things are strange!

last Thursday, i had the pleasure of attending the opening of Humble Arts Foundation's new group show, "Things Are Strange," at New Century Artists gallery in Chelsea.

as always, Humble puts on a fun party and a thought-provoking show.  sometimes what i enjoy most about the process of group exhibition is reading the curatorial statement and the selected images together as a text.  in this case, curator and gallant man-about-internet Jon Feinstein writes that the eighteen photographers in the show "explore the peculiar, idiosyncratic and often absurd elements of the contemporary world, using them as a metaphor for the current state of social and political affairs."

with this framework, i enjoyed the puzzle presented: to piece together the collected mix of landscapes (found and arranged), portraits (found and arranged) and more conceptual pieces through a lens of metaphor for our allegedly strange days.  the piece that spoke to me the loudest was not one i expected: Ofer Wolberger's "Garbage Circle, Austin Texas, 2001" (below, jpeg doesn't do much justice).  the print was prominently placed and Chelsea-big.  

with its pointed juxtaposition of neo-pagan eco-worship and literal low-culture trash, it not only cast a circle, but i think you could even say that a spectre of new mysticism haunted the show.

the images in the show declare that symptoms of our strange cultural moment manifest when: we entomb ourselves in soulless office buildings, we search earnestly for signs of the paranormal, we feel stranded instead of freed by our American car-traveling culture, we angle for fascination through interventions into mundane urban landscapes, we fantasize about the line between raw nature and the remove of human conceptualism, we question the compulsion (and perhaps typologize the instruments used) to carve away at our bodies.  

Feinstein posits that each artist "alludes to a world that is gradually falling apart at the seams." so what do these cries of Koyaanisqatsi add up to?  are things strange?  sure.  oddly enough, what the show did not do is convince me that there is a particular nowness, a freshness, or a specificity to this strangeness.  (or a politics of strangeness.)  but it did make me hope (perhaps perversely) that we'll keep trying to unravel the seams a bit harder.

to that end, i'll leave you with a photograph from Emiliano Granado's "Ghostbusters" series, which i saw both as a portrait and as a continuation of photography's longtime fascination with capturing the spirit world...and also as one more piece of the puzzle. 

photographic and literal mysticisms

last week, i touched on the topic of the 'new mysticism' in contemporary photography in a discussion of the Young Curators, New Ideas show. one of the artists in the show (and also alleged as a new mysticist), Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, emailed me a thoughtful response on photographic mysticism and his own work.

"Great Grandfather with Freemasons," above, is one of my favorite photos of his. i love the way it mixes family history, portrait-as-document, analog vs. digital, and pokes at the mystery and ritual of freemasonry with some freaky, postmodern special effects. it's from his series Nocturne.

Noel says:

"I can’t speak for the other photographers in the show but for me this tendency, to highlight and/or deconstruct the medium’s properties (photographic mysticism which we can be critical of, and photographic mysticism that is attached to all photography whether we like it or not), is heavily rooted within my upbringing. This is to say that, unlike previous generations who used photography as a crucial way to understand, confront and engage with social issues, political unrest, and war, my relationship to photography is related to my upbringing by the intrusive and numbing hand of media (news, movies, TV, computers, etc).

I know war and heroism through highly graphic movies, vehicles of unrealistic archetypes. The ways of the universe (both spiritually and spatially) have been prodded into my consciousness by robots streaming data back from the very edges of the solar system. God is no longer a viable entity and the psychotropic drugs don’t get her/it/him to speak - realistic computer generated pixies and dragons are far more telling.

With all of this in mind I refuse to buy into the medium’s influential ability to mean significantly (its importance as a vehicle for substantial change in an all but uninterested world), however, this doesn’t mean that photography being produced today is uninspired or vacant, it's just aware of its relative unimportance. So this may explain why there is an inherent “prettiness” in so much photography as well. I take this notion and make banal beauty to subvert the notion of having to live up to the medium’s past and present quality control. My photos are small, often single editions of minimal captured prints. I want people to consider how digital and analogue image-making co-exist now and forever, how our thirst for better, faster, stronger, shapes our understanding of value in a medium tied to craftsmanship.

