––as some of the artists represented in the exhibition do––in which production and reception are generally separated by location and anonymity of audience. However, it strikes an appropriate balance in the contextual specificity of the public projects associated with Sahmat in which creators, venue, and audience are wholly imbricated, as evinced in Slogans for Communal Harmony.

Gigi Scaria, Details of a Personal History, 2007, Digital print; Collection of Sahmat.

About halfway through the show, the curatorial tone shifts from historical narrative and documentation to what feels more like a contemporary art exhibition. Two-dimensional, photographic, and installation work dominates the final galleries, with video documentation of musical performances at the end. Gigi Scaria’s Details of a Personal History (2007) was created for Making History Our Own, an exhibition organized by Sahmat to commemorate the first uprising against British rule in India in 1857. Scaria responded to Sahmat’s request for participating artists to contemplate how personal histories form part of a larger history by photographing workers’ personal effects left in a mall showroom under construction. Within this seemingly simple photograph––reminiscent of Jeff Wall’s The Destroyed Room (1978), which, in turn, is based upon Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (1827)––the relationship of personal to historical narratives becomes manifest. In Scaria’s words, “That was when I felt that personal history also leaves marks that will never be traced back by the ones who made them.”

The Sahmat Collective is difficult to mentally encompass in a single visit due to the amount and diversity of work, as well as the amount of context needed to understand the work. The overarching goal of the exhibition seems to be both to officially document the collective’s history and to introduce it to an audience outside of India. This is no small challenge. Many artists associated with Sahmat fluidly adapt both Indian and Western traditions to suit their needs and visions. Using my own Eurocentric art education as an imperfect gauge of an American audience’s experience, the latter part of the exhibition containing artwork made to be shown in galleries is more familiar and thus more readable than the public projects taken out of the contexts of their production and reception. However, this is less a criticism of the exhibition and more of my own affinity for work engaging Western modern and contemporary traditions. Optimistically––and in opposition to curatorial trends in many Western art institutions^[2]––the Smart Museum’s exhibition can expand narrow and problematically Eurocentric views of art history and contemporary art. Like the collective itself, the exhibition embraces the diversity and complexity of its content and context.

Extensive public programs and film screenings are scheduled in conjunction with The Sahmat Collective. Videos concerning the history and context of Sahmat may be viewed in the exhibition or online. An exhibition catalog, organized by project and including images, articles, essays, and interviews with artists, is available for purchase.

—Alicia Chester

(Image on top: Safdar Hashmi performing in a Janam street play, ca. late 1970s; © Photo courtesy Janam archive.)

For the past twenty years, Benoit Huot has worked in virtual obscurity in Montivernage, a tiny village in France’s eastern Franche-Comté region. The artist’s first exhibition came just this past fall when, at the age of forty-six, a sampling of his sculpture—fifteen whimsically festooned taxidermied animals—was shown in Paris at La Maison Rouge (collector Antoine de Galbert’s foundation.) Soon after this high-profile debut, Huot was picked up by Galerie Eva Hober, where seven new sculptures are currently on view.

Huot’s latest bestial creations (all 2013) are more elaborately conceived and less homogenous in terms of presentation, scale, and animal-type than his earlier work. Instead of wall-mounted heads and trophy animals on white pedestals, Huot’s current exhibition is a menagerie of lifeless, but lavishly garbed, animals including a St. Bernard, a wild boar, a lamb, and a buzzard, all reposed regally on custom-designed platforms. One of the quirkiest stuffed animals is a turkey whose impossibly long neck is fully extended and tightly wrapped in red-and-white striped fabric adorned with alternating bands of gold fringe and fake flower garlands (La roue du soir, 2013). In addition to wearing dangly earrings and a vertiginous fringed hat, the bird’s entire body is swathed in materials of varied sheens and patterns. On the turkey’s back, a pink human skull sporting an elaborate headdress sits next to a framed Celtic cross. Multiple crucifixes and a round miniature painting of a Christian saint grace the sculpture’s sizeable bi-level base—more of a throne or altar, really—which is also brocade covered, tassel laden, and otherwise bedazzled.

