Free-range

As with many residents of the United States last week my thoughts turned to food. The most obvious reason being Thanksgiving, but there was also the audio version of Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma on the long drive to and from our meal in Southern California. In hindsight it may not have been the best choice as it had me calculating the corn content of the Thanksgiving dinner between bites. For those who haven’t read or listened to the book, Pollan traces four meals from their origin to his table and in the first section (the one we listened to on the drive) the path he takes is through the industrial food system which centers around corn, a path that ends at the pinnacle (or nadir depending on your point of view) of the industrial food system, the fast food meal.

Tessa Bunney from Hand to Mouth

It’s seems like more than a coincidence that the latest issue of Daylight Magazine, which I picked up before the trip, also focuses on agriculture. In it Peter Menzel’s images of feed lots and turkeys in California are compelling and related perfectly to the season, the location (driving through huge monocultures), and themes in Pollan’s book, but it was Tessa Bunney’s work in the Romanian Carpathian mountains that I keep coming back to. I think they play into the same pastoral ideal that Pollan discusses that, even though I grew up on a small farm, I can’t help being seduced by. The idea of an idyllic life of simplicity lived in harmony with nature that conveniently leaves out all the work that’s involved and the nearly impossible situations the small farmer faces in the modern consumer culture.

Tessa Bunney from Hand to Mouth

Tessa Bunney from Hand to Mouth

Sebald and Sabra

Waltz with Bashir film still

The connection between photography and memory is a facile one. Who doesn’t have a photograph of a time or place that they would like to remember? The school photo, the vacation snapshot, the wedding photograph all verify, more concretely than memory, that a certain moment occurred. Or do they? Even before digital manipulation, photography has had, at best, a loose relationship with reality. On the one hand, we are taught to consider photographs as representations of the real when they appear in newspapers, court rooms, scientific publications, etc. But even these images are produced by way of any number of subjective decisions which determine the “reality” of what is portrayed.

So what put me on this line of thought? First, I’m currently reading The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald which is a combination of reminiscence by the narrator and his chronicling of the lives and travels of the four emigrants of the title. Though the narrator is never identified, I can’t help thinking it’s Sebald himself. It’s a thought that’s at odds with the book being a work of fiction. This tension between document and fiction is strengthened by photographs placed throughout the text as if they have been collected from various shoe boxes and albums of the characters. The images, though they appear to relate to the text, could very well be a collection of unrelated images around which the author created his story. The book has me wondering, as if I were watching a movie “based on a true story,” how much is remembrance and how much is pure fabrication.

In contrast to Sebald construction of fiction from “real” representations of the world (i.e. photographs), Ari Folman’s film Waltz with Bashir uses a stylized form of representation (animation) to portray real events. It’s an animated documentary. Here the animation enhances the subjectiveness of memory as Folman, a former Israeli soldier, tries to recall the events of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The film moves back and forth between past and present as Folman interviews various people involved trying to uncover the memories he himself has blocked out. Slowly things come to light as his memory returns culminating in a final denouement which I will leave a surprise. The film is a powerful contemplation on war and memory.

Mark Lombardi

Mark Lombardi Global Neworks , book cover

The upheaval in the US financial markets over the past couple months, its effect on the international markets, and the baroque interconnectedness of it all has had me thinking about what Mark Lombardi would have thought of all this. I’ve long been a fan of Lombardi’s extensively researched and delicately drawn maps of connections and was thrilled to find a copy of Global Networks at Green Apple a couple weeks ago. Sadly, Lombari’s brief career as an artist ended with his death in 2000. If you are not familiar with his work, Lombardi drew maps of the relationships between the players in various networks of power be they criminal, financial or political. He drew maps of Iran-Contra, the Savings and Loan meltdown, the Chicago mob, and the Pope and his bankers. He mapped out the connections around Osama bin Laden and his brother-in-law Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi banker, so thoroughly in the work BCCI-ICIC & FAB that in the aftermath of 9/11 the FBI contacted the Whitney and requested a copy of it.

Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of Lombardi’s work is that it doesn’t reproduce very well in books or on the web. You end up with either a view of the entirety where you can’t make out any detail or a detail that lacks context. Even seeing them in person requires the viewer to have a huge amount of information to understand the full implications of the connections. Is it this lack of easy readability that makes the work art and not information design? I don’t want to get into a big discussion of what is art here, but Lombardi’s work has certainly raised some questions for me. Do they become art because they are aesthetically pleasing? Is it because they show the hand of the artist, i.e. would they be the same if they had been done on a computer? Is it art because the creator says it is and some gallery owner agreed with him? Or is it the combination of all these things? Whether it is art or not (I think it is), I would have loved to see Lombardi’s take on the current crisis.

Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008

Erased de Kooning Drawing, Robert Rauschenberg

I just want to make mention of Robert Rauschenberg’s passing this week and revisit one of my favorite works of his, a piece that resides at the SF MoMA, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953 (for a clip of Rauschenberg talking about the work go here). Even more so than the de Kooning with his choice of drawing, Rauschenberg has left us with something that will be difficult to erase.

