Mark Morrisroe: From This Moment On @Artists Space

JTF (just the facts): A retrospective exhibit of roughly 190 photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung against grey partitions in a series of 6 adjacent rooms and their side walls. Given the large number and wide range of works on display, I have noted the details (as available) on a room by room basis:

Room 1: 11 gum prints, 1981
Room 2: 23 c-prints, 1979-1980; 1 glass case of collage pages
Room 3: 17 Polaroids, each roughly 3×4, some toned, 1985/undated
Room 4: 44 Polaroids, each roughly 3×4, interspersed with 7 larger toned gelatin silver prints, 1979-1989
Room 5: 31 prints in a variety of processes, including colorized/toned gelatin silver, c-print photograms, gelatin silver photograms, gelatin silver x-rays and other combinations, 1986-1987; 3 glass cases of magazines, cut-outs, collages, drawings, and journal pages
Room 6: 59 c-print negative sandwiches, some with ink, marker, or other residues along the border areas, hung in large grids, 1982-1988
Side wall of last room: 1 c-print, 1 c-print negative, 1 Polaroid, 1 gelatin silver print

Unfortunately, no photography was allowed in the galleries, so there are no installation shots for this review.

Comments/Context: First, let’s start with an admission. Prior to walking into this show, I really hadn’t ever heard of Mark Morrisroe. If you read the many features, reviews, and articles about this exhibit (several linked below), you’ll find that nearly all of them lead in with a retelling of the back story of Morrisroe’s life, a now seemingly mythical/tragic/nostalgic story of living fast and dying young. But I didn’t steep myself in this cult of personality until after I saw the show, so what follows is really a response to the photography itself, irrespective of the trajectory of his famously short life (he died of AIDS at the age of 30 in 1989).

While Morrisroe’s artistic output was surprisingly diverse, I think it is possible to synthesize it down into three major categories, with some intermixing and overlap between the three buckets: color candids, black and white Polaroids (primarily nudes, portraits, and self portraits), and process experiments. Morrisroe’s color photographs are generally taken with a Nan Goldin-like snapshot aesthetic, most being casual portraits of people in and around his particular social scene, many preening and performing for the camera. Exuberance and self-consciousness are mixed in equal parts in his subjects’ experimentation with different invented personas, genders, and personalities.

Morrisroe’s smaller black and white work is altogether more inward and personal, his search for identity captured in different facets of emotion. Shadows and blurs add a layer of romantic elegance to simple shots of Morrisroe and his friends and lovers, often seen in his bedroom or apartment staring into the camera in a variety of moods. These photographs are close in, the nudes both authentic and informal, running the gamut of the playful and provocative in his early days to the harrowing, emaciated decay of the later years. In some of the works, Morrisroe modified the surface of the picture, adding faint toning or washes of chemicals, further softening and obscuring the crisp reality. All of these images, and particularly the self-portraits, have a time capsule immediacy, where gritty, atmospheric moments are captured and then gone, the desires wispy and ephemeral.

I was most impressed with Morrisroe’s wide ranging experiments with photographic process. He seems to have been a bit of a mad scientist, combining and recombining elements of collage and photogram in ever more complex compositions, adding layers of gay porn magazine cutouts and object silhouettes to both black and white and color designs. He even found a way to incorporate some of his own x-rays and dental records into these vivid inventions. The end result is somewhat reminiscent of a more intimate and personal Robert Heinecken, but with brighter, more acidic colors. His “negative sandwich” prints have a more indistinct, almost gestural quality, the nudes and still lifes darker and fuzzier, often with tone-matched scratchings and crude notations drawn all over the borders and edges like simplistic graffiti. The last two rooms of the show that house these process-centric works seem to have an almost manic quality, of an artist brimming with ideas and struggling to edit and make sense of them all. I would certainly enjoy seeing a deeper, more systematic exploration of these particular images, as I think they display the most raw, unchanneled, innovation.

All in, this expansive retrospective depicts Morrisroe as part social animal, part shape shifting searcher, and part lively artistic experimenter, and successfully places some order and context around his various bodies of work. Having seen this show, I think I can now more accurately categorize Morrisroe in the larger field if 1980s photography, and better understand his connections to Mapplethorpe and others. I also came away with the itching, unanswerable question of what unexpected surprises this man might actually have been capable of, had he been given more time to refine and evolve his artistic vision; there’s undeniably a nugget of something unique here, it just hasn’t been clarified and synthesized into something altogether more potent.

