Christian Marclay, Fourth of July @Paula Cooper

JTF (just the facts): A total of 31 color photographic works, mounted and framed in light wood, and hung intermittently throughout the gallery space, including the entry/reception, the smaller front room, and the two larger back rooms, divided by an interior wall. All of the works are c-prints, torn into a variety of sizes, ranging from roughly 15×18 to 54×46. Each of the works is unique, and the unusual shapes created by the rips have been squared off into rectangular and square shaped frames. All of the works were made in 2005 and are untitled. A catalogue of the show is available from the gallery. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Christian Marclay’s art lies in the intersection of music, performance, and visual representation, often mixing these mediums together to find new relationships between seeing and hearing. This show contains a group of Marclay’s recent photographs, taken at a classic American Independence Day parade in Hyde Park, NY. The shots capture the various marching bands, the tricorne hats and period costumes, and the casual crowds of spectators on the sidewalks.

What is different here is that Marclay has blown up his snapshots to large size and then torn them into fragments. The effect is to isolate individual features of the parade: the side view of a bass drum, a mallet in motion, cymbals crashing, an elaborate vest, the black gloved fingers of a trumpet player, the chair of a spectator, or a head with a towel on it to keep cool. If you have ever stood and watched a small town parade like this one, you will remember the way the sound of the band changes as it moves past – certain instruments get louder and dominate your hearing/attention, and then they move on and new ones come forward in waves, even though they may all be playing the same tune. First there are flutes, then trumpets, then the thump of the bass drum, perhaps with a break to check out the rest of the crowd across the street. The installation and cropping of these photos does the same thing; it centers your brain on certain fragments and implied sounds, rather than on the overall picture of the parade, encouraging you to jump from one tonal picture to the next.
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Individually, I’m not sure any of these photographs is particularly exciting or memorable. But taken as a group, in the context of the larger installation, there is something intellectually intriguing about Marclay’s use of visual images to effectively evoke an auditory experience. His pictures make us hear with our eyes, playing back an internal soundtrack based on personal musical memory.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced between $10000 and $15000 based on size. Marclay’s photographic works have not yet become routinely available in the major secondary markets for photography, making the creation of a relevant price history difficult. As such, gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

Christian Marclay: Festival @Whitney, 2010 (here)
NY Times review of Whitney show (here)

Christian Marclay, Fourth of July

Through July 30th

Paula Cooper Gallery
534 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10011

Auction Results: Italia, June 30, 2010 @Phillips London

Whether it was the arrival of the hot summer weather or the thinness of the material on offer, the results for Phillips’ recent ITALIA themed sale didn’t make much of a stir. The Buy-In rate for photography was over 50% and the Total Sale Proceeds from the photo lots missed the estimate range by a wide margin. This was the last photography-related sale of the season; we’ll now take a much needed break from auction reporting until the action picks up again in the fall.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 73
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £447400
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £631100
Total Lots Sold: 35
Total Lots Bought In: 38
Buy In %: 52.05%
Total Sale Proceeds: £281125

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 32
Low Sold: 13
Low Bought In: 19
Buy In %: 59.38%
Total Low Estimate: £110600
Total Low Sold: £40750

Mid Total Lots: 37
Mid Sold: 20
Mid Bought In: 17
Buy In %: 45.95%
Total Mid Estimate: £355500
Total Mid Sold: £196625

High Total Lots: 4
High Sold: 2
High Bought In: 2
Buy In %: 50.00%
Total High Estimate: £165000
Total High Sold: £43750

The top lot by High estimate was lot 120, David LaChapelle, Statue, Los Angeles, 2007, at £50000-70000; it did not sell. The top outcome of the sale was lot 14, Alighiero Boetti, E piove sempre sul bagnato, 1980, at £22500. (Image at right, via Phillips.)

