Daniel Joseph Martinez, I Want to Go to Detroit; Cheerleaders CHEER @Simon Preston

JTF (just the facts): A total of 28 black and white photographs, framed in bond wood and unmatted or framed in white and mounted, and hung against white walls in the divided gallery space. The images in the show were taken in 1978 and 1979. The 13 prints in the front gallery area are modern light jet prints, each sized 40×29, in editions of 3+1AP. The 15 prints in the back gallery area are vintage gelatin silver prints, each sized 16×19; these prints are unique. (Installation shots at right.)Comments/Context: Looking at Daniel Joseph Martinez’ photographs in this show is a little like traveling back in time to the Southern California of the late 1970s. But while these images are rich in details and atmosphere from that period, this smart pairing of two complementary projects (male body builders and female beauty pageant contestants) opens up a complex conversation about the extremes of human body image that continues today.
Martinez’ body builders have been captured just off stage before a competition. They stand flash lit against a simple white backdrop (almost Avedon style), strutting and posing, but doing so with a bit more relaxed naturalness than they might exhibit in the heat of battle. Exaggerated muscular bodies ripple in the bright light, their curves accented by a sheen of oil. Obvious pride mixes with oversized freakishness in an over-the-top display of survival of the fittest strength taken to the limits of plausibility. There is something both impressive and sadly desperate about the life these pictures depict.
Martinez’ backstage photographs of California beauty pageants are more candid and less centered. Young women with sashes (Apple Valley, Barstow, Santa Barbara, South Coast) wear sparkly evening gowns, swimsuits, and tiaras, complemented by wavy blond Farrah Fawcett hair, feathers, and chunky heels; mothers hover on the fringes. Many of the moments have a deer in the headlights feel, the flash pulling a contestant’s vulnerable frown or unguarded glower into high contrast relief, with creepy grinning men never far from view. The sense that it is all a stage managed production comes through clearly; this is a show and not everyone is entirely keen to play along with the constant illusion of perfection.
Both bodies of work push hard on the underlying societal why of such behavior, both on the level of the individual and in the broader cultural context. They combine a documentary process with a conceptual overlay, capturing the genuine effort and the subtle comedy of these unnatural bodies and situations. While the scenes may seem plucked from times long gone, the underlying ideas are remarkably fresh and vibrant. Decades later, we’re still modifying our bodies, in ever more extreme ways, and Martinez’ 1970s critique still hits home.
Collector’s POV: The works in the show are priced as follows. The 40×29 body builder prints are $7000 each. The 16×19 beauty pageant images are being sold as a single set of 15, priced at $120000. Martinez’ work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

  • Features/Reviews: Art in America (here), Huffington Post (here)
Through October 28th
301 Broome Street
New York, NY 10002

Gordon Parks: Centennial @Howard Greenberg

JTF (just the facts): A total of 51 black and white and color photographs and 1 video, variously framed and matted, and hung against light brown walls in the main gallery space, the book alcove, the small back gallery, and one of side viewing rooms. The works in the show were made between 1941 and 1970. The black and white images are a mix of vintage and modern gelatin silver prints, sized between 9×12 and 30×20 (or reverse); no edition information was available for these prints. The color images are later pigment or Ektacolor prints; the pigment prints are sized 24×24 or 20×16 (in editions of 10 and 25 respectively), while the Ektacolor prints are sized 14×19 (with no edition information). The book alcove also includes a display case with 3 LIFE magazines. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: This centennial exhibit, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gordon Parks, successfully gives the viewer an idea of the photographer’s tremendous range and talent. The show includes photo essays and street photography made on assignment for LIFE, incisive portraits of artists and celebrities, and even a few fashion shots. Never seen color rarities from the 1950s round out the four decade selection, a treat for those already familiar with Parks and his work. And a mini-retrospective like this one would be incomplete without Parks’ now iconic American Gothic, but not to worry, it hides on a side wall, tucked into one of the viewing rooms.

