John Baldessari, Installation Works: 1987-1989 @Marian Goodman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 3 large scale photographic installations, displayed in the north and south galleries and in the smaller north viewing room. The works are made up of archival pigment prints or vintage black and white/color photographs, with latex/oil paint and oil tints; the modern prints are mounted on Lexan or Plexiglas. The works were made between 1987 and 1989, with some of the prints made in 2013. Dimensions are variable. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: This show takes us back to the late 1980s, to a focal point in the long artistic career of John Baldessari. In the earlier part of that decade, Baldessari’s multi-part photocompositions of film stills and found photographs had been critically well received, and the conceptual underpinnings of appropriation and mediated viewing which had been so much a part of the CalArts way of thinking were becoming more broadly accepted. By the end of the decade, Baldessari had started to experiment with larger installations of these multi-part works, extending and expanding the way they were presented. The three works on view here provide a snapshot of that particular period of time, and highlight how Baldessari was challenging conventional notions of viewing space.

While these works include many of Baldessari’s important visual motifs (vertical ladders of images, colored dots obscuring faces, the following of eyes and sight lines, the rebus like quality of constructed juxtapositions), their main innovation is the destruction of the idea that there is any right place to stand to see them. No longer is the viewer asked to stand square in front of an image hung 57 inches from the floor, with the remainder of the works in the show hung in a toilet bowl ring around the gallery. In fact, that whole behavior is impossible with these works, as Baldessari has enlarged the scale of the images to such an extent that standing too close makes them impossible to take in. He has also hung the images in unlikely locations: near the floor, up high bumping the ceiling, in the nooks and crannies of the space rather than always on the broad central walls. The effect is one of space set free, of photographs in complex dialogue with one another in a single room installation form, where the head spinning whole trumps the significance of any of the individual parts. There is no longer one single dominant viewpoint, and instead the viewer is subjected to a shifting set of sculptural perspectives, connections, and spatial relationships as he/she moves through the gallery.

In the best of these works, there is the sense that the photographs are talking with each other, physically oriented by Baldessari to face one another and interact. Whether its the conversation of a dwarf and a rhino, a giraffe and a man with a telescope both looking at (and silently commenting on) the same ladder of images, or desert wagon trains and arctic mush sleds both following baby polar bears, it’s as if the pictures don’t need a viewer; they’re connecting all on their own. With these works and others from this period, Baldessari freed photography from the spatial constraints of the standard frame and opened up the idea of more complex installations of carefully sequenced imagery. Not long after these pieces, Baldessari started to build up the works into three dimensions, adding jutting space and thickness to his spatial repertoire.

More generally, the innovations that Baldessari introduced with these installations are lastingly fresh, and in many ways, not enough contemporary photographers have internalized the radical ideas embodied in them. Perhaps the new challenges and opportunities offered by installations of digital imagery will rekindle an interest and appreciation for these smartly original constructions, as there are still plenty of photographic lessons to be learned from the way these artworks have been imagined.

Collector’s POV: The photographic installations in this show are priced between $1000000 and $1300000. Baldessari’s work has become more consistently available in the secondary markets for Contemporary Art in recent years. Prices in the past decade for his photo-based pieces have ranged from roughly $10000 to nearly $1 million, with most of the larger multi-part works made since the 1980s routinely fetching six figures. Some of Baldessari’s paintings have run even higher, up to $4.4 million in 2007.
Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Catalog raisonné site (here)
Through August 23rd
24 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