Benoit Huot, La roue du soir (dinde), 2013 Techniques mixtes 230 x 180 x 65cm; Courtesy Galerie Eva Hober, Paris; ©Y.Petit

Though the idea of gussied-up dead animals reeks of kitsch, Huot’s work actually comes across as quite earnest. The fastidious craftsmanship of his fetish objects shows a profound respect for the animals as well as his own creative process. Unlike other contemporary artists who have used taxidermy (Adel Abdessemed and Huang Yong Ping come to mind, both having exhibited stuffed animals in Paris in 2012—at the Centre Pompidou and Galerie Kamel Mennour, respectively), Huot’s work is neither political nor abject. Whereas Abdessemed’s fire-blackened assemblages of wolves and foxes and Yong Ping’s decapitated polar bears and tigers with bright-red neck stumps are grisly and provocative statements, Huot’s sculptures are reverential portraits. In interviews Huot has attributed the inspiration to bring new life to animals through art to early experiments with desiccated rodents (and even a mummified cat) he discovered during a home renovation. Though the artist now sources animals on the Internet, a palpable sense of intimacy between the artist and the natural world remains.

Not much of a traveler, Huot collects decorative materials at flea markets, sewing stores, and bric-a-brac shops in France. His treasure trove of accoutrements, however, spans across oceans, eras, and creeds. Asian ribbons are interwoven with cloth dolls from South America and braided locks of human hair are juxtaposed with framed paintings of Jesus. Removed from their original context, ceremonial artifacts take on new meaning when sprinkled amidst curiosities like a plaster tooth mold or a pair of resin-set petrified frogs. Without showing allegiance to any particular religious faith or cultural customs, Huot’s hodgepodge devotional décor is both naïve and utopian.

—Mara Hoberman

(Image: Benoit Huot, installation view -TRANSHUMANCES; Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Hober.)

Clutching cups of tea from thermos flasks to warm our hands on a cold evening in a classroom-like space at NASA (New Art Space Amsterdam), I and roughly thirty others listened to a Dutch film maker expressing his love for a 19th century anarchist. Cees Hin, one of the evening’s speakers, had grown great affection for Voltairine de Cleyre. Especially after googling her name and seeing her eyes – her words had apparently made less of an impression on him than her looks. De Cleyre (1866 - 1912), admittedly, was a beautiful woman. But her text, Why I am an Anarchist (1897), deserves a closer look. It describes De Cleyre's thoughts on American society at the time as well as her political ideals. Elaborating on the title's statement, she explains her driving forces: in her words, the possession of an active mind and a large proportion of sentiment. Offering vivid opinions about society's shortcomings she describes how she craved, above everything, to be free. She desired freedom “from conventional dress, speech and custom”, as well as a more general liberation, such that people would not live as captivated consumers in a money driven world. Brilliantly accurate even to this day, De Cleyre also touches on the carbon footprint debacle, hoping that “people would realise (…) that the vast mass of this dragging products up and down the world (...) is economic insanity.”

Nicoline van Harskamp, Yours in Solidarity; Courtesy of the artist and New Art Space Amsterdam / Photo: Maarten Kools.

The readings provide a historical and theoretical framework for the exhibition Yours in Solidarity, in which artist Nicoline van Harskamp explores the legacy of Dutch activist Karl Max Kreuger (1964 - 1999). Kreuger was in contact with his fellow anarchists on a global scale and he maintained connections to them throughout his lifetime. His legacy is in his letters – there are hundreds of them, which now constitute the archive from which this exhibition derives its ostensible subject. Van Harskamp, who had herself exchanged thoughts with Kreuger on paper, explored this correspondence archive, choosing sixty of Kreuger’s addressees for further research. To glean a sense of the writers’ personalities, she analyzed their handwriting wherever possible. The exhibition’s first room at NASA is allocated to this endeavor. Letters neatly line the walls, accompanied by van Harskamp’s analyses with marks and comments scribbled over them. In the same room, van Harskamp beams text from spoken interviews in white words onto black boards. The wide range of Kreuger’s correspondents becomes clear from watching the projections and reading snippets of the letters. We don’t need to see writers’ faces, “nice eyes”, or even know their names. A twenty-year-old Chilean girl and a “friendly, down to earth” Israeli debunk the general anarchist stereotype.

