zuihitsu

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.

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.

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.

The following post was started quite some time ago, but sat waiting to be finished as life intervened and my focus shifted from talking about and making art to paying my rent. Now that I’ve regained a semblance of normalcy, it’s time to return to my much neglected blog.

A while back a writer friend of mine suggested I should read Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, a book about the experiences in reading and, by extension books. It had come up as part of a discussion of our mutual, if slightly differing, love of books. To use Fadiman’s terms my friend’s love of books tends towards the carnal, consuming both their soul (the words and ideas) and their body (annotating pages, breaking spines) while mine tends toward a courtly love where, in addition to appreciating the words, the book as an object is something to be venerated. As with most things, the middle ground is more populous than either extreme and though I may choose to copy passages of interest into a notebook rather than marking the original text I’m sure Ms. Fadiman would be pleased to know that a copy of her book lies spine up, pages splayed on my desk, paused in the reading, rather than stopped.

Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Lengua Madrid, Candida Höfer

The point I am gradually coming to is that there is something about the book as an object that appeals to me. So much so that I have tried to capture, with limited success, this fascination on film (see group 04 in the photography section of the main website). Many of the photos were shot at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, a place created in defense of the activity of browsing. For those interested, an article on the library appeared in the May 2007 issue of Harper’s and was accompanied by images by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin. If you appreciate a good library, you should also check out the series of library photographs by Candida Höfer (though her images tend to be more about the spaces than the books).

Thought Book, 2001, Abelardo Morell

When considering books as a subject for photography many people reference Abelardo Morell. I have to admit I also associated Morell with his Book of Books (which I finally picked up at Green Apple Books recently) and his camera obscura work. I also thought of him as working exclusively in black and white. In January, however, I saw him speak and was surprised to see a range of work from early street photography to his most recent experiments with making camera-less images and even shooting in color.

Upshot, 2003, Thomas M. Allen

One of the reasons people probably photograph books is that they are so convenient, they’re everywhere. It was probably a rainy day and Thomas M. Allen first started cutting up and photographing the pulp novels that ended up in his book Uncovered. There is also something romantic about books, the accumulation of knowledge they symbolizes or the possible worlds and stories they hold between their covers. Their influence reaches beyond their pages, shaping the way people see the world. Interacting with books from an early age can leave a lasting impression as I imagine it did with Marc Joseph. His series New and Used, a series of used book and record shops, shows a love for these objects, the search for and collection of them, and the life they lead when their original owners have given them up.

Something caused all these artists to consider either the book itself or the life of books. So, though many have proclaimed the death of print, books still seem to hold some cultural resonance. Will there ever be a time when people will look at these varied portrayals and not recognize books? It seems more likely that images of books will become quaint, like pictures of rotary phones, but I doubt they will ever be unreadable.

Between the holidays and getting ready for my midwinter review today I haven’t had a whole lot of time to see stuff or to write about the things I have seen. I did go to the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, an amazing building by Tadao Ando, and to the SF Camerawork opening for the Katsushige Nakahashi show I wrote about in my last post. The completed submarine is quite cool, floating suspended in the gallery, if you are in San Francisco I’d recommend checking it out.

As for my own work, the project that I have been working on most recently is a large map of Martha’s Vineyard, where I grew up, that is made up with a combination of burn marks and my handwriting. Below is an image of the piece with me standing to one side to indicate scale (roughly eight feet high by twelve feet wide).

With Christmas coming up I’m a bit prone to nostalgia, thinking back to a time before I was aware of the rampant commercialization of the holiday. The arrival of the Sears Wishbook that officially kicked off a season of acquisitiveness, the anticipation of Christmas eve, tearing open the presents on Christmas morning, a time when toys were the order of the day. I never really thought about the meaning of those toys then. How toys for boys generally centered around construction and war while girls’ toys often were about child rearing. Katsushige Nakahashi, on the other hand, has spent quite a lot of time thinking about his childhood and the things he played with.

from the University of Hawaii Zero Project, Katsushige Nakahashi

Nakahashi is a sculptor who uses photography to generate the building material for some of his projects. In 2006, at the University of Hawaii he built a full-size replica of a WWII Japanese Zero out of roughly 25,000 photographs. The photographs where taken of a 1:32 scale model, a toy. Nakahashi constructed such models as a child, so the work is partly about the memory of those times and the sense of play, but the objects represented are so loaded there are bound to be multiple readings. It seems Nakahashi has run afoul of these multiple readings and has the following to say about his work.

