August 2012
notes from the airless void
It's been five years since I moved from a blog with comments to the current set-up. Recently, folks who don't know about my rich interactive history in the pre-Facebook blog chatter trenches are giving me well-intentioned advice on how to "open up" my blog to the possibilities of social media. One commenter described this site as "claustrophobic and Web 1.0"; another worried that certain decently-wrought posts would just "sit there" without the pot-stirring of comments. My favorite are the people who say they won't respond to something I wrote "until I open comments." Writers have been writing for thousands of years without a place at the bottom of the papyrus for people to add their thoughts. Suddenly the decision to go commentless is treated as highly morally suspect.
It's true that comments can "keep a blogger honest" but so can email.
As for the lack of interactive bells and whistles I opted long ago not to have a "stat counter" on the blog, or other hard numbers showing visitors, shares, likes, and all that. This is an "art blog" not a statistician's blog. If you have anxiety about the lack of quantification -- "klout" -- around here I advise you to seek medical help.
Diana Kingsley
Congratulations to Diana Kingsley for this New Yorker write-up of her show at Castelli:
It’s hard to know what Kingsley is up to with this new group of photographs, but she’s obviously having fun. Some of her still-life images look like parodies of Elad Lassry’s, with similarly oddball arrangements of tomatoes, cheese wedges, and melons and balloons on brightly colored backdrops. Roe Etheridge [sic] might have shot the ikebana-style flower arrangement with a partly eaten foil-wrapped candy bar left at its base. But Kingsley’s off on her own wonderfully weird trip with much of this work, including a picture of a forest floor with little stacks of coins among the pine needles. Through Aug. 3.
Of course Kingsley was doing this before Roe Ethridge but it's not unfavorable company.
Some earlier writing on Kingsley:
and here.
Chris Marker 2
More thoughts on a JPEG --I haven't seen this printed out. It's from Chris Marker's final NY exhibition -- shots of subway passengers taken with a hidden camera. (See previous post.)
This has been "done": one example is John Schabel's photos of people in airplane windows snapped with a telephoto lens. OK, precedent noted.
Almost 50 years separates the woman subway rider from this frame from Marker's 1962 film La Jetee.
You can't miss the continuities. Both images feature a face in calm (yet anxious) repose surrounded by a vortex of angles and converging lines. The actual and reflected subway railings and the woman's bag strap suggest tubes and wires surrounding a comatose patient. Like "The Man" in La Jetee we could imagine she is dreaming or time traveling. From the physical tension of her arms and clawlike hands it's possible things aren't going so well.
The earlier image gained much of its impact from the stark blacks of silver nitrate photography. The subway rider is a study in slightly sickly colors: the green that you'd see on no American train and the green-and-brown fractal pattern on the wall and seats that resembles vegetation or cell-division. The clawing hand touches and interacts with this pattern in the woman's dream theatre. Both images are cinematic: "The Man" because the shot inspires tension and concern in the context of the overall story and "The Woman" because the shot is so dynamic, like a moment in a film where a camera lingers on a face in the midst of expressionistic chaos. The sensibility or vibe uniting the two images is fairly remarkable - how many photographers are this consistent even from month to month?
When an artist reaches 90 you want to write about him with respect. This is especially true if his work remains active and vital across the decades. RIP, Chris Marker.
Chris Marker
Filmmaker Chris Marker died recently. Hadn't paid much attention to his art career but felt moved to write this last year in response to a blog post smugly putting down his work:
This is the filmmaker who made La Jetee. A legend, yadda yadda, but readers might want to know how the iconic still photography in that and other earlier works compare to what he's doing now. Does his careful style of framing and eye for vernacular street scenes make the jump from "quasi-documentary" to "urban flaneur" modes of working? How much of the magic of his photos lay in chemical darkroom technology? That sort of thing.
From his Wikipedia bio I see he was a digital pioneer, and made an "art" CD-ROM in the '90s. Another avenue to explore in writing about him is how such (now dated) media have informed current so-called (and likely-soon-to-be-dated) image aggregators such as Tumblr, and where he fits in the spectrum.
Reviewing cliched writing in the press release is usually kind of a low blow. You are privileged to be in New York seeing the actual work--others have to travel here.
Images from the show in question suggest no diminution of the artists' powers late in life. (I didn't see them installed so this is a jpeg review.) The photos of random subway riders taken without their knowledge conjure painted portraits and religious icons (an unfortunate handful make this connection explicit by photoshopping in familiar masterpieces) but at the same time are as dynamic as cinema. Each photo inserts you at some fraught or charged point in a film-like narrative and you immediately find yourself working out the back story and conclusion. Answering a question above, connections to La Jetee's frame-by-frame style abound: in the dramatic angles, the lighting, the melancholy mood. Photoshop manipulation of light and saturation substitutes more than adequately for the chemical darkroom effects of the earlier work. It's what makes the imagery now rather than some emulation of the '60s. As for the Tumblr connection suggested by the original blog post: nah.
More.