Nicoline van Harskamp,Yours in Solidarity, first opening of the archive; Courtesy of the artist and New Art Space Amsterdam / Photo: Nicoline van Harskamp.

In the next room, van Harskamp's project truly begins to unfold. Here it becomes apparent that she hired actors and conducted interviews to further investigate the archive. The actors’ characters, based on the sixty writers, are asked about their beliefs and driving forces, how they feel about freedom and their country’s politics. As with the letters, these aren’t coherent stories. Short bits of information set the tone. The work seems more about getting a feel of this global movement, of all these people brought together by one man. It isn't until the next room that we fully understand the scope of van Harskamp's endeavors. Three large screens appear to feature a documentary film showing the actors together in a meeting. They passionately discuss the things they would fight for, recalling an imagined scenario that could happen were all the letter writers to meet today. Words lead to actions; language breeds change.

Van Harskamp succeeds at making these people come to life, and at displaying their ideas and discontents. In the evenings of readings she's hosting at NASA, Reading Anarchism, she encourages debate. It's evident that van Harskamp is no dispassionate observer. She aims to reinvigorate this movement – she's part of the same school, and she wants you to take part. Being immersed in these words and ideas should spark a desire to read, to investigate, to know more. It's a challenge, but it’s worth it.

—Georgia Haagsma

(Image on top: Nicoline van Harskamp, Yours in Solidarity, Installation at Manifesta 9, 2012; Courtesy of the artist and New Art Space Amsterdam/ Photo by Kristof Vrancken)

It’s hard to clear one’s head of all the preconceived notions and packaged analyses about an artist before going to meet their work for the first time. I made the mistake of reading other reviews before seeing Garry Winogrand’s photographs at SFMOMA (where I’m counting the days until it shutters for redevelopment, and I’ll be left a few old friends shy). One included a particularly barfy comparison of his New York period in the 1960s to the popular television program Mad Men. On the first pass, they do indeed seem to carry all the promise and poetry of a film still.

But everyone knows the movie itself never lives up to the still.

After a while details emerge: visible pores, awkward/dated hair and clothes, background subjects that throw off the symmetry of the composition just so. There’s an unsettling immediacy, a particularity that is honestly not so different from the feeling I had looking at my first Caravaggio, a bewilderingly lively portrait of a likely cadaver. Speaking of which, Italian old masters (or at least their techniques) surface here and there in Winogrand: a photograph from the New York World's Fair in 1964 is comically classical in its composition, and in another, seven figures seated on a bench in perfect symmetria, their alliances readable as The Last Supper. These invitations to interpretation are pure chance, and say more about us than about the photograph. Winogrand states plainly in Bill Moyers’ 1982 documentary on Creativity (viewable on a little TV inside the exhibition), “I don’t have any storytelling responsibility to what I’m photographing.”

Garry Winogrand, New York World's Fair, 1964; gelatin silver print; Collection SFMOMA, Gift of Dr. L. F. Peede, Jr.; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

The sharp, beautiful processing—most of it done by Winogrand himself before his death in 1984, some of it in Tuscon, AZ just over the past year—coupled with the spontaneous content removes any possibility of retro nostalgia conferred by blurry family photos or orchestrated lifestyle portraits of that era, lending the images their enduring uncanniness. The snapshots are a significant plot point in a series of moments that—for future generations, anyhow—blurred the boundaries between photojournalism and fine art photography. Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans were but dutifully following Roy Stryker’s scripts for documenting the work of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, and Weegee’s more sensationalist street photography of the thirties and forties were mainly in the service of newspapers.

Winogrand didn’t chase ambulances or the police-band for pictures to happen. He went out and took the world for what it was, and the results were often intended for magazine puff pieces, but I don’t think a camera has come so close to being the truth-telling tool we so hoped it would be. There are many photographs of women, some tense, some diffident, one startlingly happy, and most just plain startled. The long depth-of-field makes you feel the throng of crowded city streets; figures of all sizes, in both fore and background, appear to be all in the same plane, on the brink of collision.