Collector’s POV: Given that this is a museum-style exhibit, the prints in this show are obviously not for sale. Morrisroe’s photographs haven’t yet found their way to the secondary markets, so gallery retail is really the only option for interested collectors at this point. ClampArt (here) has a parallel show of Morrisroe’s work on view through April 30th.

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

Transit Hub:

Feature: Art in America (here)
Reviews: New Yorker (here), Village Voice (here), Artnet (here), Photo Booth (here), T magazine (here)

Mark Morrisroe: From This Moment On
Through May 1st

Artists Space
38 Greene Street
3rd Floor
New York, NY 10013

(As an aside, this show is the year-to-date leader in the most unhelpful staff category. No, I could not carry my bag with me I must put it near the desk, no I could not take any photographs, no, there were no installation shots readily available, no, there was no catalogue, no, there was no detailed checklist with item by item information, just look at the wall labels sir, followed by an unfriendly annoying blank-eyed shrug. This isn’t a major museum venue, and given the irksome reception, I was nanoseconds away from walking straight back out. So if my tone here is a bit more surly than usual, chalk it up to a piece that tried hard not to be written.)

Max Kozloff: New York Means Business 1977-1984 @Higher Pictures

JTF (just the facts): A total of 25 color photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung in the small single room gallery space. All of the works are c-prints, taken between 1977 and 1984. The images have been printed in one of two sizes: 20×16 (or reverse) or 3×2 (or reverse); there are 13 of the large size and 12 of the small size in the show. Kozloff does not edition his prints, and as such, the works on view are a mix of vintage and later prints. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Max Kozloff is probably best known as a wide-ranging art historian, an exacting art critic, and a former editor of Artforum. That Kozloff is also a talented photographer in his own right was news to me, and this small show of his early work certainly helped to place his artistic output into the larger framework of 1970s color photography.

Kozloff’s faded images of tired New York storefronts and window displays fall into a long subject matter tradition, reaching back to Atget and Abbott, and on to the crackling compositional experiments of Friedlander. While a few of Kozloff’s storefronts follow in the traditional mode, providing elements of the surrounding architecture as context, most of his images have cropped out the framing, centering on the view through the glass itself and into the careful arrangements on display. His works feature the random marginalia of commerce: columns of twine, dusty curtains in various colors, a dense array of gold watches, triangular towers of fabric, and a parade of wigs. Other images add a layer or two of visual complexity, using mirrors to capture multiple angles, sunglasses to capture fleeting self-portraits, and reflections from the street to tell more dense and complicated stories. Placed in the context of the color experimentation going on in the 1970s, Kosloff’s images show the beginnings of employing color as a primary and featured compositional tool.
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While I’m not sure I can detect a refined and original voice in these pictures, it is clear that Kozloff was working through the same visual challenges that were confronting photographers like Levitt and Callahan, trying to bridge from an accepted black and white methodology into an entirely different mode of visual thinking. Color for color’s sake was becoming the new norm, and I see this body of work as yet another well-crafted example of a transitional effort to span the two sets of adjacent but competing aesthetic ideas.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows: the 20×16 prints are $3200 each, and the 3×2 prints are $2300 each. Kozloff’s work is not widely available in the secondary markets; the few public sales results that I could find were all under $1000.
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My favorite image in the show was Zipper Shop, 1978; it’s on the far right in the top installation shot. In it, strips of zipper ribbon hang from a sagging pair of wires, creating an eye-catching striped design, punctuated by the stenciled words on the window itself. The composition seems to have one foot in the old world and one in the new, using splashes of bright color as the focal point, enriching and rebalancing an otherwise standard view.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Books: The Theatre of the Face, 2008 (here), New York: Capital of Photography, 2002 (here)

Max Kozloff: New York Means Business 1977-1984
Through May 7th

Higher Pictures
764 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10065

Alvin Baltrop: Photographs 1965-2003 @Third Streaming

JTF (just the facts): A total of 58 black and white and color photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung in a single room gallery space with small dividing walls. The show contains 47 black and white images, 11 color images, a glass case with various photographs and ephemera, a portfolio, and a carousel of 35mm color slides projected on the wall. The black and white images are generally vintage gelatin silver prints, with a handful of modern prints (in editions of 15) mixed in. The color images are modern digital c-prints, also in editions of 15. All of the works were taken between 1965 and 2003. Physical dimensions of the prints range from 4×5 to 9×13. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Alvin Baltrop’s photographs of the subculture of life on the abandonded West side piers in New York in the 1970s and 1980s mix danger and tenderness, public and private, in ways that brim with truthful, gritty energy. This broad retrospective show stretches from early images of his time in the military all the way to late pictures of hospital life, but it is the pier photographs that are his lasting and durable legacy.