Parks’ documentary work and photo essays are full of simmering tension and emotion. The Fontenelle family stands together at the poverty board desk, clinging to each other, exhausted and grimly resigned to the ruling of the bureaucracy. Gang members openly fight in Harlem streets, followed either by a tender embrace or attendance at a wake. Dirty children in Rio de Janeiro favelas play with spiders and carry water in makeshift parades. And his recently rediscovered color works capture the realities of small town segregation, picking out separate “colored” entrances at the theater, the ice cream shack, and storefront drinking fountains.

Parks’ portraiture is equally accomplished. The show includes powerful images of black leaders and celebrities, from Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael in the passion of speech making, to a sweaty, meditative Muhammad Ali and a somber Eldridge Cleaver. Duke Ellington is artfully reflected in his piano, a shadowy Langston Hughes stands with an empty picture frame, and Sugar Ray Robinson plays golf with muscular style. These portraits are consistently atmospheric, personal, and full of life.

All in, this is a solid gathering of work from Parks’ many projects and interests, and it provides an impressive and useful introduction to one of the most influential African-American photographers of the past century.

Collector’s POV: The works in the show are priced as follows. The gelatin silver prints range in price from $8500 to $25000. The pigment prints range from $5000 to $10000, and the Ektacolor prints are $12000 each. Parks’ work has only been sporadically available in the secondary markets in recent years, and many of his most famous images have not come up for sale at auction during that time. Recent prices have ranged between $1000 and $9000, but this may not be entirely representative of the market for his most important photographs.

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

Transit Hub:

  • Parks Foundation site (here)
  • Features/Reviews: New Yorker (here), Le Journal de la Photographie (here), Elizabeth Avedon (here)
  • Companion Exhibit: Contact: Gordon Parks, Ralph Ellison and “Invisible Man” (DLK COLLECTION review here)
Through October 27th

Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Body and Spirit: Andres Serrano 1987-2012 @Edward Tyler Nahem

JTF (just the facts): A total of 19 large scale color photographs, framed in black and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the entry and the divided gallery space. All of the works are Cibachrome prints with silicone and acrylic, made between 1987 and 2002. The prints on view range in size from 40×28 to 60×50 (or reverse) and are available in editions of 3, 4, 7, and 10, depending on the series. The show was curated by Walter Robinson. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: If we were to gather together the names of the most controversial photographers in the history of the medium, Andres Serrano would certainly be on the short list. While his now infamous Piss Christ would have singlehandedly been enough to earn him a coveted spot on the team, his entire artistic career has been full of provocative, often challenging, and sometimes disturbing work. Many viewers have been deeply offended by Serrano’s imagery, and he has been roundly and repeatedly condemned over the years. In project after project, he has pushed the boundaries of acceptability and taste, confronting a litany of taboos, religion, race, and death being just a few of the highly charged subjects he has openly tackled. The consistency of his point of view across the decades has in many ways worked against him I think; it has turned many people off before they even bothered to look closely. Prior to this show, I will certainly admit to having offhandedly dismissed him as a shock for shock’s sake grandstander, an opinion I unfortunately derived mostly from others rather than from my own experience of the work.

One of the unexpectedly important things to come from writing about photography on a daily basis has been that it has forced me out my own safe, self-fulfilling bubble of seeing things I already know I will like, dragging me to shows I would have never gone to otherwise. While I have of course encountered plenty of individual Serranos at auctions, art fairs, and museums over the years, this was the first time I had actively engaged an entire gallery show full of his work. The exhibit spans the last three decades, bringing together a mini-sampler from some of his best known series.