My memory of war was making a plastic model of a Zero fighter, and playing with it. I am not a historian, nor am I a politician. I am frequently asked to clarify my status, whether I belong to the right or the left. The fact is that answering these questions is not what I am asked to do as an artist. Judging right from wrong doesn’t make any sense to me either. On the contrary, questioning people from a lot of different dimensions through my work, bringing those questions to light, is what I am aiming at. Through the process of doing so, I sincerely believe that by looking back at the past, a spirit of forgiveness, intelligence, and respect for a better future will emerge.

In the past few weeks I spent two separate occasions taping together photographs for his upcoming show at SF Camerawork. This time Nakahashi has photographed a 1/30th scale model of a WWII suicide sub (kaiten) in minute detail. When the photos are taped together they will create a 3D replica at actual size (roughly 15 meters). Unlike past projects, where he has photographed commercially available models as a connection to his childhood, he had to have this model custom made. I don’t know that this fact changes the tone of the work because, to me, the whole project is a replication of that sense of construction as play. In this case the materials are not plastic parts and glue, but photographs and cello tape. The show opens January 3rd and runs to March 22nd with an opening reception January 15th.

For more information on the upcoming exhibition, including volunteer sign-up for the construction of the project, click here.

What do Chris McCaw and Marco Breuer (links to work here and here) have in common (other than their work sometimes bordering on combustion)? Both artists are very interested in the photograph as an object and the process involved in creating that object. In the current climate of rapid digitization, where the process of photography becoming more removed, this is a refreshing notion.

from the Sunburns series, Chris McCaw

At Friday night’s Photo Alliance lecture McCaw talked about the long daylight exposures, large format (in some cases self built) cameras and paper negatives of his Sunburns series and how he has become more attuned to the seasons and the movement of the sun. This series of work has also made him more aware of his materials as only certain older stocks of paper will give him the results he is looking for. Beyond the aesthetic appeal of the images, the draw of McCaw’s images is the combination of two types of interaction that light has with the paper. The first being the recording of the landscape in the traditional photographic sense and the second being the burning of the paper as if with a magnifying glass.

It’s interesting that McCaw and Breuer have ended up where photography began, creating unique objects rather than multiples. In Breuer’s case a lot of his earlier work was with photograms because, for him, printing photographs in the darkroom felt like working with old ideas, ideas he that had occurred to him days or weeks earlier. His whole output since has been exploring ways to keep immediacy in his work and do away with any mediating process. This in itself is an interesting choice considering photography itself is mediation, a removal from the actual.

PAN(C-289), 2003, Marco Breuer

Breuer’s more recent work, which appears in a recently published book by Aperture, is done by working (sanding, scraping,incising) the surface of exposed color photo paper to reveal different colors. In an interesting side note, Breuer wasn’t terribly happy with the outcome of the book so he began reworking a handful of the actual books in the same way he produced the original work. He sanded, removed text, and otherwise worked the books until they had reached an acceptable level of authenticity. That is what I appreciate about Breuer, his dedication to the ideas that he has set forth for himself and his continuous exploration of those ideas.

” A fucking masterpiece”

That’s what Sean Penn called Julian Schnabel’s new film tonight at a screening in San Francisco and I would have to agree. Without giving too much away I’ll say that the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby is amazing, the performances (particularly Max von Sydow) are heartfelt and pitch perfect, and the team of Schnabel and Janusz Kaminski create a truly beautiful film.

In a Q&A session after the screening (which was more rambling anecdotes than interview) Schnabel said that he felt film making was more about finding something out about the world than telling something that you know. His discoveries become our discoveries and they make for the palpable freshness of this film.