Many of Baltrop’s photographs capture the backgdrop of the pier environment itself: the exposed steelwork, the rotting wood, the slabs of pavement, and the dark open spaces punctuated by shafts of light streaming through cracks and broken windows. There is a sense of expansive emptiness in these pictures, of vast uninhabited areas, a few carved up by the artistic experiments of Gordon Matta-Clark and others. It is a world of crumbling disintegration, only a few steps from utter ruin.

The cast of characters that passed through this collapsing world included a spectrum of New York’s forgotten and marginal: runaways, homeless people, criminals, prostitutes, and men looking for gay sex. Baltrop captures these people in intimate portraits and everyday nudes, and often in the stolen moments of fleeting encounters, hasty couplings standing up against the backdrop of grime. While the lazy images of sunbathing make the scene seem open and accepting, a few images of covered corpses and lingering policemen attest to the rough violence lurking just underneath the surface.

While not every one of these pictures is particularly memorable, the body of work on the whole has an immediacy and authenticity that keeps it fresh after many passing years. The images mix on-your-guard tension with brief moments of understanding, documenting an invisible strata of individuals searching for connection and acceptance.
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Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The modern prints, either color or black and white, are $2000 each. The vintage gelatin silver prints were all marked “price on request” and I didn’t ask for more information. Baltrop’s work hasn’t yet made it to the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

My favorite image in the show was Untitled, 1975-1986; it’s the middle image in the third column from the right in the top installation shot. I like the slashing intersection of the steel girders and the layers of angles and shadows created by the decaying structure.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Review: New Yorker (here)

Alvin Baltrop: Photographs 1965-2003
Through May 28th

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Third Streaming
10 Greene Street
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10013

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection @Met

JTF (just the facts): A group show consisting of 25 photographic works from 15 different photographers, variously framed and matted, and hung in a single room gallery space with a main dividing wall. The prints were made between 1979 and 2010, using multiple processes (gelatin silver, chromogenic etc.). (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers have been included in the exhibit, with the number of images on view in parentheses:

Gretchen Bender (1)
James Casebere (1)
Moyra Davey (1 grid of 100)
Philip-Lorca diCorcia (4)
Robert Gober (2)
Katy Grannan (3)
Hans Haacke (1 diptych)
An-My Lê (1 group of 5)
Curtis Mann (1)
Trevor Paglen (1)
Adrian Piper (1 triptych)
Laurie Simmons (1)
Wolfgang Tillmans (5)
Jeff Wall (1, distractingly large given the narrowness of the space by the way)
Christopher Williams (1)

Comments/Context: If you’ve spent some time trolling through the contemporary photography galleries in New York in the past couple of years, the odds are you’ve run across many of the works on display in this new group show of contemporary photography at the Met. Roughly half the works in the exhibit are recent acquisitions (look for the little blue logos on the wall labels), so it’s a terrific chance to try to extrapolate how the curators and the members of the Photography committee are approaching the addition of new work to the permanent collection.

This particular installation puts these photographs in the specific context of cultural interchange, and makes an argument for a pattern of contemporary work that is addressing and responding to the social, economic, and political environment that surrounds us, either as direct commentary or as indirect undercurrents and glimpses of prevailing mood and emotion. It then goes on to dig additional images out of storage from the 1980s and 1990s that fit this overall thematic construct, connecting the dots between different time periods and commonalities of upheaval or uncertainty in society at large.