Every individual body of work on view here finds its own way to upend and unsettle, testing limits and forcing uncomfortable dialogues. A swirling bubbled abstraction from the Bodily Fluids series is made of semen and blood, a smiling African-American man is dressed in a pointed Ku Klux Klan robe, a pair of serene folded hands turn out to belong to an AIDS corpse from The Morgue series, and homeless people are photographed with the rugged glamour of a fashion shoot in three images from Nomads. I now understand both the knee-jerk reaction of finding these images deplorable and a contrasting view which finds them thoughtfully out on the edge. The late 1980s Immersion series, which is represented here by Piss Christ as well as images of the Madonna, Moses, a discus thrower and the baby Jesus, walks this same bright line, at once confrontationally crass and surprisingly vital. And a group of pictures from the more recent America series traverses a variety of societal stereotypes via uniforms and clothing, starting with the All-American fireman and boy scout, continuing with a procurement analyst and investment bank sales assistant in unexpectedly traditional African garb, and closing with a Playboy bunny and a covert to Islam in headscarf and veil. Serrano is reminding us that they are all “America”; sure they’re heavy handed and exaggerated, but his point about diversity is succinctly delivered.

I can’t say that I came away from this show a Serrano fan; I still find too many moments in his work where the effect seems too self-consciously outrageous. But the best of these works deserve respect for the real thrumming electricity that he has managed to create. We all know that he’s actively pushing our buttons and trying to get a rise out of us, but realizing that, if he can still successfully get us to stop and think once in a while, isn’t that what art is all about?

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show range in price from $22000 to $120000, with most between $30000 and $40000; Piss Christ is on loan and NFS. Serrano’s work is consistently available in the secondary markets, with recent prices ranging from roughly $5000 to $160000.

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

Transit Hub:

  • Features/Reviews: New Yorker (here), Huffington Post (here), NY Post (here)

Body and Spirit: Andres Serrano 1987-2012
Through October 26th

Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art
37 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

Artie Vierkant @Higher Pictures

JTF (just the facts): A total of 6 sculptural photographic objects, mounted unframed and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are UV prints on thick machine cut sintra, made in 2012. Five of the works are roughly rectangular, ranging in size from 14×59 to 19×55; the other work on display is roughly square, at 54×56. All of the works are unique. This is Vierkant’s first solo show in New York. (Installation shots at right.)
Comments/Context: While my itinerant wanderings through the galleries and museums of New York are mostly about looking at and thinking about the art, I would be a liar if I didn’t say that there is a healthy component of socialization and information transfer that goes on as well. From time to time, the endless chatter inside the photography bubble converges around certain ideas or artists that seem to be particularly relevant or of the moment. In my experience, for the past few months, the work of Artie Vierkant has been one of those recurring themes, his images popping up in group shows and his name echoing in idle conversation. Folks are paying attention more than you might expect for a generally unknown artist.
In a certain way, I think this is happening more for the elegance and timeliness of his ideas than for the end points of his artworks. For nearly its entire history, photography has been concerned with the final print as the ultimate and definitive expression of the will of the artist. In our post Internet digital age, Vierkant calls this whole mindset into question, cutting the Gordian knot of what digitization means with a single easy stroke. His view is that the art object now floats between multiple instantiations, unlimited by the traditional boundaries of medium. In this world, there is no original or better copy, the digital file (or software code) being just as valid or important as the gallery print. The “data” of the art is simply presented or represeneted in different ways, moving back and forth between the logical and the physical, taking into account the nature of the communities with which it is interacting.
The works on the walls at Higher Pictures were constructed in PhotoShop, starting with geometric forms and straightforward gradients. The colorful abstractions were then layered iteratively, using filters, skew angles and color mixing to create stuttering, overlapped shapes built from shared elements. Different “final” compositions have been time stamped, as the process continued and additional incarnations/versions were conceived. There are fades, blurs, wipes, and arcs, both pure in their brightness and perfectly flat, the appearance of space squashed into a single plane. As objects, the prints have an unexpected texture, a matte finish that somehow seems sparkly without being glossy; as digital files on the gallery website, they pop with eye-boggling crispness.
As abstractions, I think Vierkant’s images feel like first steps; I think he can (and likely will) go much further in terms of complexity and risk taking in the future. What I find exciting is the idea of the mediumless artist who moves effortlessly from one output form to another, equally happy in video, sculpture, photography or the open ended, shared, remixed, reworked data file. Some might argue that we are no longer in the realm of pure photography, but likely that definition doesn’t really matter any more. Vierkant seems to be a model for a new kind of artistic thinking, one that embraces and extends the fluidity of the digital world rather than fighting it.
Collector’s POV: The 5 rectangular pieces on view were priced at $6000 each and the larger square piece was $10000. I use the past tense on purpose here, since all of the works were sold before the show even opened. Vierkant’s work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for those collectors interested in following up.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)