It’s easy enough to guess why the later periods presented here are suggestively marked by the wall labels as a decline, possibly even a failure, on behalf of the photographer. The subjects do become subtly, progressively more aggressive and self-aware, but why is that inherently disappointing? Winogrand’s face fills the grainy little TV screen. “All a photograph does is describe light on a surface,” he says, sounding almost befuddled.

Perhaps describing light on a surface is an inherently interpretive act. To do it with words actually draws us away from light and into our selves.

—Christina Catherine Martinez

(Image on top: Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, ca.1980-83, gelatin silver print; Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.)

Every product suggests itself first as an imagistic extension of one’s body and mind: consuming, being clothed, experiencing a situation, being enhanced, or encountering pleasure. Even an ergonomically designed shampoo bottle is the anthropomorphic picture of an imagined hand. Critical viewers typically regard such representations with conscious skepticism and probably as often with unconscious approval. “The Pathos of Things,” at Carriage Trade, puts such contradictions under scrutiny. The show is studious about the portrayal of objects as images, eschewing spectacle and focusing on the way that viewers absorb products first as visual promises.

Curator Peter Scott asserts that we only consciously confront the disparity between ourselves and the ego ideal that consumer goods provide after those products have failed us. We imbibe their illusive rhetoric as much as we do the commodities themselves, a fact emphasized by three works in the show that trade explicitly in hallucinatory imagery: a sculpture by Antoine Catala and two anaglyph inkjet paintings by João Enxuto and Erica Love. Enxuto and Love’s paintings are viewable with cyan and magenta 3D glasses, which make the ornately framed paintings they depict appear to project from the surface of the canvas. Each bears the image of an unknown masterpiece found on Google Art Project, a service that allows users to virtually tour museums around the world. Those artworks that Google doesn’t have the right to reproduce are blurred out, so despite the incredible dimensional detail of both reproductions, the paintings are effaced, pixelated. Enxuto and Love’s paintings inhibit the perception of the images they reproduce.

Lewis Stein’s 1991 Cibachrome print, Untitled (#2 from "Consumer Products Series"), is a mock stock photograph of an Oster brand blender, presented in large scale on a picture-perfect countertop with strawberries and a bright pink milkshake. Without an advertiser’s text, Stein’s photograph points less to the blender that is its formal centerpiece, and more to the amorphous sense of fulfillment the machine is equipped to provide.

Probably the most delightful work in the show is Fischli and Weiss’s 1987 film The Way Things Go. It shows the complicated and pointless workings of a warehouse-sized Rube Goldberg machine made with household goods that variously roll, launch, spill, or climb their way through the space. Like the rest of “Pathos,” Fishli and Weiss’s film doesn’t rely on consumer spectacle—it doesn’t patronize or mystify. It slowly unfolds in fits of goofy explosions, the objects strained beyond their conventional functions.

Installation view, (top to bottom) João Enxuto and Erica Love, Antoine Catala; Courtesy of Carriage Trade.

Three haunting black and white photographs by Katarina Elven are severe reminders of the kind of shock we experience, individually and socially, when products break. Elven’s pictures document abandoned boutiques and storefronts—palimpsests of a once-delirious market in the midst of a traumatic “correction,” circa 2011. Hung between other pieces in the exhibition, they punctuate the show’s exuberance and keep present the potential danger of unconsidered consumption. Conceived as a recession-era exhibition, “Pathos” unpacks the mistake of confusing objects with their image, and reminds us that we’ll have to live with the consequences of expecting all that an image has to promise. 

—Noah Dillon

(Image on top: Installation view, (left to right) Lewis Stein, David Baskin, Katarina Elven; Courtesy of Carriage Trade.)

I didn’t plan to write about this exhibition – I intended to write about another show at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA), Moments on Moments, which features video works by prominent female performance artists. But as soon as I entered the exhibition space on the top floor of M HKA, I knew something was wrong. Chaotically curated, the works were displayed too close to one another, the screens were too small, sounds overlapped, and one of the televisions hadn't even been switched on. Apart from one early video work by Marina Abramovic, there was nothing particularly worth mentioning, nothing that will linger as positive in my mind.