Melanie Bonajo, Furniture Bondage

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2009 by Kodoji Press (here). Softcover, 52 pages, with 17 color and 8 black and white images. The book also includes a list of model’s names and a short text by the artist. (Spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: For the past several months, a vision of contemporary photography as a series of interlocked Venn diagrams has been percolating around in my head. The gist of this thinking is that to a greater and greater degree, we are seeing overlap between previously separate artistic mediums, creating intersections zones where multiple media are mixing in unexpected ways, all of which is then upended by the underlying digital revolution which affects nearly everything. While there is certainly some slower step evolution taking place inside the formal boundaries of the contemporary photography bubble (most of it driven by the ongoing absorption of digital thinking and tools), much of the most drastic artistic mutation that is twisting the medium is taking place in these nether edges, where the rules are looser and the traditions less solidified. To my eye, these radical combination areas are where much of the most creative action is taking place, and where we ought to be paying attention if we want to see where the medium is really going.
Melanie Bonajo’s Furniture Bondage series is just the kind of hybrid work I am interested in thinking more about. It brings together photography, sculpture, and performance in almost equal parts, the result being something a little of each but altogether new. Her photographs are images of staged constructions, where anonymous nude female models are tied up and otherwise bound and burdened with a dizzying array of mundane household objects. My first reaction to the works was that they were a little like the precariously balanced found object sculptures of Fischli & Weiss, but with the scaffolding of a human body added to the complex physics equation. With faces turned away or hidden by hair, the bodies become malleable objects, jammed into the space made by a desk chair, tied up with a phone cord, folded into an aluminum ladder, or bent into a wooden shelf unit. They act like center of gravity towers that hold the sculptures together, with any number of additional objects added on or perched on top. In this sense, the bodies are remarkably mute and inert, just one more limp sculptural object in a gathering of textures, colors, and jutting lines.
But if we step back and see these assemblages as performances, an entirely different reading of the works can take place. The female subjects are wrapped up and trapped by their possessions (the bondage motif), literally carrying the heavy load of their stuff. There is an innate physicality to what’s going on, a bearing of weight and a contorting of bodies. Without much imagination, these images can be easily connected to a long line of body-based performance artists, both those who explored the limits of the flesh and those who had a more direct feminist angle, the suffocating cleaning products, kitchen utensils, and laundry racks offering biting commentary on traditional gender roles.
And depending on our vantage point, we might simply characterize these works as straightforward photographic nudes, albeit with a conceptual feel. The material objects and additional items surround the sitters like a still life, a mountain of daily clutter giving context and implied narrative to the elegance of the nude form. The photographs might feel equally at home with the witty early 1970s conceptual experiments of William Wegman or Robert Cumming or at the end of a comprehensive nude retrospective, in visual dialogue with a Dada nude from Man Ray, a bondage nude from Araki, and an interrupted windowsill and coffee table nude from Friedlander.

I like the back and forth instability of this mixed media approach, the alchemy of borrowing from various aesthetic tool boxes. It allows for multiple readings of the imagery and multiple placements within different cultural and artistic frameworks, all with a freshness that only comes from deliberately coloring outside the lines. If we’re looking for the next set of photographic disruptions, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that they will come not from within, but from the external friction zones, where chaotic idea recombination like Melanie Bonajo’s is the norm.

Collector’s POV: Melanie Bonajo is represented by PPOW Gallery in New York (here), where this body of work was shown in 2009. Bonajo’s work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail remains the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Interview: I Heart Photograph, 2008 (here)

Ansel Adams: The Politics of Contemplation @MoMA PS1

JTF (just the facts): A total of 50 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung against white walls in a series of three connected rooms. All of the works are vintage gelatin silver prints, made between 1932 and 1968. The show is part of the larger EXPO 1: New York show which fills the museum. Other photographers included in the larger exhibit include Matthew Barney, Agnes Denes, Mitch Epstein, João Maria Gusmão, Taiyo Kimura, Zoe Leonard, and Mikhael Subotzky. The Adams micro show was organized by Roxana Marcoci, Klaus Biesenbach, and Lucy Gallun. (Installation shots at right, courtesy MoMA PS1. Images taken by Matthew Septimus.)

Comments/Context: Roughly a decade ago, the Ansel Adams at 100 show blanketed the nation, making stops in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York (along with a few foreign venues as well), and basically set the permanent standard for Adams scholarship. It was a comprehensive, chronological, and exhaustively researched retrospective, with plenty of surprises and treasures. I particularly remember seeing multiple prints of the same iconic images from different decades, showing how Adams’ printing style had evolved over time. With this show as a singular example but just one of many great Adams exhibits over the years, it’s hard to imagine that there is anything more to say about Adams that hasn’t already been said better by someone else previously. And yet, the curators of this small show stepped up to that challenge and tried something radical, their approach bringing an entirely fresh perspective to Adams and his work.

The larger EXPO 1: New York exhibit of which this show is just one module takes on a variety of contemporary environmental and ecological issues and explores how artists are addressing these issues in their work. Adams’ passion for environmental preservation and his involvement in the Sierra Club and other organizations is now old hat, so his inclusion in this survey is at first glance an odd and awkward choice; he’s not exactly a current voice on climate change or global warming. The interest here comes not from a tired rehashing of his greatest hits, but from an unexpected conceptual what if exercise as posed by the curators. What if we sliced through Adams’ prolific career and pulled out specific subjects he returned to again and again? And what if we filtered his whole aesthetic through the mind of the Bechers, paring him back to a documentary exploration of changing natural forms and landscapes? The result is Adams turned into a hard core detail tracker, a conceptual series maker and systematic watcher, and I have to say, it’s a fascinating transformation.

