political-erotical-mystical

i just saw this quote on Exposure Project.

"I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum." 

—Claes Oldenburg, 1961

love it.  i want to see a contemporary photograph that is full on political-erotical-mystical.  (all three.  not just two!)  

what have you got for me, internets?

here are just a few that i think nail two, but not all three categories:

erotical-mystical:

(Miranda Lehman)

(Hanna Liden)

political-erotical:

(David Wojnarowicz, from Rimbaud in New York: not a fresh, contemporary image, but still so amazing.)

(Jen Smith, quoting Catherine Opie.  Opie's work would fall into this category for me as well.  actually, a lot of work falls into the category of 'political-erotical,' but not all of it moves me especially...)

political-mystical:

(can mystical and political co-exist?  they often repel each other.  but i think this one fits the bill, by Guillaume Herbaut, from the Asgarda series.)

political-erotical-mystical?

please send thoughts my way!  you get to define the terms however you wish.

aperture spotlight: women, in the photography

last night i went to the "Women in Photography" talk in Aperture's new Spotlight lecture series, hosted by the super Laurel Ptak. the talk was packed to the gills! i'd visited the Women in Photography website several times, so it was interesting to hear the perspective of the founders, Cara Phillips and Amy Elkins.

i knew the site was aimed at increasing visibility for female photographers working in the contemporary fine art mode, which is a lovely thing, especially if that's your passion. but i hadn't realized, until (the very well-prepared and well-spoken) Cara pulled out a powerpoint of statistics, how much the site's mission came out of a direct desire to remedy the fact that women face inequality as an identity category in the commercial art world--an inequality that they measured in major institutional credibility as well as dollars and cents. the discussion reminded me of many i've had among my white, middle class peers in, say, Women's Studies classes in college. especially when Cara offered the perspective that it was important for women to "learn to be powerful" and that if one believes in good things like equal pay, then it makes sense to identify as a feminist.  but, you know, i think these things just feel more complicated for some people.

i think i am in a privileged position to not want to measure success by the number of solo shows women have had at MoMA last year (1 out of 18) or the number of women among the top grossing artists. i do not dispute that these facts are real and that they really affect people. however, i'm mainly interested in work that is successfully provocative and discourse-inducing. even if it is less popular, more difficult to track down, or made by people without genders. but hey, if i were out there trying to pitch myself to Gagosian right now, i might be feeling a lot more like Cara and Amy.

Amy quoted Imogen Cunningham, who, when asked how being a woman had affected her life as a photographer, replied "I'm a photographer, not a woman." i couldn't tell Amy's intention in conveying the quote, or whether she felt critically that it reflected a sad necessity of Cunningham's era. (interestingly, Diane Arbus had a similar, but maybe less revolutionary, twist on this: "Look, I'm a photographer, not a woman photographer.") personally, i find Cunningham's remarks fascinating at face value--but don't feel a stake in prioritizing or analyzing her identifications. but i imagine that for many of the photographers featured on Women in Photography, being a woman is primary among their personal identity politics.

the discussion also reminded me that i should push harder in my own quest to seek out interesting, diverse work to think about and talk about, and not just pick through the obvious links. (once again, these events make me feel like the internet can sometimes make itself a small place.) it also made me realize that focusing on portraits on Subjectify has seemed to mean that i single out female-identified photographers more often than not. i definitely wonder why that is--and whether my eye, my identity, or an affinity for portraiture might be a cause.

overall, i was very happy to hear personal stories from panel photographers Elinor Carucci and Robin Schwartz, and to see previews of more of their new work. (i had seen Carucci's work a lot and had questions about how female beauty, nudity, and confessionalism factored in. so it meant a lot to hear about the work from her perspective--and i especially enjoyed her thoughts on the erotic tension of family relationships. one of her photos, "My Mother and I, 2000," is featured above.)

i deeply appreciate all of the panelists for their honesty, humor, and willingness to share.

(and tonight Justine Kurland was presenting at Aperture but i got sick and couldn't make it. YouTube, anyone?)

nerve: a little off topic

your (n^th) favorite blogger (i.e. me), plus some photos, some funnies, and some fire: here.


p.s. hello Nerve readers. do you like photos? if so, here are some of the smuttier (ha, ok, not really) Subjectify posts:

john currin and the pornography of the photograph

jessie mann on sexuality and buttless chaps

photographing virginity

how large is your negative?

jessie mann interview, part 5

part five of Seven Questions for Jessie Mann. the gay part.

Subjectify: Self Possessed definitely tackles ideas of gender and performance, and the subject or muse as a feminine archetype. Do you subvert that dynamic in your role as the conscious subject? The characters you portray in Self Possessed include Mapplethorpe and Warhol. I imagine that their queerness helped them disrupt the traditional barrier between subject and artist in their work. How does that function in your project ? Does Len Prince’s sexuality, or yours, have an impact on your work together to question the role of the subject?