Disillusioned, I took the elevator down to the second floor, where I walked into Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys’Optimundus. After what I had just seen upstairs, it proved a relatively welcome surprise. The show features predominantly recent works by the two Flemish artists and is the largest exhibition of their work to date. The title Optimundus refers to the concept of a parallel world that exists in our imagination, a world which, according to these artists’ interpretations is multi-faceted, and often interferes with what we perceive to be real.

Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, So ist das, 2013 mixed media sculpture; Courtesy the artists, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Galerie Micheline Szwajcer.

Video works bookend the exhibition. De Gruyter and Thys are best known for their projects in this medium and the space at M HKA is brilliantly equipped to show it. The video rooms are secluded from the rest of the exhibition and the building’s half round shape creates an interesting interior viewing space. My only critique was the quality of sound. In the room where a film about the artist's research project is shown, it was nearly impossible to distinguish the words of the narrator.

De Gruyter and Thys started their video projects some years ago when they interviewed people living in the margins of society. Intrigued by the stoic attitude of some of their subjects, they decided to create life-sized sculptures based on the people and film these fictional characters instead. In one of the videos, Les énigmes de Saarlouis (The Riddles of Saarlouis) (2012), two expressionless polystyrene faces belonging to the artists’ mannequin-like creations, are filmed in close-up. A mechanical sounding voiceover describes mundane demographic facts like “the man who smokes Marlboros has a neighbor who drinks water” or talks about a tramp scavenging for cigarette buds. The entire experience is space-age and sterile. It feels like we’re looking at the world from an alien point of view.

Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Twee Vagebonden, 2013, mixed media sculpture; Courtesy the artists, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Galerie Micheline Szwajcer.

Though De Gruyter and Thys explore the margins and edges of society, they express themselves in a subtle and, considering their subject, conservative way. There is little room for chaos – their work is considered, stylized, neat. The exhibition space is strategically filled with the artists’ fabricated brainchildren – an unhappy village populated with lifeless, marginal (or marginalized) men. So Ist Das (2013), for example, features a stereotypically dull looking man sitting at a plastic camping table. Twee Vagebonden (Two Vagabonds) (2013) depicts two murderers, coordinated in their tattered clothing, holding deadly knives mirroring their rigid, upright postures.

Optimundusis neither a breathtaking nor groundbreaking exhibition. I missed something crazy, perhaps an element of shock, or at least something that breaks with the stereotypes and cliches. The world created by Thys and de Gruyter is rather a subdued and tepid version of the real. At times it can be grim, or perhaps a little eerie, but the trivial, inescapable boredom displayed ceases to be confrontational and doesn't leave a lasting trace.

Optimundus will be continued in the beginning of 2014 in the Kunsthalle Wien, in Vienna.

—Georgia Haagsma

[Image on top: Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, still from Les énigmes de Saarlouis (The Riddles of Saarlouis), 2012, video, 00:18:00;  Courtesy the artists, Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Private Collection.]

Gay Guerrilla (1979) is a composition for four pianos by African-American composer Julius Eastman (1940-1990). Concert played by the pianists Faristamo Susi, Andriy Dragan, Benoit Hennecart and Lukas Rickli on the occasion of the exhibition Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc: Songs for a Mad King at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland on March 16, 2013. The above video is an excerpt, the full-length video is available on Vernissage TV.

(Image on top: Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, 7 contracts, for M.A., 2013, 3 bronze sculptures, 7 contracts, Dimensions variable; Courtesy of the artist and KUNSTHALLE BASEL / Photo: Serge Hasenböhler.)

A work of art that’s been stolen attains a tantalizing aura of mystery, a legendary status that grows with each hour of absence. A destroyed or a lost work of art can sometimes attain that level of mythos, as long as we are aware of its significance before it’s disappeared. But most art, in fact, most of the art that has ever been made throughout history, is simply lost and forgotten, and we don’t even realize it. Ancient art that was intended to last for eternity is slowly eroding, and contemporary artists now incorporate ephemerality into their works in acceptance of the fact that nothing lasts forever...