My analytical brain can think of three different ways this show might have come to pass:

1.) The Met identified (“top-down”) a certain type of photography to look for or that it was interested in (cultural response), and then went out and systematically acquired works that fit those specifications
2.) The Met acquired recent works (of all kinds) that it thought were important and discovered later (“bottom-up”) that a real and identifiable pattern was occurring in part of the contemporary artistic environment; the curators followed that trail and then created a show that highlighted those discoveries and placed them in context
3.) The Met acquired recent works (of all kinds) that it thought were important and then shoehorned some of them into a theme so that it could find a rational way to display them and tie them into other existing holdings

While we’ll probably never know which of three it actually was (unless one of the principals involved weighs in with an answer), I think the theme of art as a reflection of the issues of the times seems like an awfully broad and all-encompassing umbrella under which to stand; apart from abstract, inward-looking, or highly conceptual work, almost anything else might logically fit into such a framework. As such, this show lacked the tightness of vision I’d like to see in a group show; yes, all the pieces fit into the right general bucket, but the selection and juxtaposition of images (walls of economic hardship, subtleties of military might, economic satire, snippets of racism, sexism etc.) wasn’t as hard hitting or consistent as I would have expected it to be if you were really trying to make a powerful point about the engagement of contemporary art photographers in current events; the thread was there to be sure, but it was just too diffuse to really grab my attention.

So rather than drawing any crisp conclusions about the overall trends in contemporary photography, I came away ticking down a checklist: Grannan, Casebere, Lê, Mann, Davey, Tillmans, all high-quality work that was recently (or still is) in local galleries, now part of the prestigious permanent collection of the Met. Let’s agree that these are all solid choices. But still, for the purposes of collection building (a topic in which I have infinite interest), it’s intriguing to think about what drew the curators and accessions committee members to these particular works. Why these photographers and not others? Why these specific images and not others from the same project or series (especially for an artist like Tillmans)? What long-term historical significance did they ascribe to these photographs? What holes were they trying to fill? How did they convince each other that these were the ones that money should be spent on? The answers of course are unknown, but thoroughly fun for an afternoon of speculation.
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Collector’s POV: Given this is a museum show, there are obviously no posted prices for the works on display. That said, given that many of these photographs have recently been in local NY gallery shows, an intrepid collector could search through the archive here for the relevant reviews and likely piece together a decently current price list for roughly half of the prints in the exhibit.

My favorite work in the show was Moyra Davey’s Copperhead Grid, 1990/2009; it’s on the right in the bottom installation shot. While I have seen variations on these Davey copperheads before (in different sizes), I continue to be enthralled by their tactile surfaces. Chemical residues of orange and green swirl across the profile of Abraham Lincoln, the coins sometimes scratched and covered to the point that his head is almost indecipherable. Her subtle commentary about the insignificance of the penny, the deterioration of money, and the loss of meaning in the financial system are all wound together into a memorable set of eroded symbols.

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

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Transit Hub:

Review: Village Voice (here)

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection
Through January 2nd

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

Auction Results: BRIC, April 14 and 15, 2011 @Phillips London

The results of the BRIC sale at Phillips in London last week were generally uneventful, with the two Rashid Rana lots bringing in nearly half of the photography proceeds. The overall Buy-In rate was nearly 40% and the Total Sale Proceeds for photography came in just under the low end of the estimate range. With no positive surprises, there were no individual outcomes really worth mentioning, and thus no accompanying images for this results review.
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The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 56
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £722000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £971000
Total Lots Sold: 34
Total Lots Bought In: 22
Buy In %: 39.29%
Total Sale Proceeds: £719600
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Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 18
Low Sold: 13
Low Bought In: 5
Buy In %: 27.87%
Total Low Estimate: £73000
Total Low Sold: £55625
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Mid Total Lots: 32
Mid Sold: 16
Mid Bought In: 16
Buy In %: 50.00%
Total Mid Estimate: £318000
Total Mid Sold: £150125
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High Total Lots: 6
High Sold: 5
High Bought In: 1
Buy In %: 16.67%
Total High Estimate: £580000
Total High Sold: £513850

The top lot by High estimate was lot 25, Rashid Rana, Veil IV, 2007, at £250000-300000; it was also the top outcome of the sale at £301250.
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97.06% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range. There were no surprises in this sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate).

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Phillips De Pury & Company
Howick Place
London SW1P 1BB