While 97.14% of the lots that sold had proceeds above or in 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

Collier Schorr, Blumen

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2009 by steidlMACK (here). 104 pages, with 50 color plates. All of the works included were made between 2005 and 2008. There are no essays, texts, or captions. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: As collectors of floral imagery, we are always on the look out for contemporary photographers who are taking on the traditional floral still life in new ways. While Collier Schorr is likely better known for her masculine portraits of wrestlers and young men in military uniforms, for quite a few years now, she has been working on a project called Forests and Fields, where she has been documenting life (real and imagined) in the small German town of Schwabish Gmund; Blumen is the second volume in this series.

Schorr’s florals are a perplexing mix of nature and artifice. Many of the images are staged out in rolling meadows of lush grasses and wildflowers, against skies that run the spectrum from clear blue to murky grey. Against this backdrop, she constructs strange temporary structures, made of thin sticks and string or fishing line, from which she suspends bright blooms which have been picked from nearby gardens. Like flies trapped in a spider web, the flowers are suspended in mid air, disconnected from the rest of their natural world, strung up in a mess of tangled wires.

While these juxtapositions are thoroughly staged and arranged, there is something surprisingly odd and compelling about these compositions. The combination of exotic, boldly colored, cultivated blooms (roses, zinnias, cosmos, cacti etc.) with the simplicity of the natural landscape or a nondescript wall creates a sense of unease that is further deepened by the weird bondage of the cut flowers hanging from the string matrix. (Arrangement #12 (Blumen), 2008, at right, via artnet.) There is an undercurrent of Araki or Mapplethorpe here, of ephemeral human control applied to the specific manipulation of the landscape. (Richard Learoyd also recently used a similar string contraption on a fish heart.) The images have a sense of heightened theater, of unexpected drama being created out of commonplace materials.

In many ways, these pictures don’t fit any usual definition of a floral still life. And most of the other non-floral images in the volume continue this line of thinking. A jumble of tools, a plastic bucket with potatoes, a red backpack and a yellow plastic shopping bag, an overhead view of a grey floor, an astroturf tennis court, the shadows of geraniums, they all appear controlled, seemingly found abstractions, but perhaps not. As a result, the entire atmosphere of this book is a bit unnerving, where artificiality is cloaked in the normal.

In the end, I’m not sure that I am particularly moved by most of these floral constructions. That said, I certainly appreciate and applaud Schorr’s willingness to do something original and radical to explore the boundaries of the form.
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Collector’s POV: Collier Schorr is represented by 303 Gallery in New York (here), Modern Art in London (here), and Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin (here). It appears that the floral prints from Blumen are generally printed quite large (between 38×31 and 49×41) and often come in editions of 5. Schorr’s works have only intermittently been available in the secondary markets. For those lots that have become available, prices have ranged between $4000 and $10000.
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Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Book review: 5B4 (here)
Features: ArtForum (here), Guardian (here)
Interview: Dossier (here)

Rineke Dijkstra @Marian Goodman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 3 videos and 4 large scale color portraits, displayed in separate darkened video rooms and hung in the north and south galleries. All of the photographs are larger than life size archival inkjet prints, each 48×40, in editions of 10, made in 2008 or 2009. The videos are:

3-channel HD, 12 minutes, in an edition of 6, from 2009
1-channel HD, 6 minutes, 36 seconds, in an edition of 6, from 2009
4-channel HD, 25 minutes, in an edition of 6, from 2009

Unfortunately, no photography was allowed in the galleries; as a result, there are no installation shots for this exhibit. The images at right were taken from the gallery website. (Still from The Krazy House, Liverpool, UK, 2008- 2009, at right.)

Comments/Context: If you actually take the time to watch all five segments of Rineke Dijkstra’s The Krazy House, to patiently stand there in the dark for the entire 25 minutes and drink it all in, I think it would be nearly impossible to leave the gallery without a broad smile on your face. Without a doubt, it is the warmest, most compelling and uplifting time I have had in an art gallery all year.