This selection of photographs proves that Adams returned again and again to the same subjects, often placing his camera in nearly the very same spot year after year, taking basically the same picture from the same vantage point, the details and atmospheric moods changing through the seasons. Half Dome is alternately decorated with cottonwoods, thunderclouds, and white billowy clouds, while El Capitan is seen at sunrise, in shadow, amid misty winter haze, and set off by the silhouette of a winter tree. It’s almost as if he was intent of making typologies, capturing these landscapes in every potential state. The plume of Old Faithful in Yellowstone runs the entire spectrum from white to black (with several intermediate grey steps), while various waterfalls are framed with deadpan clarity, their differences of angle and splash captured with the same precision as a series of Becher water towers. Moons, cliffs, rivers, aspens, firs in snow, every one becomes a set of subject matter motifs, a fugue of theme and variation. Adams’ famous surf sequence seems perfectly matched to this way of thinking, a series of images of the same set up, the natural ebb and flow of the white bubbly waves providing the elements of chance and change.

So while nearly all of these pictures will be familiar to most, the way they are presented in this show turns the bombastic natural drama of Adams into just one aspect of a broader and more structured vision. Each image is no longer a virtuoso stand alone performance exactly, but a part of a larger whole, a variant of the underlying reality, or in musical terms, a different way to play the natural score. The hanging points to discipline and organization in his thinking, to his technical prowess channeled into an equally formal way of approaching the land. In a certain way, it makes Adams look much more boldly contemporary than we normally give him credit for. That’s an entirely out-of-the-box way to see Adams, and proof positive of some smart curatorial thinking.

Collector’s POV: Since this is a museum show, there are, of course, no posted prices. Adams’ work is ubiquitous at auction, with dozens of prints and portfolios coming up for sale every season. Given large edition sizes, some of the prints are still very affordable (finding buyers for a few thousand dollars) while large vintage images of iconic works routinely stretch well into six figures (a few as high as $600-700K).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

  • Features/Reviews: Daily Beast (here), NY Times (here), Village Voice (here), Haber’s Art Reviews (here)

Ansel Adams: The Politics of Contemplation
(part of EXPO 1: New York)
Through September 2nd

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101

Daido Moriyama: Sunflower

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2011 by Match and Company (here). Hardcover, 88 pages, with 64 black and white images. The photographs included were taken between 1965 and 2009. There are no essays or texts. (Spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: Daido Moriyama’s photographs of flowers aren’t like most floral pictures. They aren’t intricate botanical specimens, up-close geometries, or bright blossoms captured at the peak of their freshness and beauty. Moriyama’s flowers are much darker and edgier, turning floral innocence into something alternately sultry, menacing, decaying or decidedly urban. This book brings together a broad sample of Moriyama’s flowers, taken over four prolific decades, offering a subject matter-based view into his singular aesthetic.

This edit applies perhaps the loosest possible definition of “floral” to the photographs that have been included here. While there are a handful of single images of sunflowers, roses, hydrangeas, tulips, and the like, as well as some wider shots of fields and cherry trees, for the most part, Moriyama has avoided straight-on floral portraits. Instead, his flowers are found in the flow of daily life, in bursting bouquets wrapped in plastic and tin foil, reflected in shop windows, and discarded in dingy gutters and alleys. They are often seen in flash lit glare, looming out of the surrounding darkness with out of place, tactile seductiveness.

Moriyama’s restless eye for the contrast between flowers and their surroundings extends in all directions, from printed floral clothing and tawdry motel furnishings to funeral wreaths and elaborate tattoos. Patterned blouses and skirts, swimsuits and shoulder bags all add a pop of flower power to an otherwise shadowy world, while bedspreads, curtains, and worn carpet with floral prints add a touch of faded energy to empty rooms. Hints of floral motifs show up in even more subtle and unexpected places in Moriyama’s world, in lace lingerie and underwear and on ironwork benches and shop awnings. Even fireworks, dancefloor confetti, and nighttime snowflakes become vaguely floral when seen from the right angle.

The best of Moriyama’s flowers have a lush eroticism that feeds on his dark palette; whether literal or figurative, they have a lurking sense of knowing danger or spent beauty. Even the cheapest and ugliest of his flowers have some seedy come hither attraction, trading pure elegance for something a little grittier.