To walk into the Takashi Murakami show at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in LA is to enter a hallucinogenic mash-up of Pop and traditional references that obliterate the already blurry line between art and commerce. Murakami’s world is populated by paintings and sculptures of smiling flowers, mushrooms with eyes and all manner of creatures done in a whole palette of shiny candy colors. It’s also available for purchase. There is a gallery of 500 mass produced goods in the “Kaikai Kiki Merchandise Display Room”, a Louis Vitton store complete with cash registers, and a line to get in to the MOCA store. Even if you don’t want to take a little piece of Murakami’s work home you have to appreciate his industry. There is a video viewing room where you can sit on a smiling flower patterned carpet and watch a Kanye West video, the first part of an animated KaiKai & Kiki film (you have to return to the exhibit two more times to see the complete film), and a sample of an upcoming live action project. Outside the room is a monitor showing a looping series of short videos done in the form of commercials advertising Inochi (life) staring a young futuristic humanoid amongst Japanese school children. What makes the exhibit more than just a crass commentary on consumerism and the commoditization of art is the breadth of Murakami’s references. While his chosen vocabulary is that of the contemporary Japanese anime/manga/otaku culture he references Buddhism and traditional Japanese art.

It seems like a lot of art today is about spectacle and the Murakami show certainly falls into that category. But it is that quality and the questions that it raises about art and commerce that make it worth seeing.

For information online about the show check out www.moca.org/murakami/

On a recent trip to NYC I went to the Met to see the show of Dutch paintings from “The Age of Rembrandt”. First of all, it’s been a long time since I’ve been to the Met and I’d forgotten how huge the place is. It also now includes a new gallery for modern (since 1960) photography, but I was really there to see the paintings.

Falconer’s Bag, 1695, Jan Weenix from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last spring I saw Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and it knocked me out. I know, I know, Vermeer is one of those artists whose work is so well known that it’s easy to feel blasé about the whole thing, but seeing that particular painting in person (even more so than the Girl with a Pearl Earring at the Mauritshuis in the Hague) was a memorable experience. So I was looking forward to seeing the five Vermeers that the Met has as well as any still life that might be there. On the whole the show was quite good, though I was disappointed that there were only a limited number of still lifes among the many portraits and landscapes and the Vermeers weren’t quite up to the Kitchen Maid. Maybe my expectations were too high. Anyway, that sets the context for the work of another artist I saw later that day.

While thumbing through a copy of Photograph at a gallery in Chelsea I came across a photograph that reminded me of the Dutch still lifes, but instead of the usual rabbit or game bird this image contained a wallaby. Needless to say I was intrigued, so I made a point of seeing the images in person.

Wallaby with Tarpaulin, 2006, Marian Drew

The artist’s name is Marian Drew and she finds these subjects by the side of the road in her native Australia. The gallery notes say that, opposed to the bounty portrayed in traditional still lifes, her images are a commentary on human wastefulness and disregard for wild animals. I don’t know that I get the wasteful aspect of it because the images themselves are generally quite minimal, seldom is the table overflowing. I do however see roadkill a comment on the intersection of the wild and the developed, the often disastrous consequences of that intersection, habitat loss, etc. Despite the somewhat gruesome subject matter there are some wonderful images.

Wombat with Watermelon, 2005, Marian Drew

That said, seeing the images in person there was something I hadn’t noticed in the smaller image in the gallery guide. In many of the images there was a halo around the objects on the table. A kind of spotlight effect that I found distracting. I feel her best images are the ones where this effect isn’t as strongly evident. Later I learned from the gallerist that the effect was due to the fact that Drew photographs these images in complete darkness and illuminates the objects with a “torch”. She doesn’t know herself exactly how the lighting is going to turn out until she sees the image. Personally, I would rather have the images lit with a more natural light. I don’t know that her method adds anything to her intended meaning. It would be interesting to know the reasoning behind shooting the images in this way.

The intersection of man and animal (and being in NYC) got me thinking about Alessandra Sanguinetti’s from On the Sixth Day. I saw some of those images at the ICP show Ecotopia last year and finally got around to buying her book at Dashwood Books (an excellent shop with a very strong section of Japanese photography) the same day I went to see the Drew show. One of the images from the series is also a still life, though much more naturalistic than either Drew’s work or the Dutch paintings.

Still Life from On the Sixth Day, Alessandra Sanguinetti

Beyond the visual difference there is also a considerable difference in the image’s meaning. Rather than the wastefulness and disregard for the natural world portrayed in Drew’s images Sanguinetti was photographing subsistence farmers in Argentina who are intimately linked with their surroundings.

For anyone who hasn’t seen On the Sixth Day, I highly recommend it. It is a visual tour de force and will definitely make you think about the origin of the piece of meat on your plate.