The artistic conceit at work here is relatively straightforward. Dijkstra constructed an all-white room in a Liverpool dance club, and she invited club goers to come and dance to their favorite tracks when the club was closed. At first glance, you might think that this concept has echoes of the simple, unadulterated joy of dancing found in the early Apple iPod ads or those from the Gap featuring swing dancers from a few years back, and on the surface, there are some parallels in terms of look and feel. But what is altogether more surprising is that Dijkstra’s video is actually about a process, like the fantastic transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. In each segment, the young person starts out timid, self-conscious, painfully aware of the ridiculousness of dancing alone in front of white wall for a camera. They are all shy and tentative, unsure of themselves, only trying out the simplest of their moves. But in each case, as they get more comfortable and feel empowered by the music, something spectacular happens: they blossom into amazingly beautiful individuals, giddy with freedom and lost in themselves.
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What is fascinating is how each person responds to the music, making movements that match their range of emotions. A young girl with lilting blond braids pulled back from her face slowly swings her hips, her bare arms waving over her head in a mellow trance. A young guy in jeans and a t-shirt rips his moves with choreographed precision, aggressively jerking his body up and down, exploding with energetic hand positions. Another young girl mouths the words, acts out the lyrics, and makes a heart with her fingers, as her bright laughter and huge contagious smile fill the room. And a young guy with long greasy black hair slashes his head back and forth with rhythmic, twisting drama, adding in ecstatic snippets of earnest air guitar for flair. The classic motif of the whole piece is at the end of his session, when the music stops and he closes himself back up: he lets slip a sly goofy grin, acknowledging his stolen moment of letting it all hang out. (Still from The Krazy House, Liverpool, UK, 2008-2009, at right.)

There are plenty of meaty ideas and questions buried in these dances, from how we attract others using constructed behaviors to how young people search for outlets for expressing themselves, and from how we assert our own personalities to how we protect ourselves from our own doubts and insecurities. In each case, the music takes over and the subject eventually lets his or her guard down to reveal something special and otherwise hidden. Dijkstra has also made still portraits of many of the women club goers, arrayed in their cheap finery and posed against uniform grey backgrounds in classic grace. These reveal much less than the videos, but raise many of the same subtle questions about the process of creating our identities.

The other two videos in the show capture an array of children responding to art at the Tate Liverpool: in one, the kids verbally respond to Picasso’s Weeping Woman, and in the other, a single girl sits on the floor and makes a drawing in response to the painting. The first is particularly engrossing, as the children try to explain what they see. Like the dancers, in the beginning, the children are shy and uncomfortable, chewing on their fingernails, looking around, yawning, and fidgeting. Soon, they being to reluctantly talk about the colors they have picked out, and all at once, they seem to explode into a flood of increasingly fanciful ideas that build upon each other (the sliced three-screen display makes this interchange all the more swirling and chaotic). Like a wild jazz improvisation, the kids throw their ideas back and forth, connecting and embellishing them into imagined stories and creative vignettes, their individual personalities coming out from behind their common grey sweaters, white shirts, and red ties. In the abstract, Dijkstra seems to have captured the very essence of brainstorming, the uncontrolled conversational exchange where multiple perspectives interact and converge. In the second video, this coalescing occurs more subtly, as the single school girl sits quietly on the floor, looking back and forth between the picture and her pencil drawing, intermittently distracted by students nearby, until she finally becomes completely engrossed in her drawing and hardly notices the action around her. (Still from I See a Woman Crying (Weeping Woman), Tate Liverpool, 2009, at right.)

In all of these works, Dijkstra creates an inversion for the viewer, where the obvious subject turns out not to be the subject at all. These works are not about dancers or school kids exactly, but about the more complex idea of how we create and explore who we are, how we get immersed in something that lets us be free, if only for a moment. While some readers here might quibble that these artworks are mostly video not photography, I would respond that these videos are entirely photographic in their approach. The difference comes in that Dijkstra has tried to capture an invisible process not a subject, something that is fleeting and amorphous not stable, and a still frame just doesn’t provide the richness needed to describe the changing and morphing she is trying to document.

Overall, I found this to be a tremendously impressive and entirely thought-provoking show, full of original conceptual ideas, expressed with maturity and executed with confidence. Simply put, to my eyes, this is the most exciting and memorable body of new contemporary work I have seen this year.