Collector’s POV: Daido Moriyama has been a prolific book maker, and the specialized secondary markets and photobook auctions are routinely stocked with vintage rarities for deep pocketed collectors. Morimaya’s photographs have also become more widely available at auction in recent years, with print prices generally ranging from $2000 and $40000.

Transit Hub:

  • Artist site (here)
  • Features/Reviews: Japan Exposures (here)

XL: 19 New Acquisitions in Photography @MoMA

JTF (just the facts): A group show of the work of 14 photographers, variously framed and matted, and hung in a series of 4 divided rooms on the 3rd floor of the museum. All of the works are recent acquisitions. (Installation shots at right.)
The following photographers have been included in the exhibit, with the number of works on view and image details in parentheses:
  • Yto Barrada (1 set of 4 chromogenic color prints, 2004)
  • Liz Deschenes (1 chromogenic color print, 2009)
  • Robert Frank (7 gelatin silver prints, 1976-1998)
  • Paul Graham (21 pigmented inkjet prints, 1981-1982/2011)
  • Birgit Jürgenssen (1 gelatin silver print with applied ink, 1972, 1 gelatin silver print, 1976)
  • Jürgen Klauke (1 set of 4 gelatin silver prints, 1974-1975)
  • Běla Kolářová (4 gelatin silver prints, 1962-1963)
  • Lynn Hershman Leeson (3 gelatin silver print, 1974-1978, 1 16mm film, 1978, 5 chromogenic color prints, 1976-1978/2003, 1 silver dye bleach print, 1976, 4 chromogenic color prints, 1975-1976, 1 chromogenic color print, 1977/1999, 1 modacrylic fiber wig, 1 pigmented inkjet print, 1978, 1 offset lithograph, 1974, 1 pigmented inkjet print, 1975/2003)
  • Dora Maurer (1 set of 24 gelatin silver prints and graphite on paper, 1972, 1 set of 28 gelatin silver prints and graphite on paper with 1 map, 1979)
  • Oscar Muñoz (1 set of 12 chromogenic color prints, 2007/2012)
  • Mariah Robertson (1 chromogenic color print, 2012)
  • Allan Sekkula (18 dye transfer prints and 7 text panels, 1988-1995)
  • Stephen Shore (1 set of 32 gelatin silver prints, 1969/2013, 16 chromogenic prints, 1972-1979/2013, 4 chromogenic prints, 2012)
  • VALIE EXPORT (3 gelatin silver prints, 1968/2011, 1 gelatin silver print, 1968, 1 set of 40 gelatin silver prints with pencil and pen on paper, 1968/1973, 1 gelatin silver print with package of cigarettes, 1970/2005, 4 gelatin silver prints, 1972)

Additional works by Taryn Simon, Phil Collins, Stan Douglas, Leslie Hewitt, and Hank Willis Thomas will be added to the exhibit on August 23rd.

Comments/Context: The everyday trade-offs that are faced by museum accession committees and curators are often much more complicated and multi-faceted than outsiders might imagine. Start with a fixed budget (and one that it is inevitably smaller than might be desired) and an existing permanent collection with its own particular strengths and weaknesses, and add to that mix a shifting set of priorities, personalities, and upcoming shows. Should precious acquisition dollars be spent on new and emerging work that is representative of the current trends, or should gaping holes in the collection be filled with key masterworks? And which gaps in the collection are most pressing (assuming a perfect “solution” could be found at the right price)? If we can ascribe intention to the acquisitions process (and not just the random arrival of donations and gifts), those works a museum acquires in any given period can tell us something about how these choices are being made.

This show brings together a selection of MoMA’s recent photography acquisitions and mostly finds the museum shoring up its foundations and deepening its commitment to certain thematic ideas. It’s clear that Paul Graham, Stephen Shore, and Robert Frank are critical photographers in the history of the medium, so it’s not surprising to see the museum filling in their holdings of these three masters; perhaps what is more unexpected is that this work wasn’t already in the collection. New acquisitions include a selection of prints (unfortunately recent) from Paul Graham’s early 1980s color classic A1: The Great North Road, a set of Robert Frank’s darker, more psychologically raw later multi-image works (1970s-1990s), and a sampler of Stephen Shore’s work, from modern prints from American Surfaces and Uncommon Places to an early conceptual piece and some recent images from Ukraine.