Auction Results: Photographs, April 13, 2011 @Bonhams Dubai

Bonhams’ recent Photographs sale in Dubai didn’t generate much notable momentum. The overall Buy-In rate was up over 33% (more than a third of the lots failing to find a buyer) and the Total Sale Proceeds missed the low end of the estimate range by a significant margin on both a dollar basis and as a percentage. With no positive surprises, there were no individual outcomes really worth highlighting, and thus no accompanying images for this results roundup.
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The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 85
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $570000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $757900
Total Lots Sold: 56
Total Lots Bought In: 29
Buy In %: 34.12%
Total Sale Proceeds: $394920
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Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 72
Low Sold: 49
Low Bought In: 23
Buy In %: 31.94%
Total Low Estimate: $430900
Total Low Sold: $253920
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Mid Total Lots: 13
Mid Sold: 7
Mid Bought In: 6
Buy In %: 46.15%
Total Mid Estimate: $327000
Total Mid Sold: $141000
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High Total Lots: 0
High Sold: NA
High Bought In: NA
Buy In %: NA
Total High Estimate: $0
Total High Sold: NA
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The top lot by High estimate was tied between two lots: lot 33, Shirin Neshat, Mystified, 1997, and lot 70, Halim Al-Karim, Goddess of the Desert, 2010, both at $35000-45000. The Al-Karim didn’t sell. The Neshat sold for $36000, and was tied with lot 41, Camille Zakharia, Cultivate Your Garden, 1998, also at $36000, for top outcome of the sale.
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91.07% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range. There were no surprises in this sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate).
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Complete lot by lot results can be found here.
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Bonhams
Royal Mirage Hotel

Villa No. 23
Beach Road
Jumeirah 1
Dubai, UAE

Auction Preview: Post-War and Contemporary Art, April 20, 2011 @Christie’s South Kensington

On the heels of the spring Photograph auctions and before the main event Contemporary Art sales in New York in mid May, Christie’s has jammed in a low end Post-War and Contemporary Art sale at its South Kensington office in London, scheduled for the middle of next week. It’s an eclectic mop-up of contemporary art photography, with a variety of lesser known and more affordable images. I was particularly happy to see the abstract photographs by John Chamberlain (better known for his massive sculptures of swirled together car parts), which don’t tend to surface much at auction. Mixed in with works from other mediums, there are a total of 43 lots of photography on offer, with a Total High Estimate of £328800.
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Here’s the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including £5000): 21
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £68800

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 22
Total Mid Estimate: £260000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 0
Total High Estimate: NA

The top lot by High estimate is lot 38, Robert Gober, Untitled, 1988, at £18000-22000. (Image at right, top, via Christie’s.)

Here is the list of the photographers who are represented by two or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

John Chamberlain (3)
Candida Höfer (3)
Nobuyoshi Araki (2)
Dan Graham (2)
Gabriel Orozco (2)
Wolfgang Tillmans (2)
James Welling (2)
Erwin Wurm (2)

(Lot 87, Sean Scully, Santa Domingo Facade No. 2, 1999, at £7000-10000, image at right, bottom, and lot 150, John Chamberlain, Untitled, 1997, £2000-3000, image at right, middle, both via Christie’s.)

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here. The eCatalogue is located here.

Post-War and Contemporary Art
April 20th

Christie’s
85 Old Brompton Road
London SW7 3LD

Katy Grannan: The Happy Ever After: The Believers and Boulevard Series @Salon 94

JTF (just the facts): A two-part show, split between the gallery spaces at 243 Bowery and 1 Freemans Alley. The Freemans show consists of 28 large scale color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung nearly edge to edge in the single room space. The Bowery show consists of 6 photographs upstairs (framed similarly) and 1 three-channel video (9 minutes long) shown in the main downstairs space. All of the photographs are archival pigment prints on cotton rag paper mounted to Plexiglas, made between 2008 and 2010. The photographs are generally sized 39×29 (in editions of 3), except for one image in the Bowery show which is 26×20 (also in editions of 3). The video was made in 2010, in an edition of 5. A monograph of this body of work is available from the gallery for $45. (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: It’s a pretty tough challenge for a young photographer to wedge herself into the already crowded field of contemporary street portraiture and then durably and defensibly develop an original point of view. In fact, this genre is so strewn with entirely forgettable, derivative photographers that it most resembles a medieval battlefield after a particularly bloody exchange; hardly anyone actually emerges intact with a brand new formula. Katy Grannan’s images of the invisible and marginal inhabitants of the sun blasted streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles aren’t pictures that deviate widely from those of a handful of recognized masters, and yet, she seems to have found a way to tweak the proportions of the visual ingredients just enough to generate an unusual recipe. A touch less intimate and empathetic than Arbus, a pinch more offhand and less formal than Avedon’s In the American West, and quite a bit more theatrical and performative than most street photography or Sander clones, Grannan’s photographs capture a melting pot of quirks and eccentricities with a surprising level of cool distance and mystery.