Jessie Mann: This one is my favorite question! I like your use of the word queer—it is my favorite for such discussions, and so I will stick with it. For ease, I will once again break this question down into two broad topics: the first, being the idea of gender and its relationship to the subject in art and culture. The second being the role of sexuality in this collaborative project and others. To start, I do try to subvert a few ideas. One of them being that women in art are silent objects. Another, that women in collaborations were inevitably exploited or in someway manipulated into acts of self exposure. And still another, the idea that it is women who have exclusively populated the role of muse and/or artistic object. By speaking about my role, from my position, I am able to at least assert that one woman was not silent—is not silent, was not exploited, will not be exploited. That it is possible for the muse or the subject to bring artistic action to a collaboration. I try to get people to question the assumptions we make about women in art, and the subject in general. I am often asked why I didn’t “just take self portraits?” But a very important part of this project is to assert that the act of collaborating with the artist is artistic, that what women have been doing for so long, is “enough”—I don’t have to take the pictures myself; I can even pose nude for a man (gasp) and it can still be me making art. Additionally, by portraying Warhol, Dali, Mapplethorpe, and Beuys I am reminding people that the use of the self, the body, and one’s character in art is not something reserved for women, while at the same time giving a nod to the fellows that gave me the precedence to take on this theme.

It seems to me that both queers and women are particularly appreciative of the distinction between self and character. Here I would reference Wilde as a prime example of this self aware posing that is widely practiced by queers and perfected by the all-too-rare brave woman. Why this talent is most frequently, or even exclusively, developed by queers and women, is perhaps another chicken or egg question. Do women and queers feel the social need to separate identity from character, is the external flamboyance assigned to women and adopted by queers a result of social roles/pressures or is a certain amount of flair and show simply a part of the wonderful nature of said human beings? This is maybe another question I don’t really have the answer for, but I do love the discussion.

And though the overlap between queer culture and the cultural identities of women is infinitely interesting to me, I would like to take this opportunity to turn the question around. Why don’t straight men make characters of themselves? Why is it that queers and women share this trait but straight men don’t? Is it that they think of themselves or are seen as the fallback position—no need to define yourself when you are vanilla—everyone else has to add flavor, or is the straight male identity lacking in character? A notable exception to the rule that ‘the straight man’ doesn’t make a character of himself are writers. Hemmingway, Hunter S. Thompson, and Phillip Roth with his alter ego Zimmerman, all made characters of themselves as much as they wrote new ones into existence. Perhaps, something of it has to do with the position of the observer. From that stance, the outside, the viewer develops a sense of the play of it all. Or, maybe, the artistic spirit can, in fact, be channeled into ‘character making’ as a medium, and ‘outsiders’ simply tend to make good artists.

Finally, on the point of sexuality—I think it is relevant to this project that Len and Jason Paulson, who did a majority of the make up and styling on these photographs, are partners. I think that is a cog in the dynamics of this project that people are not generally aware of when they are introduced to this work. One blogger, reviewing the work, wrote that it was just another example of the dirty old man looking at the young girl posing. Just more of the male gaze. I found this hilarious. Definitely not for the first time, but maybe for the first time since people have been allowed to be open about their sexuality, we have been openly documenting an archetypal love—the queen for the queer and vice versa. I wonder how many collaborations of this kind have gone down to history in silence. The sexual dynamics of our team also allows the character I make of myself freedom from just that male gaze. In might be that the absence of a sexualized air, a familial environment (if you will) allows me to fully integrate my character as a woman—self possessed—sexual yet not objectified—a character—yet one who writes her own dialog. When I asked Len about this question, he said that gay men get this work better; they are looking for the nuances of meaning in a dialog that uses their language, in short, they are not distracted by the tits. I don’t know if that is really true, but there is so much of this work that speaks to queer identity and the many suits (of armor perhaps) that women wear. Someone once said that Monroe flirted with the camera, Len and I might just be pulling a ‘deadpan camp’ right back at the camera— itself known for its pregnant silences and contrived blankness.

the first new last sitting

vs.

i saw Bert Stern's new photographs of Lindsay Lohan, "recreating" the "Last Sitting" shoots he did with Marilyn Monroe in 1962. i think if anything, they offer an interesting commentary on how our relationship to celebrity and celebritic age, tragedy & drama have evolved in the past 46 years. our appetite for intimacy in photography has increased as well. but nudity is a poor substitute for intimacy here. and while mimetic nostalgia can be fun to play with (and seems appropriately postmodern), it's nothing without that spark.

perhaps this behind-the-scenes description from New York Magazine, where the photos are published, offers some insight: "The original photos, however, were distinguished by an almost claustrophobic intimacy between photographer and muse. In the first session, Stern persuaded the entourage of stylists to leave him alone with Monroe. The shoot thus took on the symbolic (if not the actual) contours of a liaison. The rise of the celebrity industrial complex has rendered this sort of tense pas de deux all but impossible. At the Lohan shoot, the crowd included Lohan’s manager, her security guard, and her younger sister, Ali; a makeup artist and assistant, a hairstylist and assistant, a stylist, a manicurist, a sentry to watch the borrowed diamonds; Stern, his manager, and two photo assistants. Lohan and Stern worked in an adjoining room, while the rest of us hovered outside like groupies at a backstage entrance."