Artie Vierkant
Through October 27th

Higher Pictures
980 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075

Bruce Haley @Anastasia Photo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 12 panoramic black and white photographs, mounted unframed and unmatted, and hung against grey walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are Epson archival pigment prints on Museo silver rag paper, made between 2007 and 2010. Each of the black bordered prints is sized 14×60 and is available in an edition of 5. The show also includes a short video on the artist which is displayed on a small monitor. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Bruce Haley is probably best known as an award-winning conflict photojournalist, taking pictures of wars, famine, and destruction in Burma, Somalia, Afghanistan and the former Soviet states. His newest work brings him back to the United States and to the dusty, desolate wastelands of Nevada, where marginal mining towns sprang up during boom times and now hold on with hardscrabble tenaciousness.

The twelve pictures in this show are arranged in a progression, almost like a time lapse recreation of the history of the region. The first few are geology and geography centric, like survey pictures from the 19th century, capturing the looming black cone of a small mountain and the vast, scrubby flatness of the empty valley below. Soon, the hand of man starts to appear: a lonely cinder block shed, mining walls, open pit holes, and the beginnings of a haphazard settlement of low rise buildings, temporary trailers, and pickups. Haley then moves in closer, making elegant, high contrast images of the geometric out buildings. Edges zig zag in and out, boxes and rectangles pile up on each other, scrap wood and winding towers create dense black angles, and tin siding adds vertical striping. The final photographs in the series move back to an elevated vantage point, taking in the sweep of the sprawling towns, with their dense clusters of houses, telephone poles, and decaying structures. The mining activity may have moved on to the next rich site, but these towns have endured with remarkable frontier stubbornness. So while there is clearly an echo of the ugly suburban menace of the New Topographics in a few of these images, I took away a bit more survivalist desperation, the unlikely scratching out of a life in the harshest of conditions.

I have to admit that I am a bit of skeptic when it comes to the panorama format; I think too many of these wide pictures seem gimmicky. My favorite panoramas are those made by Art Sisabaugh decades ago, where the strengths of the format were smartly matched with the superflat land of the Midwest. So I was somewhat surprised to like Haley’s panoramas as much as did. Both the pure landscapes and the city vistas play off the bigness of the sky and the horizontals of the land, and the up-close buildings have been carefully composed to take advantage of an enveloping edge to edge movement. I think part of their success also lies in their narrowness, which keeps the images tightly hemmed in even when they depict something grand and effusive. All in, Haley deftly engages the history of American landscape photography in these images, while still bringing his own voice to the ongoing dialogue.

Collector’s POV: All of the 14×60 prints in this show are priced in ratcheting editions, starting at $6500 and rising to $9000. The images are also available in a smaller 9×40 size (not on display, in a larger edition of 10); prices for these prints start at $4000 and rise to $8000. Haley’s work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Interviews: Conscientious (here), Lenscratch (here)
  • Exhibit: Fresno Art Museum, 2012 (here)