Collector’s POV: The four photographs in this show are priced at 22000€ each. The three videos are respectively 65000€ (I See a Woman Crying), 50000€ (Ruth Drawing Picasso), and 85000€ (The Krazy House). Dijkstra’s photographic work has become generally available at auction in the past few years, with prices ranging widely, from roughly $4000 to $180000, with a sweet spot between $10000 and $50000. She is also represented by Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin (here) and Galerie Jan Mot in Brussels (here).

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Exhibit: Tate Liverpool, 2010 (here)
Review: Frieze, 2010 (here)
Features: Almerisa @MoMA (here), Guardian, 2010 (here)

Rineke Dijkstra

Through August 21st

Marian Goodman Gallery

24 West 57th Street

New York, NY 10019

Auction Results: Jeanloup Sieff Photographies, Collection Gert Elfering, June 30, 2010 @Christie’s Paris

The results from the Jeanloup Sieff sale at Christie’s in Paris last week were generally right in line with expectations. The overall Buy-In rate was near 25% and the Total Sale Proceeds fell near the top end of the estimate range.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 67
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: 304000€
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: 461000€
Total Lots Sold: 49
Total Lots Bought In: 18
Buy In %: 26.87%
Total Sale Proceeds: 416300€

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 54
Low Sold: 40
Low Bought In: 14
Buy In %: 25.93%
Total Low Estimate: 293000€
Total Low Sold: 249500€

Mid Total Lots: 13
Mid Sold: 9
Mid Bought In: 4
Buy In %: 30.77%
Total Mid Estimate: 168000€
Total Mid Sold: 166800€

High Total Lots: 0
High Sold: NA
High Bought In: NA
Buy In %: NA
Total High Estimate: 0€
Total High Sold: NA

The top lot by High estimate was tied between four lots, all estimated at 10000-15000€:

Lot 9, Jeanloup Sieff, Hommage à Seurat (variant), New York, 1965, sold for 16250€
Lot 12, Jeanloup Sieff, Yves Saint Laurent, Paris, 1974, sold for 39400€ and was the top outcome of the sale (image at right, top, via Christie’s)
Lot 16, Jeanloup Sieff, Grès #160, Harper’s Bazaar, 1964, did not sell
Lot 67, Jeanloup Sieff, Corset, New York, 1962, sold for 18750€

87.76% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate. There were a total of 8 surprises in the sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 8, Jeanloup Sieff, Femme nue gravissant une dune, 1970, at 10625€
Lot 12, Jeanloup Sieff, Yves Saint Laurent, Paris, 1971, at 39400€
Lot 14, Jeanloup Sieff, Derriere Anglais, Paris, 1969/Later, at 27400€
Lot 22, Jeanloup Sieff, Par un jour pluvieux, Paris, 1975, at 22500€
Lot 33, Jeanloup Sieff, Ina, Angleterre, Queen, 1965/Later, at 6000€
Lot 41, Jeanloup Sieff, Jane Birkin, Paris, 1968/Later, at 10000€
Lot 47, Jeanloup Sieff, Le tapis volant, Normandie, 1988, at 22500€
Lot 57, Jeanloup Sieff, Alfred Hitchcock et Ina sur le plateau de ‘Psycho’, Harper’s Bazaar, 1962, at 8125€

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Christie’s
9 Avenue Matignon
75008 Paris

Will Steacy, Down These Mean Streets @Michael Mazzeo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 22 color images, framed in black with no mat, and hung against grey walls in the entry and main gallery spaces. The pigmented ink prints come in two sizes (or reverse): 16×20 (in editions of 5+2AP) and 24×30 (in editions of 3+2AP). While no dates were given on the gallery checklist, I think we can safely assume that all of these images were made in the past few years. A 16-page tabloid newspaper in both color and black and white is available from the gallery for $5. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The plight of our inner cities isn’t exactly a new topic in the world of contemporary photography. Many photographers have pointed their cameras at our abandoned houses, empty streets, and broken neighborhoods, most with an air of clinical detachment or meticulous anthropological documentation, searching for abstract photographic beauty or subtle irony hidden amid the grit. Will Steacy’s photographs, taken at night while wandering in the transitional zones between airports and urban areas in some of America’s best known cities, have no such comfortable, eyes-averted distance. They are right up in your face, with a level of aggressive confrontation that is unavoidable. This is an artist with a chip on his shoulder, willing to take some risks to jolt us out of our stupor, combining the eye of an investigative reporter with the angry heart of a dramatic story teller.

