'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.