Bruce Haley
Through October 26th

Anastasia Photo
166 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002

Kate Steciw: Boundless Hyper @Toomer Labzda

JTF (just the facts): A total of 3 large scale photographic works, framed in custom oak and unmatted, and hung in the small single room gallery space. All of the works are c-prints with additional mixed media elements, made in 2012. Each of the prints is sized 60×44 and is unique. The show also includes 2 twisted metal sculptures, shown on white pedestals near the front window. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Ever since Marcel Duchamp took an ordinary white porcelain urinal, turned it upside down, painted a fictitious name on it, and boldly stated it was art, the readymade object has been part of the artistic conversation. Fast forward a century, overwhelm our society with consumer goods, and flood us with overly perfect digital imagery, and the time has certainly come for an exploration of the “Internet readymade”. Kate Steciw’s new works dive down this dark rabbit hole, combining manipulated image data and found objects into three dimensional abstractions brimming with vitality.
The three works on display in this show all begin with commercial stock photography as source material. These images are flashy and eye catching, full of saturated professional color, soulless and yet somehow with a point of view that says these unblemished manufactured things ought to be of interest to you. Steciw has taken these photographs and thrown them into the digital blender, twisting and stretching, interleaving and swirling, recombining and reassembling with facile skill, ending with fluidly chaotic flat abstractions that nearly defy identification: a bright yellow egg mixes with a fitness machine, orange fire blends with pipe fittings, and watery blue textiles intermingle with bubbled glass. These compositions are then decorated with seemingly random objects, which have been stuck directly onto the print and its frame. I can just image the AI code out in the cloud churning out the recommendations: “if you like these opalescent glass pebbles, you might also like this blue painter’s tape!” or “if you like these faux marble tiles, you should try this adhesive gauze bandage!” I’m sure that there is some hidden logic connecting all these sculptural and collage items, and yet the puzzling mystery of the Infidel decal in Arabic, the cartoon horse sticker, and the Mason symbol seems oddly appropriate in our opaquely complex digital age.

I think these works place Steciw in a different category than the countless digital image appropriators and manipulators at work today; I think she is coming from a different conceptual place. She’s way out on the edge where the photographs have become cold objects and the digital transformations have become a dance recognizable to the computer savvy. She’s playing with both virtual and physical space, with texture and surface, the stock photographs and the other accoutrements abstracted and yet still somewhat representative of their original selves. It’s a new aesthetic, with new associations, firmly rooted in our ever evolving Internet reality.

Collector’s POV: The 3 mixed media prints in this exhibit are priced at $6500 each. Steciw’s work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here) and tumblr (here)
  • Feature/Review: Hyperallergic (here)
Through October 28th
100A Forsyth Street
New York, NY 10002

Erica Baum, Naked Eye Anthology @Bureau

JTF (just the facts): A total of 12 black and white and color photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung in the single room gallery space and the smaller annex next door. All of the works are archival pigment prints, made between 2010 and 2012. The works come from two separate projects: Naked Eye Volume Two and Naked Eye Anthology. The prints range in size from roughly 15×16 to 19×13 (or reverse) and are each available in editions of 6+2AP. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Erica Baum’s recent photographs examine the interplay between the physical reality of yellowing paperback books and the two dimensional flatness of a camera-mediated image. The result is a set of abstract images that provide elusive hints at context or narrative but remain pleasingly compressed and tactile.

The dominant visual motif in these pictures is repeated vertical striping, made by fanning out the inked page edges of the books and splaying them at differing widths like a Minimalist line drawing. The aging paperbacks are tinted in purple and red, green and faded orange, offset by the darkening of the paper itself. Between these areas of lines and a sprinkling of cut off letters, small snippets and scraps of halftone imagery peek out: a man sitting in a chair, Brigitte Bardot, a woman smoking, a terrier, a leg, the face of Jean Moral. The story they might have been illustrating (trashy or serious) is unknowable, so the pictures have become separated from any particular context and immersed in the overall abstraction. In a few images, wider strips of adjacent photographs have been laid edge to edge in triangles and trapezoids like a collage, creating a rebus of unrecognizable image fragments that interconnect with surprising harmony.

