Everything Old Is New Again

A quartet of photographers draw on the origins of the medium – daguerreotypes, photograms, cyanotype, camera obscura, cliché verre – to make thoroughly contemporary work.

Home and the World: Adam Fuss’s latest isn’t exactly subtle but it sure is beautiful. The subject is snakes: photograms of snakes slithering on grids of newspapers, around staffs or, most elegantly, against a white background. (In these, the line created by the snakes resembles classical Arabic calligraphy.) The heart of the show is the trio of daguerreotypes – the largest ever made – displayed in a separate chamber (a chapel?): two images of stripped mattresses face off against one another, one complete with writhing snakes. Between them, a third image of a vagina sits on the floor, like a portal into the earth. Paging Dr. Freud?

(Cheim & Read, 547 West 25)

The Speed of Dark: Like Fuss, Eric William Carroll also returns to the origins of the medium – in his case, blueprinting. But Carroll’s photographs of foliage are a far cry from Anna Atkins’s botanical specimens. Displayed in another darkened, chapel-like chamber, the multiple-panel works are expressionistic. Surrounded by them, I flashed back on childhood memories of lying under the backyard tree, staring through the branches and leaves into the sky beyond.

(Michael Mazzeo Gallery, 526 West 26)

Groundwork / Blue Room: Once again working with the camera obscura, Abelardo Morell is going out into the field with a light-tight tent and a periscope to project the landscape outside onto the ground of the tent and then photographing the resulting image. The pictures partake of the scenery (Big Bend, the Baptistry in Florence, the Tuscan countryside) and the earth itself. Morell is showing cliché verre photographs (literally, glass picture) – essentially hand-drawn negatives. To make these images, Morell pressed ferns and cycads over the surface of the glass plate to make lush pictures that hover on the edge of abstraction.

(Bonni Benrubi Gallery, 41 East 57)

Christopher Bucklow: The men and women depicted in these photographs are silhouetted against grounds of color, their luminous figures looking for all the world like benign beings from another galaxy. Bucklow begins by projecting his subject’s shadow on a sheet of aluminum foil, then traces the outline, and makes thousands of pinholes within the outline. With the foil serving as the lens, Bucklow exposes a sheet of color photographic paper to direct sunlight. An heir to William Blake, Bucklow makes artwork in a mystical vein: otherworldly figures radiate with the light of thousands of suns.

(Danziger Projects, 534 West 24)

Speed Reviews 2: The Fabricators

Who said that the camera never lies? Herewith, four photographers whose work is all about fiction and fantasy.

The Looking Glass: Starting with photographs of high-end department store windows, Lynn Goldsmith manipulates the scene by adding and subtracting objects. To finish it off, she dresses herself up in full mannequin garb (including the blank stare) and Photoshops herself into the scene. According to the gallery notes, these images occupy some pretty well-trod post-modernist terrain, i.e., “questions of identity and how it is constructed.” Whatever, these Baroque photographs are a hoot although you’ve got to wonder just how long they’ll hold your interest. 

(Jenkins Johnson Gallery, 21 West 26)

Untold Stories: Aiming for a Chandleresque atmosphere, Jonathan Smith’s riffs on film noir are hit or miss. He’s got the setting down, the narratives are suitably enigmatic, but he left me wanting. Maybe the sets were too elegant (shouldn’t noir feel like a trip to the wrong side of the tracks?) or maybe the mysteries aren’t shady enough. For me, the most successful were those that took the longest view: the peeping Tom’s view of a woman in her apartment; the neon sign encircled by a stand of trees; the glimpse, from across the tracks, of a woman waiting for the night train.

(Rick Wester Fine Art, 511 West 25)

Generations / Brothers & Sisters: Ruud van Empel channels Henri Rousseau in his images of black children in jungle settings and school photographers in his group portraits. These images are flagrant fabrications – and we’re meant to read them as such. As the gallery notes put it, they’re about “the disruption of apparently straightforward meaning.” But while Van Empel certainly creates convincingly “constructed” portraits, I wasn’t entirely convinced by the gallery’s contention that these photographs capture the children’s “existential discomfort” as they approach the disrupting age of puberty. 