this makes me think again of how successful Ryan McGinley's breakthrough performances images were. i think, as A Photo Editor pointed out, that some of the shock and beauty of the McGinley photographs is how un-handled the shoots seemed.

mediating the pornography of the photograph

last night i was reading "Lifting the Veil," the John Currin profile from a few weeks ago in the New Yorker (slideshow here). in discussing his recent paintings of images from internet porn, Currin says: "Pornography is so associated with photography, and so dependent on the idea that the camera doesn't intercede between you and the subject. One motive of mine is to see if I could make this clearly debased and unbeautiful thing become beautiful in painting."

questions of 'beauty' aside, i think Currin has hit the problem of photography on the head pretty well here. the idea that photography captures the real, without art or artifice, is deeply ingrained—as is the illusion that nothing stands between the viewer and the subject. i'm sure this is why artists who work outside of photography often play with ideas like this.

but of course i didn't just want to put actual paintings on Subjectify... so, above are two photographs of artists wrestling with the problem of pornography and photography... the first is Elinor Carucci's portrait of John Currin in front of his new painting "The Women of Franklin Street." the second is a photograph of Whitney Lee vacuuming one of the latch-hook rugs she makes from Playboy and cyber porn images.

but my real question here is: do you need to use another representational art form in order to trouble the relationship between the viewer and the subject of commercial pornography? or can photography mediate itself? in a way i think the crux of fine art photography is precisely this act of trying to make photography mediate or problematize itself.

then is 'art' photography any better suited to critiquing this aspect of photography than those other art forms? Larry Sultan's series "The Valley" comes to mind as one such critique. (a lot of other folks, like Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, have photographed porn stars, but The Valley seems the most on point to me in exploring the difference between pornography and representations of pornography.)

have more examples? any opinions on which projects are most effective and why?

(bonus question: can the commercial pornography industry problematize itself? or are any attempts it may make at irony really just camp?)

8 x 10

i'm interested in both the aesthetics of 8 x 10 view cameras and the dynamics of shooting portraits with them... after all, large format cameras still seem to be regarded by many as the ultimate tools for fine art photography.

since photographer Alec Soth is the guy both most likely to be described by the sentence "the photographer who takes color portraits with an 8 x 10 camera" and also the guy most likely to not want to be described that way (see his blog post on "the sentence")... i can't help but single him out. (the photo above is "Florence" from his latest project, Magnum's 2007 "Fashion Magazine").

in this video on the YouTube, Soth says of the dynamics of confronting people from beneath the cloth of the view camera: "they're portraits, but there is a distance there. to me it's often a picture of the space between us, in a way"

Soth also posits that the 8 x 10's ground glass itself creates a beautiful, jewel-like image so powerful to the photographer that actually taking the picture is secondary. the resulting photo is just a document of a larger event that takes place, "which really the viewer doesn't experience...they experience the idea of that." i really like the idea that the viewer only experiences the idea of the photograph. i wish Roland Barthes were still around to noodle on the topic.

to sum up the experience, he says "It's not this 'decisive moment'...it's a slowed-down, very purposeful encounter."

i've never used a view camera. but he just makes it sound so romantical...like a tool of seduction.

or, as the fine art world's Nerve profile would remind us: "large prints are sexy... large negatives are sexier."

p.s. in another interview, Soth says that he doesn't collect photography, but he has bought one print, by E.J. Bellocq. (early 20th century photographer who left behind a hidden cache of sexy and awesome portraits of prostitutes from Storyville, New Orleans...taken with an 8 x 10 camera.) i rest my case.

domestic stages

i saw Domestic Stages by Carrie Levy a few years ago at Daniel Cooney Gallery and a few of the photos stuck with me. well, literally. the gallery had printed the top image, above, as 5 x 7 promotional postcard. i grabbed it and for some reason stuck it on the wall over my computer at home. a lot of people come over and wonder why there is a photograph of a random naked guy on my wall and i have no good explanation.

Carrie Levy describes the project, which she started after finishing an emotional personal project, as "anti-portraiture." a lot of portraits these days play with the idea of anti-portraiture... and i've seen a lot of portraits that hide the face in various ways, but these seem to me to also be adding in an idea of shame. i don't think it's just the nudity and facelessness that adds that in—it's the turning to the wall but also the studio lighting, the exaggeration of the pose, and the choice of color film. Levy also says the project was about investigating "how we deal with identity when you are not exposed to facial details and how the body becomes a gaze which does not see."

do the subjects gaze at us? whose shame am i detecting? Levy's, the subjects', yours, or my own?