What I find intriguing about these photographs is that Baum has appropriated the entire book form (not just an image or a passage of text), and then manipulated that form in ways that take advantage of its inherent physical properties. Barbara Astman did a similar thing with newspapers a few years ago, but Baum’s works feel both more reverently literary and more richly conceptual.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this exhibit are priced at $3300 each. Baum’s work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

  • Interview: Mousse (here)
  • Review: New Yorker (here)
Through October 21st

Bureau

127 Henry Street
New York, NY 10002

Contact: Gordon Parks, Ralph Ellison, and “Invisible Man” @Howard Greenberg

JTF (just the facts): A total of 25 black and white photographs, framed in white and variously matted, and hung in the second gallery space to the left of the main entrance. The show combines prints and contact sheets made between 1948 and 1952; there are 13 individual prints and 12 contact sheets on display. The single images are a mix of vintage gelatin silver prints and more recent pigment prints, sized between 8×10 and 20×16 (or reverse); the later prints are available in editions of 5 or 10. The contact sheets are all recent pigment prints, sized 24×20 (or reverse). The show also includes 3 magazine spreads from LIFE, displayed directly on the wall under plexiglas. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Of all the exhibits dedicated to the work of Gordon Parks on view in the city right now (and there are several), this small show is my favorite. Curated by the artist Glenn Ligon, it primarily examines the images Parks made in 1952 to illustrate some of the scenes from Ralph Ellison’s ground-breaking book Invisible Man. The exhibit dives deep into important single images from the project and the related contact sheets that show Parks’ artistic process, and then pairs them with more documentary-style street photographs made by Parks in Harlem a few years earlier (again with the associated contact sheets). The result is a show that smoothly moves back and forth between fact and fiction, between real life and literature, all within the context of Parks’ compositional eye.
The images Parks made for Invisible Man have a definite sense of the staged or the imagined. A man peers out from under a manhole cover in the middle of the street with an uncertain, fugitive look in his eye, another works turntables amid a light blub covered underground retreat (complete with superimposed city lights above), and various suited men dash with suitcases on darkened sidewalks. The contact sheets show Parks experimenting with poses and angles, looking for just the right range of quietly surreal tension and contrast.
What’s amazing is that many of Parks’ street scenes from Harlem exhibit some of these same kind of moments, albeit drawn from everyday life. Pedestrians trudge in the rain under a movie marquee announcing Dealers in Crime and Hoodlum Empire, while lines of abandoned shoes lie on the sidewalk. Most of these photographs document lingering life on stoops and outside storefronts: watching the world go by, yawning, arguing, in front of the Indian herb store or the grocer advertising neck bones. The contact sheets show Parks making multiple exposures of each chosen vignette, refining the spatial relationships until the gestures coalesced.
Seeing these two sets of photographs intermingled, along with their respective outtakes, helped me to see the literary in Parks’ street pictures, to understand how his selections from the bustle of life were informed by an aim for a certain tone. His editing wasn’t just a search for the cleanest negative or the crispest composition, but was often keyed by an atmospheric connection of some kind; he was looking for something in particular when he was out there with his camera. Overall, not only does this small show deliver some fantastic images, it opens up a window into Parks’ working process, which was far more nuanced and complex than I had ever understood.

Collector’s POV: The works in the show are priced as follows. The vintage gelatin silver prints range in price from $8500 to $15000, while the more recent pigment prints are either $5000 or $6500. The contact sheets are $2400 each. Surprisingly, Parks’ work is only intermittently available in the secondary markets, and many of his best known works have not come up for sale at auction in a long time. Recent prices have ranged between $1000 and $9000, but this may not be entirely representative of the market for his most iconic photographs.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

  • Parks Foundation site (here)
  • Review: New Yorker (here)
Through October 27th

Howard Greenberg Gallery

41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

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