(Stefan Stux Gallery, 530 West 25)

Line-Up: There must be something in the air. Julie Blackmon is also Photoshopping kids – although, at least to my eye, to more convincing effect than van Empel. Blackmon’s inspiration is the 17^th-century genre paintings of Jan Steen, but the influence is subtle – you don’t need to know the connection to appreciate the images. Blackmon’s production values are slick – you’re meant to see the art direction – but the kids are unruly little anarchists, whose antics go unnoticed by the clueless adults. My favorite? High Dive, in which the grown-ups linger over their leisurely twilight picnic, while the kids hurl their plastic dolls off the nearby balcony and Barbies spike in the lawn. 

(Robert Mann Gallery, 210 Eleventh Avenue)

Speed Reviews 1: Art for People Who Think Too Much

Back from a New York trip, I offer herewith speed reviews. (No write-up more than 101 words!) Herewith, the first installment:

Minima Moralia: Any Chelsea exhibition featuring Samuel Beckett (yes, that Samuel Beckett) and a title from Theodor Adorno is made to order for the theory crowd. Words take the day: Matias Faldbakken’s “visual abstractions” investigate language “through a process of suppression of letters and sentences” (gallery speak for marking up plastic rubbish bags?). Glenn Ligon paints and neons text, most notably from James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. In Bruce Nauman’s work (drawings, his Good Boy, Bad Boy video), language breaks down and poetry (sometimes) emerges. The Beckett? A video of Not I, wherein a woman’s mouth, in close-up, spews out her life story.

(Marvelli Gallery, 526 West 26)

Stop Motion: Mining the notion of frozen time, Allan McCollum and Keith Edmier invoke the eruption at Pompeii and its excavation. In McCollum’s grid of 16 identical casts of a watchdog that died in Pompeii, each is oriented differently, rotated just a bit in relation to its neighbor to create an illusion of movement. Edmier’s Adonaïs contains basalt (hardened volcanic magma) casts of two human hearts. Unlike the dogs, each heart is unique, “excavated” from the artist and a friend through MRI imaging. Though also stopped in time, they too create the illusion of life as one swells with blood, the other contracts.

(Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 535 West 22)

Next Up: Speed Reviews 2: The Fabricators

Now Never Waits ... But Does It Return?

Michael Snow’s take on time – on display at the Slought Foundation this season – itself takes some time to unpack.

Enter the gallery and the first thing you see is a video monitor displaying a video of sheep grazing in a field. As you browse through the gallery – much like those wandering sheep – you encounter more monitors, running the same video. They’re all part of a piece called Sheep, and in their wry way, they draw the parallel between the ruminations of gallery-goers and the flock of sheep.

It’s a gentle introduction to an artist whose work can seem deliberately impenetrable – the kind of work that requires a boat load of patience and a willing suspension of skepticism about the bona fides of contemporary artists.

Nearby, Snow’s Wavelength with WVLNT: Wavelength for those who don’t have the Time makes for far more challenging viewing. A “rewrite” of Snow’s earlier landmark film piece called Wavelength, Snow compressed the original 45-minute version, layering three 15-minute clips on top of one another to create a kind of video collage.

From what I gather, the first Wavelength is a single zoom shot that opens with a wide shot of a loft apartment, progresses through the room, and finally rests on a photograph of waves that hangs on the opposite wall. The action, such as it is, involves four events occur – including what may, or may not, be a murder.

As enigmatic as the original is, the Cliff Notes version on display at the Slought is even more so: you peer into the scene, trying to decipher the narrative, and although hints of the original break the surface every now and then, you are defeated in your search for meaning.  

An Eternal Present  

In Condensation: A Cove Story, Snow “employs time-lapse photography in … [an] act of compression and experiments [with] the viewer’s temporal displacement from the passage of time.” So say the gallery notes.

What that means in effect is that Snow made digital time-lapse photographs of a secluded cove in the Maritimes every 10 seconds. Of the thousands of resulting images, he selected the most interesting sequences to create a moving picture – a condensed chronicle of a single landscape as it is transformed by the unfolding North Atlantic weather. The fog rolls in, shrouding the hills in gray, and then breaks up. Sunlight emerges, and, as the clouds pass over the scene, they cast their shadows across the now-green hills. The fog returns.