75,000 years ago: All the artworks made by people around this time have been destroyed or are lost. Besides some drilled snail shells that were found in a cave in South Africa, everything else is probably gone or stuck in a rock or underground somewhere.

40,000 years ago: Some petroglyphs remain, but maybe some art works that are still extant we don’t even recognize as art because we don’t know how to interpret them.

6,000 – 2,000 years ago: Most of the art from Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Persia, India, Ancient Greece and Rome is gone. The rest is damaged in some way or another (missing limbs, broken in half, water damage) and can be found in the Louvre and the British Museum, et al. All of those white marble classical statues everyone loves so much? They used to be painted bright, garish colors apparently, but the paint’s worn off.

2,400 years ago: Speaking of the British Museum, they still hold one of the most (in)famous works of stolen art: the classical Greek marble sculptures that were originally part of the Acropolis in Athens. They even had a notorious nickname: the Elgin Marbles, named after the Earl who looted them from Greece. These mouldering shrines, it was argued, weren’t under the proper care in their native land. Word has it that a janitor of the British Museum tried to tidy up the marbles, and ended up knocking off noses and such. Other 19^th century staff then polished the shit out of them causing “irreparable damage” according to the dismayed Greeks, who are still awaiting restitution. In fact, there are lots of people out there awaiting restitution of stolen objects hoarded by the British Museum.

1,200-400 years ago: A lot of this art is still around because it’s been kept in churches, mosques and temples devoted to religions that people still care about. Unless it was kept in a church, mosque or temple that was raided by a rival religious group. This happened a lot.

180 years ago: The world's very first experimental photographs no longer exist because they faded away. It wasn't until nearly a decade later when the process to fix the photographic image indefinitely was discovered.

100 years ago: The Mona Lisa was stolen and then found two years later when the thief tried to sell the painting.

96 years ago: The seminal readymade artwork by Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, is discarded after it was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists Exhibition in 1917. Duchamp authorized Fountain replicas in 1950. Another one of Duchamp’s readymades, In Advance of the Broken Arm, was mistaken by an employee of a major museum as an ordinary snow shovel and disappeared. Duchamp simply supplied a new snow shovel to replace it.

80-70 years ago: The Nazis didn’t like modern art and destroyed a lot of it. Paintings they did like they just confiscated.

50-40 years ago: The Minimalist painter Agnes Martin destroyed almost all of her own paintings, attempting to wipe away the evidence of her first experiments at abstraction. John Baldessari cremated all of his early paintings one day in 1970. He still has the ashes.

40-30 years ago: Every subway graffiti masterpiece from NYC c.1970-1989 was routinely destroyed by the Metro Transit Agency.

Rachel Whiteread's House getting demolished in 1994.

20 years ago: Rachel Whiteread’s monumental sculpture House, a concrete cast of the interior of a condemned Victorian house in East London, was demolished by the council.

6 years ago: A thirty-eight-ton sculpture by Richard Serra went missing from the Reina Sofia in Madrid. A Telegraph article describes that the “police investigation concluded that theft was implausible. The piece, which had taken five cranes to move, was thought to be too awkward to handle, and it was worth almost nothing.”

3 years ago: Artist Michael Landy opens Art Bin at the South London Gallery. Artists were invited to throw in any artwork they wished to discard. Works by Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Gillian Wearing were chucked there alongside the works of countless art students.

—Natalie Hegert

(Image at top: Michael Landy, Art Bin, installation view, 2010, South London Gallery.)

Driving to Albuquerque from Santa Fe in March is like propelling into the future by about a month or so. Santa Fe, while having begun its spring thaw, will continue the slow crawl out of winter for some time to come. In Albuquerque, however, chartreuse buds appear at the tips of branches, hyacinths sway in the balmy breeze, and flocks of students drape the patios of outdoor bars along Central. Spring representing a fresh start, I thought it befitting to cover Speak to Me: The 19th Annual Juried Exhibition now on view in the Raymond Johnson Gallery at the UNM Art Museum. The exhibition offers a selection of work from newly graduating students of UNM’s studio arts MFA program.