After the Revolution

If you happen to be in San Francisco on a weekday between now and June 27 you may want to check out a show of photographic work from young Iranian artists called After the Revolution. The ‘revolution’ in the title is the 1979 Iranian Revolution and all the artists were born that year or later and live in either Iran or California. The show is being presented by the San Francisco Arts Commission and hangs in City Hall which sets up an interesting dialogue between Iran and a representation of US government. Before I even saw the work, the juxtaposition had me thinking about things like censorship and freedom, fear and security. Thoughts that were reinforced when I passed through the metal detectors to see the show.

The work hangs on both sides of two long corridors that radiate from a central space. I’m describing the space because the dialogue that began with the building and art continues between the work of different artists within the show. In several cases the curator(s) have set up photos by two different artists across the hall from one another and this viewer can’t help but make relationships between them.

from Fort Series, Amir H. Fallah

The first pairing is Meysam Mahfouz’s sensitively observed series The Interiors (2007) from Tehran with Amir H. Fallah’s Fort Series (2007) in which the photographer and friends constructed forts in their homes using everyday objects. Both play with the idea of interior and exterior, but more specifically with the idea of a safe haven. Especially when you take into consideration Mahfouz’s artist statement saying that the photographer work exclusively indoors. Why is that? Is there something to fear in photographing outside or is that just the artist’s preference? In Fallah’s series there is the sense of play that comes with fort building, but in the context of this show one can’t help thinking of the military connotations of the word. Are they built for protection, an outpost in an unfamiliar land?

The topic of interior and exterior is continued in the work of Morteza Khaki, but his series Purse Snatching (2006) is also more explicitly about identity. In his series of wallets and purses that are photographed open you can see both public faces (ID cards) and private ones (personal photographs). This duality of public and private persona is the most frequent topic of the work here and shows up in the next pairing as well, Naciem Nikkah’s A Private Rebellion (2007) and Mahoube Karamli’s The Girls (2006). Nikkah’s work is a series of images of desktops from an Iranian school with the layers of writing and drawing that have been left behind by students. The image brings to mind a similar one from Catherine Wagner’s series American Classroom showing that the girls of Manzandaran high school in Iran have many of the same concerns as young people in the US. Karamli’s series also portrays young women in Iran, but this time they are themselves in the private spaces of their rooms rather than traces scribbled on a desk. Switching from the portrayal of others to the portrayal of self, Shadi Yousefian deals with the idea of different selves in a much more visceral way. Her Self-Portraits (2003) are collaged together from roughly cut or distressed parts and the central space in the exhibit holds two close to life size portraits, The Two Standing Shadis (2003), cobbled together on metal plates, one in traditional dress, one in Western dress.

from American Classroom, Catherine Wagner

from Bodiless I, Mehraneh Atashi

To me the most interesting work was Mehraneh Atashi’s Bodiless 1 (2004). A series of images taken by a young woman at a zourkhaneh, a traditional gymnasium where men train for both physical and spiritual strength. That in itself would be interesting, but she also uses mirrors to view the men and place her own image in the frame. The negotiation that must have been involved to gain access to this society of men is accentuated by her own image wearing a head scarf and holding a camera. You are conscious of both her gaze, that of the men and their awareness of her gaze. On top of all this, many of the images show that the walls of the gym are covered with portraits of very serious (religious?) men looking down on the happenings. I can’t help but wonder, would they approve? I also wonder what those serious men would think of the work across the hall where we have a different take on the mirror, identity and the idea of self-improvement, this time with the focus on Iranian women. Parisa Taghizadeh’s series Make-Up Iran (2001) focuses the lens on the daily ritual of applying make up that is most likely unknown to men outside their immediate family.

from Make-Up Tehran, Parisa Taghizadeh

The final pairing is Parham Taghioff’s Passage (2007) and Elhum Amjadi’s Makeshift Motherland (2005). On the one side you have images of a market in Iran, shops shut, covered over with colorful cloth. On the other you have images of a Persian market in California, shop keepers, people conversing, reading books, etc. The images are black and white, shot in a documentary style, but they also take on characteristics of nostalgia. They show a world that is a recreation of another time and place. It’s a place that you wonder, when looking across the hall, if it still exists.

from Passage, Parham Taghioff

Nostalgia isn’t restricted to the photographers living outside of Iran either. Working in the streets of Tehran Manboube Karamli documents the destruction of older buildings in his series The Walls (2007). By photographing the walls of the buildings that remain when the neighboring building is razed he reveals the traces of what has been lost, making what is left behind all the more poignant.

In the end I feel like the importance of this show, more than the work of any individual artist, is in the dialogue that it engenders between two cultures, past and present, public and personal, male and female. It is a reminder that dialogue is the key to understanding.