One wall in the reception area of the gallery is blanketed in a dense, highly personal installation of 3×4 photographs, maps, airline stubs, lottery tickets, news articles, terrorist mug shots, pulp novel covers, flattened beer cans, book pages, plastic booze flasks, matchbooks, taxicab licenses, and other miscellaneous artifacts and ephemera collected along the way during this project, all covered and annotated with scrawled handwriting. It’s the kind of manic, obsessive, intelligent, rage-filled wall that you normally find in the basement lair of a serial killer in the movies. It weaves failings in banking, joblessness, wars, terrorism, foreclosures, broken education, and unaffordable health care together with fear, neglect, and devastation, all wrapped up with an unforgiving rawness that is entirely mesmerizing and real. The wrench Steacy used for protection during his night time shoots is collaged next to his old labor union card; a broken newspaper box lies in front, with strewn trash on the floor nearby. It is a harrowing, multi-dimensional portrait of an artist thoroughly annoyed by the destruction of the American Dream and exasperated at our complicit avoidance of seeing what is happening or doing anything about it.

Nearly all of the larger photographs in the main gallery are awash in the malignant glare of acidic streetlights. They depict bullet holes, cigarette butts, boarded up housing projects, homeless people, gutter trash, and vacant lots, but they do so without voyeuristic sentimentality or cheap sensationalism. Even though Steacy is an outsider to these particular communities, his viewpoint comes from within, more in a social documentary style steeped in everyday realism. He has chosen emblematic scenes that have a formal clarity, with an added edge of anxiety and danger. A coffee cup lies inside a broken newspaper vending machine, a bus bench is reduced to two sawed off stubs, a purse lies abandoned on the sidewalk, and a fence encircles a dark brick housing facility, a barrier for both those wanting to get in and those wanting to get out. The sense of being out-in-the-open and alone is palpable.

In some ways, this isn’t the easiest work to like. It holds up a mirror to a world we have created for ourselves that isn’t particularly pretty. What I find most memorable is that there is a sense of fighting spirit in these pictures; the artist has dug deeply and worked hard to tell these sometimes bleak and unforgiving stories. As result, they have power and intensity that is absent in other similar drive-by projects of ruined cities. Steacy has immersed himself in this neglected and forgotten part of our world, made it his own, and is clearly taking it personally.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced in rising editions. The 16×20 works begin at $1200 and rise to $2200; the 24×30 works begin at $2000 and rise to $3500. Steacy’s work is not yet available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.
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As an aside, I think these images will make a terrific book, especially if the photographer adds in some of the back stories and ideas found in the chaotic installation.

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

Transit Hub:

Artist site (here) and blog (here)
Review: New Yorker (here)
Interviews: Conscientious (here), BOMBlog (here)
Feature: Conscientious (here)

Will Steacy, Down These Mean Streets
Through July 30th

Michael Mazzeo Gallery
526 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

Auction Results: Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening and Day Sales, June 30 and July 1, 2010 @Christie’s King Street

While the big Gursky didn’t sell, Christie’s was still able to tally the largest photography proceeds in the Contemporary Art sales in London last week. While the overall Buy-In rate was similar to that of Phillips the day before (just over 31%), the top end lots were pretty soft in these two sales. With the absence of the income from the Gursky, the Total Sale Proceeds for photography missed the estimate range by a wide margin; if the Gursky had sold for its low estimate, the results would have fallen just below the range.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 45
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £2156000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £2986000
Total Lots Sold: 31
Total Lots Bought In: 14
Buy In %: 31.11%
Total Sale Proceeds: £1229225