Speak to Me features painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, and video. Curated by Julie Joyce, the exhibition centers on a loose theme of mystery, otherworldliness, and the subtly evocative. Some works underline this theme more than others. Ghost Detector by Conor Peterson, for example, drives home the point quite literally. The oblong mechanical device dangles lightly from the ceiling above an exhibition bench, and goes unnoticed unless you happen to crane your neck upward. Tiny lights pulsate on its delicate frame, as it responds to changing levels of energy in the room. Another work with a palpable air of spookiness is a desk-turned-cabinet of curiosities, by Eso Robinson, which dominates the far corner of the gallery. It displays a host of alien looking, inorganic specimens in various writhing shapes. On the opposite wall Natalie Smith’s pale tapestry paintings are also haunting, appearing drained of color in phantasmical monochromatic white.

Justin Nolan, Stage, 2012, Photograph; Courtesy of the artist.

Photographs by Justin Nolan hang in a striking triptych of vibrant primary color. Each photograph portrays an unpopulated interior space, the standout photograph being an image of a vacant strip club. Though the room is devoid of human life—the expected mix of dancers, bouncers, and leering onlookers—it feels anything but empty. The stage is surrounded by a chorus of zippy lounge chairs in sinuous, oil slick colors. There is a flashy, boisterous quality to these chairs. In the absence of people, the furnishings become their own kind of living, seedy entourage. They ripple with tacky, neon indecency. Though certainly less coarse than an image of scantily clad strippers, somehow they are just as sexy. 

Another group of photographs on the far wall captivates my attention. The trio of images by Rachel Coxare taken from a larger series in which the artist photographed her grandmother who had been diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease. During the series, Cox’s grandmother began to pass on some of her worldly possessions to the artist, and in turn these items became incorporated into the photographs. In Mind Meld, a pair of young hands frames the face of an older woman with a vacant, far-off expression. The elderly woman appears stiff, almost waxen. In Two Turtles, we see a faceless image of the same figure, reclining in a wire chair with a small dog in her lap and flip-flops on her feet. She holds two upside-down turtle shells out to the viewer. Without any backstory to contextualize them, the shells are a bizarre offering. Moreover, they are presented by a ghostly figure that seems to exist—as suggested by the previous image—somewhere between the realm of the living and the dead. The effect is disquieting. We see a spirit held between the material and immaterial, holding out her possessions almost ironically, with a grip as light and loose as the one she keeps on reality.

Rachel Cox, Two Turtles, 2012, Archival inkjet print; Courtesy of the artist.

The images in Speak to Me are a dynamic lot to spend an afternoon with. The cool dark basement of the UNM Art Museum provides a perfect environment to take in each work with minimal distraction and appreciate the moments of eeriness, novelty, and surprise these works have to impart.

—Kate Skelly

(Image on top: Installation image; Courtesy of Raymond Jonson Gallery at the UNM Art Museum.)

Time tends to limit the appreciation of surroundings; even the exceptional melts into the patterns of the daily grind, and making sure to look up becomes a chore evaded by hurried steps. I try at times to remember the thoughts and impressions that arose during my first visit to Barcelona. I recall threading the city, judging to turn one corner rather than another, unwittingly discovering the trait which, for me, defines this city and its people – gumption. It can be found in the proud monuments and buildings erected within the city’s periphery, in the defiant graffiti which line the streets, in the rebellious history of the Catalan people.

MACBA – Barcelona’s contemporary art museum – is no exception to this rule. Designed by Richard Meier, it exudes a virginal self-containment in its elegance and its smooth luminous body, a shimmering white and glass. And yet it is boldly placed in the well-worn, shoddy neighbourhood of Raval. This juxtaposition is also suggested by the work of its current temporary exhibitor, Eulàlia Grau.

Eulalia Grau, Misses i gàngsters (Etnografia), 1973, Emulsió fotogràfica, anilines i pintura acrílica sobre tela 108,5 x 115,8 cm; Col•lecció MACBA. Consorci Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona Crèdit fotogràfic: Tony Coll.