Memory Palace

Last Monday I had the opportunity to see two editions of Hosoe Eikoh’s Barakei (alternately titled Killed by Roses or Ordeal by Roses). The 1963 original, designed by Sugiura Kohei was under glass so I wasn’t able to see more that one spread and the slipcase, but I did get to see the 1971 version that was re-edited by Mishima Yukio, the writer and model for the series, and designed and illustrated by Yokoo Tadanori. Supposedly the whole project was done as a memorial for Mishima who committed ritual suicide shortly before the book’s release.

The book is phenomenal. First of all, it is big, 15 1/4 x 21 1/4 in. (38.735 x 53.975 cm) and unfolding the 4 panels of the case reveals the black velvet bound volume resting on the torso of Yokoo’s colorful saint-like representation of Mishima impaled by roses which, in turn, overlaps a vaguely Indian deity. The process definitely has religious overtones which were amplified by the fact that, to see the book, I had to visit a library’s special collection and the book was placed on a kind of foam pedastal for viewing.

The whole experience got me thinking about my last post about libraries and how I can recall various libraries and books that I found there, experiences that I consider important. In contrast, I can’t recall being in awe (as I was looking at Barakei) with anything I have seen on a computer screen. Don’t get me wrong, I have seen a lot of interesting things, but there is something about the mediation of the screen, or the elimination of some senses (touch and smell) that keeps the experience from reaching the same level. On some level I’m just predisposed to treating books with more reverence than computers even though at the most basic level they are both carriers of information.

Reverence is also a word I would use to describe Höfer’s images of libraries both in terms of how Höfer treats the spaces and how the builders originally constructed them. For the most part, the buildings shown are not just storehouses for inanimate objects, these are palaces build to house and celebrate knowledge. Thinking of palaces of knowledge, in turn, took me back Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, a book that also touches on the idea of storing knowledge though the difference is the spaces Ricci creates are conceptual rather than physical. Ricci was a 16th century Jesuit missionary who used mnemonic strategies to both learn Chinese and spread the teachings of the Catholic church in China. The gist of the system is to create a space in your mind and fill it with objects/images that will help you remember a specific bits of information. The more specific and distinct the space is the easier it will be to remember the desired information. There is an interesting thread here of the movement from the internal to the external in terms of storage of information which also includes the subset of analog to digital, but that’s another discussion entirely. One thing I will say, however, is that I agree with Umberto Eco in his introduction to Höfer’s book, there is something to be said for browsing the stacks of a library.

Now what’s so important about the problem of access to the shelves? One of the misunderstandings that dominate the concept of libraries is that you go into one to look for a book whose title you already know. In reality it often happens that you do go to a library because you want a book whose title you know, but the principle function of the library, at least the function of the library in my house and of that of any friend we may chance to visit, is to discover books whose existence we never suspected, only to discover that they are of extreme importance to us. Of course, it’s true that this discovery can be made by leafing through a catalog, but there’s nothing more revealing and exciting than exploring the shelves that contain a collection of books on a certain subject–something that you wouldn’t be able to discover in a catalogue ordered by authors’ names–and to find another book beside the book you went to find, one that you weren’t looking for but that emerges as being of fundamental importance.

As Eco wrote about libraries he liked to visit in Toronto and at Yale I though back to some of the libraries I have visited and books that I relate to those specific times in my life. The library I frequented most growing up was the old West Tisbury library on Music Street a small two-story building where you had to climb a narrow stairway to get to the children’s section. The books that I can remember borrowing multiple times include Bulfinch’s Mythology and David McCauley’s Pyramid. The Vineyard Haven library was more modern and though I don’t remember any specific books there I do recall a quilt they had hanging on display. The quilt had panels done by different people, each depicting a different local scene. One of the panels was done by my grandmother and in the scene were sailboats with the initials representing me and my brothers. The Vineyard Haven library was also where I first encountered the kind of computerized index that would eventually replace card catalogues. As you may have guessed I loved the card catalogue as well as the sign out cards that used to be in books. You could look in the back of a book and see the last person to take it out and it’s history stamped in ink.

College opened up new libraries that were both broader and more specific. I studied among the stacks at Middlebury taking breaks to browse the aisles at random. Senior year I had my own carrel. The book that best represents those days is Nelson’s Japanese-English Character Dictionary. The RISD library (the old one on Benefit Street, not the new Fleet library which I have yet to visited) was a great example of what a library reading room, a large open room, but not too large, high ceilings, long tables, books all around including a on a mezzanine level reached by short spiral staircases around the room. Off of the main reading room was a section of the stacks that included design and photography books. That’s where, during a random bit of browsing, I first got to know the work of Josef Koudelka in his book Exiles. Most recently the cozy SFAI library perched atop one of the city’s many hills is a place I like to visit and I’m just beginning to acquaint myself with the libraries at Stanford University which is where I saw both volumes of Barakei.

Thinking of all these places, I question whether a completely digital archive can reproduce the library experience. Maybe I’m clinging to the past. I don’t dispute the fact that there are things a digital archive can do that a physical library cannot. On the subject of access alone there is no questioning the value of being able to make information available to a larger audience. But until it can recreate the serendipity of finding the thing you didn’t know you were looking for and the experience of seeing a book like Barakei in person there is still a place for the library.