Thematically, the intersecting circles of feminism, gender studies, performance, and female photographers continue to get a strong push from the museum, often with a European bent. Běla Kolářová’s circular radiograms from the early 1960s are paired with Dora Mauer’s 1970s conceptual studies in the opening gallery, and a few rooms later, VALIE EXPORT, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Birgit Jürgenssen are collected in more breadth and depth. It’s undeniably clear that the museum is interested in the evolving aesthetic and conceptual ideas in this strain of photography, and in using these and other artists as a platform for more current discussions of female identity.

The last gallery in the current show (another room will be added in August when the Brandt show comes down) is a grab bag of more recent work, from Alan Sekkula’s comprehensive documentation of global port cities and seafaring industries to Liz Deschenes’ vibrating field of abstract dots. Both Mariah Robertson’s looping expressionistic roll of photograms and the systematically woven portraits of Oscar Muñoz seem like strong additions to the collection. That said, I look forward to the inclusion of the final room later in the summer, as the current configuration seems woefully incomplete in terms of exciting new photography.

All in, this is a summer group show without a theme, a disconnected but high quality gathering of photographs that provide a trail of bread crumbs for those interested in charting the museum’s point of view. As always, the new acquisitions look like a delicate balance of reinforcing the core strengths of the collection, following the interests of the curators, and attempting to capture the best of what’s new.

Collector’s POV: Since this is a museum exhibition, there are, of course, no posted prices for the works on view. As such, we’ll pass on the normal discussion of pricing trends and secondary market history that would usually appear here.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
 
Transit Hub:
  • Features/Reviews: Opening Ceremony (here)

XL: 19 New Acquisitions in Photography

Through January 6
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019

Ron Jude, Other Nature

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by The Ice Plant (here). Hardcover, 80 pages, with 39 color images. Aside from a short Kafka quote, there are no essays or texts. (Spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: There is something truly wondrous about picking up an unknown photobook and having it grab you. Unlike gallery and museum shows which relentlessly come and go with the changing seasons, a photobook is permanent, an artifact to be unearthed at any time in the future and enjoyed by its future discoverer. Some of you (especially the photobook crazed among you) will wonder why I would review Ron Jude’s Other Nature some five years after its publication, but the truth of the matter is that I just found it. While I had tangentially heard about Jude’s work, I hadn’t ever seen any of his prints in person, nor had I taken the time to track down one of his books. So for me, seeing this book was entirely fresh and new, an introduction to a photographer I had meant to investigate.

A first flip through the pages comes off a bit dull and boring: medium range scraggly landscapes interspersed with nondescript hotel room details, all offered in deadpan color clarity. But with longer looking, both sets of pictures start to reveal themselves as quite a bit more thoughtful. Jude’s landscapes have compositional echoes of early 1980s Lewis Baltz (San Quentin Point) and Robert Adams (Los Angeles basin), but without the same suburbanization/ecological point of view. In fact, they have no point of view at all; there is no obvious sense of location, no potential narrative, nothing but an interrupted, blocked view of the land, often decorated with the lazy detritus of human involvement. Overgrown greenery, thick evergreen hedges, dry scrubland decorated with rusty oil drums, sandy desolation with the twist of a garden hose, every image is a reductive smack in the face, the opposite of what we think a landscape should be.

Jude’s interior still lifes are equally familiar yet unknowable. Doors and windows are closed, and artificial surfaces and textures stand in for reality. Fake wood paneling, vegetal vine patterns in drab carpeting, the synthetic stickiness of an extra blanket in the closet, the shiny plastic of an empty pastry rack, they all try to give us a clue to a larger story, but ultimately fail. When interleaved with the outdoor landscapes, a rhythm is created, moving back and forth between outside and inside with a frustration that borders on subtle tweaking comedy. There is no way into this body of work, and that, in a certain way, is the insightful point.

So what Jude has done is actually made a book of landscapes that aren’t landscapes, in the sense that they don’t function in the way that normal landscapes do. His project is more of a conceptual deconstruction of the genre, breaking each image down until it stands right on the knife edge of narrative plausibility, teasing us with our preconceptions but ultimately running off laughing. The hotel interiors provide the palate cleanser between courses of thwarted intention, where clean geometries balance the unruly wildness of the natural world. Seen together and in careful sequence, the images upend our sense of how a photograph is supposed to operate. That deliberate removal of narrative is a powerful concept, one that left me impressed with just how smart this book is.

Collector’s POV: Ron Jude is represented by Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica, CA (here). Jude’s work has little or no secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

Transit Hub:

  • Artist site (here)
  • Features/Reviews: Fraction (here), 5B4 (here), The Photobook (here)
  • Interviews: Ahorn (here)

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