Born in the city of Terrassa, twenty kilometres from Barcelona, Grau’s early to mid adulthood was marred by the oppressive regime of Franco. Much of the work in the exhibition is from the 1970s; its crude directness is a cry of indignation, an attempt to punch in the face a regime which was its enforced provenance. Indeed, Grau did state that in this work “...the ethical contribution is more important than the aesthetic.”

Grau saw collage as the appropriate medium through which to achieve this sought-after level of impact and presented some of her collection under the title of Ethnography. Grau’s work contains a critical depiction of two predominant themes: gender inequality and the inconsistencies of the capitalist system. Within the exhibition there are several works which play on the former theme. One such work is Nuvia i rentaplats (The Bride and the Dishwasher) (1973) in which a bride, her head severed by the frame, her body poised and graceful, advances through the image as if making her way down the aisle. Along her path she will walk by black and white images of dishes. The heavenly, light graciousness of the bride dressed in white and blue is contrasted against the clunky expectancy of the daily grind – of what she can expect her life to be reduced to. To make such a statement at the time in a work whose ambition was to propound the ethical, one had to be bold, daring and have gumption.

One of the most striking of Grau’s work on this theme is a piece entitled Tumor (1972). Here, a cancerous tumour lays menacingly alongside two pregnant women whose blossoming forms are touching, their heads severed by the frame as their hands tenderly support their bumps. A viewer may consider the image shocking and unnecessarily blunt. And yet, put into the socio-political context of its creation – at a time when women’s roles were firmly limited to that of housewife and mother, their position one of subservience to sometimes capricious masters – its crudity, and its uncompromising frankness can not only be understood but also deemed necessary.

Grau sees gender inequality in good part as a consequence of the dynamic of capitalism, which is railed against in her work, and has been an enduring theme since the 1970s. El cost de la vida or The Price of Life (1977-79) is presented as a quadrillage and discusses the three stages of capitalism under the subtitles of protocapitalism (such as that which envelops Spain, Italy and France), post-capitalism (Germany) and pre-capitalism (Third World). It encapsulates the subtle journey of control through the capitalist system, and stresses society’s acceptance and legitimisation of that power. It is this system, according to Grau, which leaves people, especially women – such as the protagonist of her 2011-12 work, Me gustaria morir en un lugar donde nadie me viera. Maria (I would like to die in a place where nobody can see me. Maria) – reduced to wandering the streets, searching through the residue of others, in an effort to survive. Maria’s daily journey is presented in clips of film alongside that of Mariano Rajoy (the current Spanish Prime Minister) and others accused of corruption.

Eulalia Grau,Nixon (Etnografia), 1973 Emulsió fotogràfica sobre tela, 112,5 x 57 cm; Col•lecció particular / Crèdit fotogràfic: CRBMC Centre de Restauració de Béns Mobles de Catalunya. Enric Gracia Molina i Joan M. Díaz Sensada.

This control which Grau speaks of was obviously suffocatingly prevalent during Franco’s dictatorship. But she was also keenly aware of the more subtly pernicious operations of capitalism in apparently more benign political systems. She recognised that there was just such an inherent contradiction in the more liberal governance in the USA and in 1973 she produced a work depicting President Nixon giving an impassioned speech, while under him there lays a cheeky monkey relaxing in a hotel bedroom (Nixon [1973]).

There is a strong anti-establishment insistence in Grau’s work; a characteristic all the more laudable during a dictatorship. And yet, for this viewer upon seeing Me gustaria morir en un lugar donde nadie me viera. Maria (I would like to die in a place where nobody can see me. Maria) wonders whether, now, in our present state of troubled capitalism true gumption lies beyond description, beyond criticism, beyond rage; in the provision, that is, of solutions and their enactment, or at least in a more transformative ethical-aesthetical experience. 

—Clare Sheppard

(Image on top: Eulalia Grau,Núvia i rentaplats (Etnografia), 1973, Emulsió fotogràfica i anilines sobre tela, 62,5 x 108 cm Col•lecció Pazos – Cuchillo; Crèdit fotogràfic: CRBMC Centre de Restauració de Béns Mobles de Catalunya. Enric Gracia Molina i Joan M. Díaz Sensada.)