All of Grannan’s images have a roughly similar composition: 3/4 pose with an indirect glance, against a whitewashed backdrop in pure sunlight. From there, the details of personalities expand in an infinite number of directions. A man in a silky green and blue shirt shimmies against a wall, while another with a top knot and heavy makeup frowns into the distance. Bushy beards, long wavy hair, black eyes, elaborate tattoos, breathing tubes and wigs tell part of the story, while simple poses and gestures become almost dance-like against the uniform flatness. While these pictures have the trappings of picked from the sidewalk documents, there is something altogether collaborative and choreographed about the final results; there are multiple layers of subtle performance going on, with the subjects creating personalities both for themselves for and the passing camera.

While not every one of these portraits is completely compelling and memorable, I found the overall effect of the many photographs seen together to be evidence of something new. Grannan seems to have synthesized the lessons of her many predecessors and successfully incorporated a more conceptual mindset, generating an approach that is at once personal and removed. It’s a tricky line to walk, and several of the images fall a little flat. But when she gets the emotional temperature just right, the photographs have that timeless sizzle that makes me think we will be seeing pictures from this series again and again in the years to come.

Collector’s POV: The photographs in this show are available in two sizes: the 39×29 images are $11000 each, and the 26×20 images are $9500 each. Grannan’s work is just beginning to become available in the secondary markets; recent prices have ranged between $3000 and $10000. Given the small amount of her work available at auction, gallery retail is still the best option for interested collectors at this point. This project was also recently shown at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco (here).

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My favorite image in the show was Anonymous, San Francisco, 2010; it’s fourth from the left in the top installation shot. I liked the faded, aspirational glamour of the older woman’s swirl of windblown hair, combined with her giraffe print shirt and beaded swan handbag; it’s roughly harsh and touching at the same time. I also particularly liked the soft, ironic undertone of Anonymous, Los Angeles, 2009; it’s the last image on the right in the third installation shot. In it, a long haired man with a FUCK LAPD tattoo across his chest stands gently holding two small bunnies.
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Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

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Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Reviews: La Lettre de la Photographie (here), Huffington Post (here)
Interview: Daily Serving (here)

Katy Grannan: The Happy Ever After: The Believers and Boulevard Series
Through April 30th

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Salon 94

Salon 94 Freemans
1 Freemans Alley
New York, NY 10002

Salon 94 Bowery
243 Bowery
New York, NY 10002

Cindy Sherman: Works from Friends of the Bruce Museum

JTF (just the facts): A total of 31 black and white and color works, variously framed and matted, and hung against orange and white walls in a series of 6 divided spaces. Information on the specific print processes was not available, but I’m assuming that the works are either gelatin silver prints or chromogenic prints (perhaps digital for the most recent), made between 1975 and 2008. Physical dimensions range between 8×10 and 71×90. All of the works on view were drawn from private collections in the Greenwich area. A catalogue of the exhibition is available in the gift shop for $20. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: It’s long been known that there was a significant (and growing) concentration of wealthy, discerning contemporary art and photography collectors in the Greenwich, CT area. If evidence for this claim were still somehow necessary, the fact that a respectable mini-retrospective of the work of Cindy Sherman can be put on by a local museum like the Bruce, drawing only from the private collections of the immediate community, should put any doubts about this to rest for good. Ahead of the full scale Sherman retrospective scheduled for next year at the MoMA, this small show is like an appetizer prior to the upcoming main course.
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Gathering work from a variety of collections has led to a show that jumps from project to project, hitting highlights across Sherman’s career, with a minimum of scholarly backdrop or narrative thread. A few unexpected early black and white works from her graduate school days are quickly followed by a selection of Untitled Film Stills (with prints in all three available sizes). Color gets introduced via a pair of early 1980s works, along with a pair of terrific large scale images from the Centerfolds series. A group of tougher images from the mid 1980s Fairy Tales and Disasters projects leads into a selection of the crowd-pleasing History Portraits, flanked by a pair of more recent clowns. The final room of the exhibit mixes images from Women from California and her most recent pictures of aging high society ladies. It’s a whirlwind tour of nearly 40 years of Sherman’s artistic output, boiled down to a series of easily digestable representative examples.

At its simplest level, this show is a solid introduction to the work of Cindy Sherman for those who are unfamiliar with her brand of self portraiture; it gathers a wide variety of high quality (and valuable) photographs and organizes them in roughly chronological order; even a Sherman neophyte could come away with a general understanding of what she’s been up to (while I was in the gallery, an older woman was walking around the show with her toddler grandchild, and at each picture, the boy would scream “it’s Cindy!”). I don’t think this show will add much to the deeper, academic understanding of Sherman’s work, but it is likely to be a local crowd pleaser.

