'Democratic Camera: Photographs and Video 1961-2008' Whitney Museum of American Art, November 7, 2008 - January 25, 2009

(originally published on artslant.com 12/2/08)

William Eggleston is one of those rare artists who hijacks your brain; his astounding body of work, on display in William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, through January 25th at the Whitney, asserts a view of the world so convincing, it overtakes your own. His photographs, sensual, strange, and eye-popping, evoke a hyper-real America that is not just visual, but tactile and poetic. It’s a world populated by shellacked chickens, ecstatic soda pop and hot gravel roads; muddy puddles and humble ice chests; people with the kinds of faces that don’t exist anymore.

The democracy of Eggleston’s vision is established at the entrance to the exhibition, where several of his most enduring works from the 1970s are hung together—Algiers, Louisiana; Sumner, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in Background; and Greenwood, Mississippi. In each, Eggleston’s peculiar mood prevails, whether he’s photographing a sunny afternoon or a dark red room.

From there, most of the works on view are grouped according to his various projects—William Eggleston’s Guide, Los Alamos, Graceland, and so on. Within these series are smaller narratives and perverse juxtapositions. A stark, funereal photograph of a corpse is hung next to a rapturous redhead splayed in the grass (both untitled). A group of three prints (all Sumner, Mississippi c. 1969-71, from William Eggleston’s Guide) illustrates an evening spent menaced by black doorways, hot pink meat, and red lampshades in a tilted Southern house. More recent works, dated 1999 to 2001, feature closely-cropped compositions and abstract blocks of color, and form a nice bookend to Eggleston’s grainy black & white prints from the 1960s.

Eggleston’s video work, shot in the 1970s with a Sony Portapak camera, is the most intriguing aspect of Democratic Camera. The black & white character studies that comprise Stranded in Canton, playing on several monitors arranged in a circle and accompanied by still portraits from his 5x7 series, are focused on individuals, stripped of any sharply defined setting and shot in hazy bar light — in short, unlike anything else in the exhibition. Yet they are the key to the rest of Eggleston’s work, providing insight into the eccentric milieu that shaped this artist’s vision so that he in turn could captivate ours.

'Alexander Calder: The Paris Years 1926-1933' Whitney Museum of American Art October 16, 2008 - February 15, 2009

(originally published on artslant.com 12/2/08)

Alexander Calder’s transitions—he went from making large, dense paintings, to constructing visages out of nothing but wire and an otherworldly grasp of gesture, to ecstatically embracing abstraction—are all marked in Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933, an exhibition that allows the viewer to step over each threshold with the artist.

The works in Paris Years are well-known, especially Calder’s Circus (1926-31), which has long been a beloved part of the Whitney’s collection, and his wire figures of celebrities like Josephine Baker. What makes the show great are the supplementary material and artifacts—the five black suitcases that Calder transported Circus in, covered in stamps and tags from all over the world; André Kertész and Brassaï’s black & white photographs of Calder with Circus; and Jean Painlevé’s film, Le Grand Cirque Calder 1927 (1955), shown here for the first time in a New York museum (and attended by a huge, enthralled crowd).

Calder’s abstract works are in a long room at the rear of the exhibition, just off another filled with representational sculptures. To enter the former after taking in wire figures of animals and ball players feels like crossing the same line Calder did in 1931 after visiting Piet Mondrian’s studio. Here also, the supplementary material is inspired; next to the mechanized sculpture Pantograph (1931) is a film in which the piece performs its halting, elegant dance. Viewers can study the hidden gears behind the black and white construction Two Spheres (1931), while, just beyond it, Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere (1932-33), though its glass bottles, tiny gong, and hanging orbs lie still, seems like it could easily spring into action, like something out of Fischli & Weiss’ 1987 film The Way Things Go.

Consistent throughout is Calder’s beguiling hand; whether it’s a humble toy lion or an ethereal mobile, Calder’s uncomplicated style is always his signature, and both the anthropomorphized and the abstract evoke delight.

Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities at Museum of Modern Art, NY

(published 10/08 on artslant.com)

James Ensor, whose work appears in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities, described the attic over his parent’s souvenir shop in Belgium as “dark and frightening … full of horrible spiders, curios, seashells, plants and animals from distant seas, beautiful chinaware, rust and blood-colored effects, red and white coral, monkeys, turtles, and dried mermaids”. Ensor drew a lasting inspiration from these stashed-away objects, and eventually moved his whole studio into the attic. Wunderkammer, organized by MoMA’s Sarah Suzuki, explores the pull that such perverse bric-a-brac has had over artists during the last century, in a display that recalls the curatorial and scientific inclinations of chambres des marveilles, a mid-sixteenth century phenomenon which MoMA calls “[an] ancestor of the museums of today”.

Works are hung salon-style in three rooms, grouped into loose categories that form some very interesting alliances (one wall is shared by Paul Klee, Louise Bourgeois, Peter Blake, and Rene Magritte). The categories are subjective; I counted creatures (plants, insects, and beasts of all stripes); freaks (bearded ladies and tattooed men); and medical phenomena (eyes, brains, and one singular vest made out of nipples) among them. Two actual “cabinets of curiosities” are on view—one that gathers tiny, impish objects from a diverse array of artists: a wax shoe sprouting human hair by Robert Gober; a Mind Expander/Fly Head Helmet (1968) by Haus-Rucker-Co; an Unhappy Meal (III, 2002) by Jake and Dinos Chapman; and two laundress aprons revealing male and female genitalia by Marcel Duchamp. The other, Mark Dion’s Cabinet (2004), is the result of an archeological dig Dion undertook in MoMA’s backyard which yielded modern urban ruins—radiator knobs, the soap dishes and checkered bathroom tile indigenous to Manhattan apartments, dented mailbox doors, stamped bricks, and rusty razor blades are all carefully arranged in stainless steel drawers. It’s a reminder that one day these items will be proper ruins, artifacts of an extinct metropolis.

With Wunderkammer, it feels as though Suzuki embarked on her own archeological dig, plucking talismans, objects d'art, and sketches from artists’ studios, or in a broader sense, their creative processes. By artfully re-contextualizing these artifacts, she has presented MoMA viewers with whole new avenues for wonder.

America and the Tintype at ICP

(published 09/08 on artslant.com)


America and the Tintype, now on view at the International Center of Photography, reinforces that, despite the rampant proliferation of arm’s-length self-portraits on today’s social networking sites, photography as a populist medium of self-expression and representation is nothing new. To say that the 1870s, when tintypes peaked in popularity, was far less saturated with images is a tremendous understatement. Yet somehow the people posing in these tiny, gem-like pictures had an innate savvy for photography’s ability to not just record, but also manipulate, reality.

These subjects of 130 years ago possessed the strange mix of idealism and cynicism that anyone creating an online profile on MySpace has today; they too sensed the possibility of photography to subvert stereotypes, build public personas, and create myths. Many of the tintypes ICP has chosen explore gender roles and social mores, and toy with the idea of “stepping out of bounds”: in one image, a daring group of women let their long hair down for the camera, while in others men strike macho boxing poses or slip into frilly dresses; there is even a startling image of two women wearing chains, their skirts embroidered with the word “Slave”.

A group of workers’ portraits on view are early precursors to August Sander; each subject is depicted wielding the tool of their trade, be it a banjo or a basket of fruit. On the opposite wall are images of leisure; because tintypes were cheaper than Daguerreotypes to produce, they were widely used by the middle and lower classes in a less formal manner, allowing a candid glimpse of life and humor in a time before snapshots were ubiquitous. In one photograph, a young woman in a fancy dress satirizes upper-class portraiture by primly posing in an outsized, garish rubber mask (Cindy Sherman’s great-great-grandmother?).

The ease and low cost of tintypes also allowed for narratives to emerge. In a succession of three photographs hung on the north wall of the gallery, a meeting between two men goes awry; the first frame depicts a handshake, the second, a shared drink, and the third, a hold-up.

America and the Tintype documents the creativity that emerged as a result of the first cheap photographic process. It marked the birth of vernacular photography, and similar bursts of democratic artistry have followed each advance in technology. The digital camera in everyone’s pocket today is simply a continuation of that phenomenon.