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 0
Low Sold: NA
Low Bought In: NA
Buy In %: NA
Total Low Estimate: £0
Total Low Sold: NA

Mid Total Lots: 21
Mid Sold: 14
Mid Bought In: 7
Buy In %: 33.33%
Total Mid Estimate: £286000
Total Mid Sold: £218875

High Total Lots: 24
High Sold: 17
High Bought In: 7
Buy In %: 29.17%
Total High Estimate: £2700000
Total High Sold: £1010350

The top lot by High estimate was lot 47, Andreas Gursky, Pyongyang II, 2007, at £900000-1200000; it did not sell. The top outcome of the sale was lot 177, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Kattegat, Kullaberg, 1996, at £205250.

A perfect 100.00% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above their estimate. There were a total of three surprises in these sales (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 317, Mike Kelley, Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood, 1990, at £37250
Lot 384, Inez Van Lamsweerde, Kate Moss, Bride, 2003, at £21250 (image at right, top, via Christie’s)
Lot 387, Andres Serrano, Black Jesus, 1990, at £73250

Complete lot by lot results can be found here (Evening) and here (Day).

Christie’s
8 King Street, St. James’s
London SW1Y 6QT

Auction Results: Contemporary Art Evening and Day Sales, June 29 and 30, 2010 @Phillips London

The media narrative around the results of Phillips’ Contemporary Art sales in London last week has centered on weakness in the market (via Art Market Monitor here and here), but the photography buried in the pair of sales performed, for the most part, in line with expectations. Most of the top photo lots found buyers in their estimate ranges. The overall Buy-In rate was somewhat soft (at just over 32%) and the Total Sale Proceeds fell just below the bottom of the estimate range, but in general, it wasn’t too far from “normal”, given a mixed bag of material, a lack of superior/standout lots, and a summertime sale date.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 46
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £853000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £1208000
Total Lots Sold: 31
Total Lots Bought In: 15
Buy In %: 32.61%
Total Sale Proceeds: £836125

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 4
Low Sold: 2
Low Bought In: 2
Buy In %: 50.00%
Total Low Estimate: £17000
Total Low Sold: £5500

Mid Total Lots: 25
Mid Sold: 16
Mid Bought In: 9
Buy In %: 36.00%
Total Mid Estimate: £356000
Total Mid Sold: £205875

High Total Lots: 17
High Sold: 13
High Bought In: 4
Buy In %: 23.53%
Total High Estimate: £835000
Total High Sold: £624750

The top lot by High estimate was lot 21, Gilbert & George, Damned Buddleia, 1980, at £150000-200000; it was also the top outcome of the sale at £169250.

90.32% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above their estimate. There was only one surprise in these sales (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 181, Dash Snow, Untitled, 2007, at £63650 (image at right, top, via Phillips)

Complete lot by lot results can be found here (Evening) and here (Day).

Phillips De Pury & Company
Howick Place
London SW1P 1BB

Jesse Burke: Intertidal @ClampArt

JTF (just the facts): A total of 32 color images, framed in white with no mat, hung edge to edge in an undulating up and down pattern across the walls of the single room gallery space. The digital c-prints range in size between 11×14 and 38×30, with a variety of intermediate sizes. The works were made between 2004 and 2010, and have been printed in two sizes each, in editions of 8. A monograph of this body of work, published by Decode Books (here), is available from the gallery for $35.(Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: Jesse Burke’s subtle photographs of stereotypical male activities are consistently filled with contradictions. They tackle the underlying rift between society’s surface assumptions about masculinity and the more complicated reality of how men really behave, exposing tensions and vulnerabilities that fall beyond a simplistic view of male toughness. These are introspective pictures, taken with tenderness and understanding, a more nuanced and less polarized portrait of the “Fight Club” search for male meaning in the modern world.