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Beyond the parade of Sherman treasures on view, this exhibit also made me think about the increasing role of large, sophisticated private collectors in lending to public exhibitions at venues like the Bruce, where nearby supporters can now enable impressive, museum-quality shows nearly single handedly. From a quick review of the wall labels, the collections of Pamela and Arthur Sanders, Jennifer and David Stockman, and the Brandt Foundation have clearly made careful, long term choices in the Shermans they own; I’d certainly be curious to see what other photographic gems they (and others) have tucked away on their walls. Given the breadth and depth of the collecting going on in greater Greenwich, hopefully this will be the first of many shows at the Bruce that will mine the rich vein of contemporary art buried in this community.

Collector’s POV: Since this is a museum show, the works on view are obviously not for sale. Sherman’s photographs have become ubiquitous in the secondary markets in recent years, both in the photographs and contemporary art sales. Prices typically settle into the five and six figure ranges, with a few lesser known outliers on the low end and a few iconic works routinely up over the one million dollar mark and higher. The artist is represented by Metro Pictures in New York (here).

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

Transit Hub:

Reviews: NY Times (here), Hartford Courant (here), Stamford Advocate (here)
Most recent Metro Pictures show, 2008 (DLK COLLECTION review here)

Cindy Sherman: Works from Friends of the Bruce Museum
Through April 23rd

Bruce Museum
1 Museum Drive
Greenwich, CT 06830

Lorna Simpson: Gathered @Brooklyn Museum

JTF (just the facts): A total of 2 large installations and 1 video, hung along two long walls in a single room gallery space and in an adjacent darkened viewing area. One installation (57/09) consists of 308 small, square format gelatin silver prints, framed in white and matted, and hung in an undulating grid pattern. The second installation consists of 82 vintage photo booth prints and 68 small ink drawings, both framed in bronze, along with 30 solid bronze rectangles and 15 thinner bronze plates, arranged in a loose cluster. The video, Easy to Remember, consists of a grid of 15 mouths in black and white; it runs 2 minutes and 35 seconds. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The three works in Lorna Simpson’s new show at the Brooklyn Museum all turn on the idea of cultural memory, of how past and present are often collapsed together and how our history is fully intertwined with our contemporary lives. It’s a powerful, sometimes haunting display that explores the universal nature of the passing of time, via its specific embodiment in the African-American experience.

In the first piece, Simpson has juxtaposed hundreds of 1950s amateur pinup photographs (found at flea markets and on eBay) with recent black and white self-portraits, recreating the specific poses, hairstyles and clothing with exacting mimicry. Both women talk on the phone, sit on benches, stand in the kitchen or near a TV, or sprawl invitingly on the floor. The mixing of old and new images and the constant repetition of twinned poses creates a strong back and forth rhythm. At first, I picked out the subtle differences between Simpson’s self-portraits (with an obvious edge of conceptual irony) and the genuine vintage photos; what is surprising is that after 50 or 60 images all tightly strung together, the context starts to dissolve away, and after another 100 or so, the contrasts become even more subtle, and they all merge together into an open-ended hybrid of past and present, reality and illusion. More than 50 years separates the lives of these two women, and yet, the connections are there; it’s like Simpson has created a kind of mirror that accounts for the changes in cultural context and perspective over time, but highlights the underlying commonality which remains.

The second piece brings together faded and wrinkled photo booth portraits, washes of dark ink, and rectangles of bronze into a complex meditation on the nature of memory. Anonymous faces stare out from the photographs, offering tantalizing clues to lost personal stories (who were these people and what happened to them?). As time passes, these individuals alternately fade and darken, becoming abstract blots of dark ink, eventually transforming themselves into mute blocks of cool bronze. Taken together, the installation seems to document the subtle process of forgetting, where the lives and accomplishments of those who came before us slowly disappear; as more and more specific faces become unknown blocks, it becomes harder and harder to recreate our collective history.

The video installation comes at the idea of memory from a different direction. 15 mouths hum the tune to the 1935 Rogers and Hart classic It’s Easy to Remember. The catchy melody will be instantly familiar to most, but the humming removes the actual lyrics, leaving behind a ghost of the song itself. Once again, Simpson has given us a fragmented shard of history, and then opened it up for a broad array of possible interpretations. I left the museum with the tune still stuck in my head, almost like a spooky undefined anthem.