Time is indeed compressed and, speeded up as it is, disorienting. But the result is more than an intellectual exercise. The experience of watching Condensation confounds but also enchants: the sweep of cloud shadows over the landscape is breath-taking.

SSHTOORRTY plays a similar game with time. Here, you can piece together a narrative – of sorts. A man, carrying a painting, enters an apartment and is greeted by a young woman. He argues with another man (her husband?), and the artist breaks the painting over the man’s head. The artist, followed by the woman, walks to the door and leaves. She turns back into the apartment.

Except that Snow cut the film in half and superimposed the two halves. Often baffling, the film is short enough (as the title suggests) that you can watch it several times and thus piece together a narrative timeline. But for me, what made SSHTOORRTY worth the time was the moment, toward the end of the piece, when the artist and the woman simultaneously enter and leave the apartment. Time folds in on itself. All time is eternally present.

Slyly, slowly, almost by sleight of hand, Snow leaves you contemplating some fairly heavy questions. Why do we remember the past but not the future? What happens to the present? Why does time sometimes fly and sometimes stop?  What is time?

Now Never Waits

For my day job, I’ve started posting on Twitter and, while a number of old friends are appalled to hear me say it, I find the work oddly enjoyable. Tweets are just latter-day headlines, and writing headlines – distilling complex stories into a limited space in language intriguing enough to get people's attention – was a blast, a real writer’s challenge. 

And so it is with Twitter.

What I do find troublesome, though, is the way tweeting distorts time. For I have found that systematic Twitter-posting – tweeting as a job – casts everything into the present tense. Recollecting in tranquility? Forget about it. Everything that matters is now, and now never waits.

For me, the anxiety Twitter produces isn’t about the end of civilization or the trivialization of discourse or any of the earnest plaints you hear about our speeded-up, hyper-connected world. Nothing so grand is in play for me. No, it’s that Twitter as a routine part of my work day reminds me, again and again and again, that the present moment – this time now – is already past. It’s a Memento Mori Machine disguised as a social media app. 

My dealings with Twitter have, as you can see here, got me thinking too much about the passage of time and also – and bear with me here – about what is so transfixing about photography.  

Philadelphia’s current art season gave me even more opportunity to reflect on the nature of time, with the revival of the Lucinda Childs-Philip Glass-Sol Lewitt collaboration, Dance, at the Kimmel Center setting the stage.

Dance and Time

A landmark of Minimalism, Dance is deceptively simple, featuring a seemingly endless deployment of dancers crossing the stage on a grid. (For a sense of the piece, take a look at this video clip.) Like Glass’s score, the choreography is repetitive, with only slight variations on the basic steps, and the effect is mesmerizing. Watching the dancers, listening to the music, you feel suspended in the now – but then Sol LeWitt's contribution to the whole kicks in and the present performance becomes haunted by the past.

Projected on a scrim in front of the stage, the LeWitt film stars the original cast of dancers, recorded as they rehearsed the piece. When Dance premiered in 1979, the audience saw the flesh-and-blood dancers chasing, and being chased by, images of themselves. 

But in the 31 years since, a new generation of dancers has taken over on stage, and now what you see has been transformed into an even deeper meditation on time. The dancers on stage act out an eternal present while ghost dancers offer up a performance from a long-ago past.

The Snapshot and Time

Now look at the photograph at the top of this post, and you look at a past present – an enigmatic, long-ago moment offered up to us in the now. 

I found this picture in a bin of similarly unremarkable snapshots at Mostly Books, a local used bookstore that sells snapshots at 79 cents a pop. I have no idea who these people were/are or what they meant to one another. I assume, of course, that they're a young family, probably on vacation, and I imagine sometimes that the marriage isn't doing all that well. But who knows who they are or what became of them? And, perhaps most intriguing of all, who can fathom why the person behind the camera chose this moment to release the shutter?

This picture -- and all those others I rummage through in the snapshot bin -- is a haunting. Here, in an ordinary snapshot as in a legendary collaboration of three major 20th-century artists, we look at ghosts.

Next up: Michael Snow at the Slought Foundation