The show covers a broad range of conventional masculine subjects, with an eye for detail: a pyramid of beer cans, push-ups, deer hunting, dogs, eye black, camouflage gear, basketball hoops at night, and mud. My favorite pictures chronicle the quintessential male ritual of shotgunning a beer. Burke photographs his subjects at the moment just after they have finished the race or the chest-thumping spectacle, when the beer runs down the front of their shirts and they stand wide-eyed and jolted by the rush of alcohol. The moment is filled with an unvarnished swirl of emotions: exhilaration, ridiculousness, testing, physical pain, and forced but somehow real camaraderie. These images are juxtaposed with a variety of gentler landscapes and more intimate shirtless portraits, posed against floral backgrounds. A self-portrait of the photographer holding his fragile baby in front of a stack of rough sawed logs poignantly captures the irony and conflict of his own male role.

It would be easy for a project like this to veer off into worn-out and obvious beer ad mockery, but Burke does an excellent job of keeping the feelings and symbols simple and authentic, opening up the stresses and paradoxes underneath the typical male stereotype without going overboard. As a result, the installation has the feel of a quiet discussion, where the men let their guard down for a just moment and expose their unprotected, imperfect selves.
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Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced between $700 and $2200, based on size, with many different intermediate prices. Since this is Burke’s first solo show in New York, it is not at all surprising that his work has not yet made it to the secondary markets. Gallery retail is thus the only option for interested collectors at this point.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

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

Jesse Burke: Intertidal

Through July 9th

Clamp Art

521-531 West 25th Street

New York, NY 10001

Auction Results: Contemporary Art Evening and Day Auctions, June 28 and 29, 2010 @Sotheby’s London

The photography lots in the pair of Contemporary Art sales at Sotheby’s in London earlier this week performed right in line with expectations. The overall Buy-In rate was solidly in the mid twenties (24%) and the Total Sale Proceeds fell in the middle of the estimate range.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 25
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £1014000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £1407000
Total Lots Sold: 19
Total Lots Bought In: 6
Buy In %: 24.00%
Total Sale Proceeds: £1191975

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 0
Low Sold: NA
Low Bought In: NA
Buy In %: NA
Total Low Estimate: £0
Total Low Sold: NA

Mid Total Lots: 16
Mid Sold: 12
Mid Bought In: 4
Buy In %: 25.00%
Total Mid Estimate: £222000
Total Mid Sold: £222575

High Total Lots: 9
High Sold: 7
High Bought In: 2
Buy In %: 22.22%
Total High Estimate: £1185000
Total High Sold: £969400

The top lot by High estimate was lot 14, Andreas Gursky, Stateville, Illinois, 2002, at £500000-700000; it was also the top outcome of the two sales at £577250.

94.74% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above their estimate. There was only one surprise in these sales (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 298, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Baltic Sea, Rugen, 1996, at £36050 (image at right, top, via Sotheby’s)

Complete lot by lot results can be found here (Evening) and here (Day).

Sotheby’s
34-35 New Bond Street
London W1A 2AA

Frank Gohlke, Thoughts on Landscape

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2009 by Hol Art Books (here). Subtitled Collected Writings and Interviews. 300 pages. Contains essays, book introductions, interviews, artist statements, lectures, and other writings from 1976-2007. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: Frank Gohlke’s writings are quiet and clear, the record of a photographic life lived with a sense of measured humility and thoughtful attentiveness. The fact that Gohlke has a written voice of genuine eloquence has perhaps gone unnoticed by many during his long career, as his careful words have been intermittently scattered between descriptions and interrogations of his own work and acute observations of the work of friends, students and colleagues. This volume gathers together the photographer’s varied writings over a period of three decades, and provides a chronological history of the progression and evolution of his artistic thinking.

What I found most interesting in these consistently articulate writings was the underlying and ongoing process of Gohlke searching for meaning in the intersection of humanity and nature. While Gohlke was included in the now famous New Topographics exhibit, his personal explorations of the meaning of the land around him across his career go far beyond the implications of the “man-altered landscape”. As these writings reveal, every one of his projects comes back to the same central subject: the patient and affectionate study of the roots of the landscape, trying to understand its subtleties and nuances with intelligence and gratitude.