A quote by Wolfgang Tillmans on The Sonic Blog sums our present relationship with photography perfectly:

“The initial question everybody asks when confronted with a photograph is, who is it? Where is it? When was it made? How it was taken? A photograph is always seen through its content and rarely through its presence as an object in itself.”

I take a photograph to show you an object, loving its business both in thought, tangibility and commerce."


thanks so much, Noel, for your thoughts—and for letting me post them. (and i think there are several topics here that are worth discussing in more depth, too, especially questions of beauty and questioning the photograph's referent.)

photos: where are they at?

so, before i went to check out 'Young Curators, New Ideas' at Bond Street Gallery, i promised to come back with my take on the exhibition's offer of "where art photography is today." i did come up with an answer for your consideration, and it's posted below some thoughts on the show itself.

the show: the exhibition offers the viewpoints of six curators. though they obviously aren't all attempting to conclusively tackle the question of where art photography is in grand terms (especially given how quickly the show was put together), all six curators present themes that point toward possible answers to our question.

i'd group the exhibitions into three loose categories: 1) the first and most straightforward for me was Amy Stein's exhibition, which presents a new crop of photographers working in the directorial tradition of Sherman and Crewdson. these folks, like Alix Smith and Ofer Wolberger, are interested in identity and storytelling and photographic authority.

2) the second group i would describe as pretty pictures with themes of magic, light, and new mysticism (Grant Willing & Alana Celii and Jon Feinstein's exhibitions both explored these). i have to admit that i find a lot of these beautiful, which makes me question them a bit. there's a lot to plumb here (perhaps a few more posts worth), but for discussion-starters i liked Jon Feinstein's interview with Shoot! about the turn toward 'photographic mysticism.'

3) my final grouping was of three curators who seemed primarily interested in questioning photographic forms, and the deconstruction of the meaning of the photograph (Michael Buhler-Rose, Laurel Ptak, and Lumi Tan). obviously this topic is dear to my heart. i enjoyed Buhler-Rose's presentation of Charles Benton's "Opposing Photographers": a timed slide presentation of two guys taking pictures of each other taking pictures of each other. incredibly simple, yes, but how fun to see a thoughtful and playful meditation on one of the most common snapshot clichés. and of course, Laurel Ptak's commissioned animated GIFs stood out (not the least because so many people at the opening reception were crowded around the flatpanel screen watching them animate). of the 26 photographers who contributed GIFs, Noel Rodo-Vankuelen stole the show. (his GIFs are GIFtastic. check out his "Father" above and "Black Monolith," below.) Karly Wildenhaus's are amazing too.

many of the themes presented do overlap and coalesce toward a certain kind of vision of art photography today. but overall -- where is it at? -- i have to say there was one obvious but largely unspoken elephant in the room: the internet. not only had i seen most of the photographs in the show online before, but the show itself definitely had a vibe of people who know each other from the internet posting up paper pictures of some of their favorite photos that they saw on different websites. i don't think this is a negative thing, but it does warrant some thought. and it is definitely something i will be pondering as i, too, contribute more posts and links about various photographs that i primarily, if not exclusively, encounter online. (of course, these questions have been tackled before, here's one interesting and topical starting point.)

the most self-conscious exploration of internet-as-co-curator is also the reason that the animated GIFs were so interesting: because they are a low-brow computer/online digital form being presented on an expensive television screen on a gallery wall -- not to mention being "sold" for $20 each. clever stuff. i think the only thing that could have been better than this, in terms of questioning photography and poking at its online migrations, would be to print each frame of the GIF out individually on paper and turn them into flipbooks.

for those folks who have also checked out the gallery show on Bond St. in lovely Gowanus, Brooklyn (and i do recommend that you check it out), i would love to hear your thoughts as well. Google is returning 3,700 hits for "Young Curators, New Ideas," and frankly the thought of reading them all is freaking exhausting. so i turn to you, dear readers.