Taken together, this is a thoughtful, understated, and quietly brilliant show about complex, interrelated cultural ideas and how time alters our perspective on these forces. And as a mark of something durably original, it has kept me thinking long after my trip to the museum.

Collector’s POV: Since this is a museum show, the works on view are obviously not for sale. Simpson’s photographs have only been intermittently available in the secondary markets in recent years, with prices ranging between roughly $1000 and $25000. As such, gallery retail is likely a better option for interested collectors at this point. The artist is represented by Salon 94 in New York (here).
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Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Reviews: La Lettre de la Photographie (here), Snapshots (here), New Yorker (here), Brooklyn Paper (here)

Lorna Simpson: Gathered
Through August 21st

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY 11238

Auction Preview: Photographs, April 13, 2011 @Bonhams Dubai

Later this week, Bonhams is having a Photographs sale in Dubai. While many Western collectors (including ourselves) might still be somewhat uncertain about bidding/buying in Dubai (and figuring out the constraints of the US sanctions on Iran), I think a flip through the catalog is an interesting window into contemporary Middle Eastern photography; there are plenty of photographers in this sale that we just don’t see much of in New York. Overall, there are a total of 85 photographs on offer, with a total High estimate of $757900.
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Here’s the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 72
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $430900

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 13
Total Mid Estimate: $327000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 0
Total High Estimate: NA
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The top lot by High estimate is tied between two lots: lot 33, Shirin Neshat, Mystified, 1997, (image at right, top, via Bonhams) and lot 70, Halim Al-Karim, Goddess of the Desert, 2010, both at $35000-45000.

Here’s the complete list of photographers represented by two or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Norman Parkinson (4)
Sebastiao Salgado (4)
Andre Villers (4)
Jamie Balbridge (3)
Chuck Close (3)
Shadi Ghadirian (3)
Peter Anderson (2)
Lillian Bassman (2)
Majid Koorang Beheshti (2)
Amr Fekry (2)
Philippe Halsman (2)
Horst P. Horst (2)
Bahman Jalali (2)
Rana Javadi (2)
Nadine Kanso (2)
Laila Muraywid (2)
Herbert Ponting (2)
Bijan Sayfouri (2)
Todd Webb (2)
Camille Zakharia (2)
Siamak Zomorrdi-e Motlach (2)
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(Lot 37, Shadi Ghadirian, Untitled from the Qajar series, 1998, at $7000-9000, at right, middle, and lot 50, Faisal Samra, Distorted Reality #36, 2007, at $10000-15000, at right, bottom, both via Bonhams.)

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.
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Photographs
April 13th
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Bonhams
Royal Mirage Hotel

Villa No. 23
Beach Road
Jumeirah 1
Dubai, UAE

Auction Preview: BRIC, April 14 and 15, 2011 @Phillips London

Coming up later this week in London, Phillips has brought back its BRIC themed sale, featuring varied work from the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. As you might expect, there are plenty of unfamiliar contemporary names in the mix, and the sale offers Western collectors exposure to work out beyond the edges of the well worn paths we regularly travel. Overall, out of 204 total lots on offer, there are 56 lots of photography available, with a Total High Estimate for photography of £971000.

Here’s the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including £5000): 18
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £73000

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 32
Total Mid Estimate: £318000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 6
Total High Estimate: £580000
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The top lot by High estimate is lot 25, Rashid Rana, Veil IV, 2007, at £250000-300000. (Image at right, bottom, via Phillips.)
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Here is the list of the photographers who are represented by more than one lot in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Zhang Huan (4)
Boris Mikhailov (3)
Vik Muniz (3)
Wang Qingsong (3)
Cui Xiuwen (2)
Oleg Dou (2)
Gao Brothers (2)
Ma Liuming (2)
Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe (2)
Qiu Zhijie (2)
Rashid Rana (2)
Marc Riboud (2)
Weng Fen (2)

(Lot 154, Zhang Huan, My Boston 2, 2005, at £6000-8000, image at right, top, and lot 165, Cui Xiuwen, One Day in 2004 No. 4, 2004, at £5000-7000, image at right, middle, both via Phillips.)
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The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

BRIC
April 14th/15th
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Phillips De Pury & Company
Howick Place
London SW1P 1BB

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