In each successive essay, Gohlke’s world view can be seen changing, becoming synthesized and transformed by intersections and refinements of ideas. His famous grain elevators start out as studies of structure and surface, but soon become investigations of function, space and the relationships between society and the land. Images of the aftereffects of a tornado in his North Texas hometown document patterns of erasure and rebuilding. His pictures of the land surrounding the Mount St. Helens volcano investigate the power of nature and the scale of destruction with the sympathetic eyes of a combination artist/scientist. And his intimate study of the less than glamorous Sudbury River asks hard questions about our actual understanding of the land around us and its history. In every case, we see Gohlke approaching his subject with intellectual rigor. What is really going on in this particular landscape? What do its surface clues tell us about its underlying structure? What are the relationships between the people and the geography and how can they be manifested in an image? He treats the land with respect and dignity, and asks his questions with both conviction and optimism. Each project represents a set of decisions, a sense of going deeper into a meaningful conversation with the world around him.

I also found Gohlke’s reflections on his life as an artist to be personal and insightful. He expresses genuine excitement in his discovery of photography and his subsequent freedom from a life of academia. His story moves through several different cities and towns, as well as a parallel journey of figuring out how to be an artist and which creative paths to follow. All along the way, he proves to be a person who is thinking deeply and maturely about his craft, its connections to his own individual history, and its place in the larger society of humanity.

After reading these essays, I only wish Gohlke had written more, especially about other artists. His introductions, prefaces, and reviews of the work various other photographers are incisive and graceful, getting underneath superficial surface observations into more thoughtful and nuanced readings of intention and execution; he paid attention and drew insightful and original conclusions.

As a collector, this terrific book is a good reminder that there are no short-cuts to understanding the motives for photography. One must look, and look again, and then actively think, and think again, before we can even hope to understand. Frank Gohlke has made a career out of this kind of steady, persistent looking, and his work and writings teach us to calm down, engage our brains, and see what the landscape around us really has to say.

Collector’s POV: Frank Gohlke is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York (here). Prices for his works (both vintage and more recent) have ranged between $4000-7500 at retail and between $3000-6000 at auction, although very few of his best works have come up for sale in the secondary markets in past few years. We have two images from Gohlke’s 1970’s grain elevator series in our collection (here).

Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Reviews: Design Observer (here), The Online Photographer (here), Englewood Review of Books (here)

Auction Results: Film, June 24, 2010 @Phillips

The results for the photographs in the FILM themed sale at Phillips last week were generally dismal, with a buy-in rate over 60% and Total Sale Proceeds that fell well below half of the Total Low Estimate. The material just wasn’t strong or unusual enough to attract an active group of buyers.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 128
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $387700
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $564400
Total Lots Sold: 49
Total Lots Bought In: 79
Buy In %: 61.72%
Total Sale Proceeds: $155814

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 123
Low Sold: 48
Low Bought In: 75
Buy In %: 60.98%
Total Low Estimate: $485400
Total Low Sold: $145814

Mid Total Lots: 5
Mid Sold: 1
Mid Bought In: 4
Buy In %: 80.00%
Total Mid Estimate: $79000
Total Mid Sold: $10000

High Total Lots: 0
High Sold: NA
High Bought In: NA
Buy In %: NA
Total High Estimate: $0
Total High Sold: NA

The top lot by High estimate was lot 108, Youssef Nabil, Rossy De Palma, Madrid, 20o2, at $18000-22000; it did not sell. The top outcome of the sale was lot 84, Lawrence Schiller, Marilyn Monroe (Color 3, Frame 18), 1962/Later, at $11875. (Image at right, bottom, via Phillips.)

77.55% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range. There was only one surprise in this sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 10, Joe Shere, Jayne Mansfield and Sophia Loren at Romanoff’s, Beverly Hills, 1958/1978, at $6000 (Image at right, top, via Phillips.)

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Phillips De Pury & Company
450 West 15th Street
New York, NY 10011

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