“The Life and Death of Buildings”

January 26th, 2012
Exhibition review, Miscellaneous publications, Photography

Published in Aperture 206, Spring 2012.

Danny Lyon, View South from 100 Gold Street, from Destruction of Lower Manhattan, 1967

Danny Lyon, View South from 100 Gold Street, from Destruction of Lower Manhattan, 1967

During the mid- to late 1960s, photographer Danny Lyon chronicled the “slum clearance” required by two enormous infrastructure projects in New York City: a new ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge and the World Trade Center. The results were solemn portraits of Manhattan’s stout brick and cast-iron buildings, the men responsible for bringing those structures down, and, in interior scenes, the accretion of human history and labor those buildings preserved. After the violent obliteration of the Twin Towers in 2001, renewed attention to Lyon’s project, evocatively titled The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, was perhaps inevitable; indeed, it has enjoyed quite a renaissance. In 2005 PowerHouse republished to wide acclaim Lyon’s original book of the photographs. The series was also the primary inspiration for the 2010 Mixed Use, Manhattan exhibition at the Reina Sofía in Madrid, which surveyed artists’ interactions with postindustrial New York’s buildings and spaces. Finally, last summer and fall, the Princeton University Art Museum presented The Life and Death of Buildings, which curator Joel Smith was motivated to organize after a collector donated to the museum a complete set of Lyon’s pictures.

Smith’s curatorial effort, drawn largely from his museum’s collection, was a meditation on the role photographs play in granting us access to pasts no longer extant. Buildings and photographs are both artifacts that can be located in history, Smith notes, but each embodies a different sense of time. Buildings accumulate pasts, which shadow every encounter one has with them in the present. (Certain examples even make explicit their history, like the Bundestag in Berlin, the redesign of which deliberately left its walls pockmarked with World War II–era bullet holes and covered in the graffiti of Russian soldiers.) Photographs freeze a specific moment, excise it from its context, and make aspects of that moment accessible at a later date. To analyze these differences, and to focus viewers’ minds on the concept of time, Smith deployed his copious material, which ranged across the entire history of photography and several continents, in a somewhat unusual manner. He intentionally disavowed the divergent aims of the photographers included in the show—amateur and professional alike. Everything, then, became more or less “documentary.” Similarly, because no building appeared repeatedly, and we were thus denied a full understanding of its “life,” each skyscraper or cathedral represented the category “building” as much as or more than it represented itself.

John Szarkowski, Corner Pier, The Prudential Building, Buffalo, New York, 1951

Though at first I chafed at this selective curatorial framing, Smith’s criteria gave coherence to his expansive selection. Under such constraints, formal connections suggest themselves immediately, as between a detail of thirteenth-century brass work on a door of Notre Dame cathedral, captured by the Bisson Frères circa 1854, and the foliate handiwork in John Szarkowski’s Corner Pier, The Prudential Building, Buffalo, New York (1951). But unexpected links revealed themselves as well. The surface of walls was given close scrutiny in a section labeled “The Sentient Wall,” which featured midcentury abstractions depicting buildings ravaged by time. In these works, by Aaron Siskind, Minor White, Harry Callahan, Robert Doisneau, and others, the “sentience” accumulates after the building is erected. Yet this arrangement prompted in me a reconsideration of the decorative patterning in the Bisson and Szarkowski photographs as a kind of sentience of its own. (Think of John Ruskin’s description of Gothic builders as free to creatively employ their talents; the resultant walls literally embody their craftsmen’s knowledge.) If, as this thought suggests, the lives of buildings begin before they are completed, evidence abounded in this exhibition that it likewise extends beyond their deaths. Richard Misrach’s White Man Contemplating Pyramids (1989) and Philip Henry Delamotte’s 1856 picture of the dilapidated cloister at Yorkshire’s Fountains Abbey both remind us that a structure’s affective potential can far outlast its original uses. So, too, does Tim Davis’s witty photograph of nearly two dozen tourists’ cameras resting on the pavement, their viewfinders displaying just-snapped shots of the Colosseum in Rome.

What did this collection of pictures suggest about time? A basic lesson came insistently to mind: time exposes the frailty inherent in all human endeavors—even the grandest and most secure-seeming ones. In some instances that frailty was evident in the images themselves. The first gallery included century-old photo-postcards depicting homesteaders posing with their ramshackle homes. “BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE…” reads the ironic handwritten inscription on one, its sender surely aware of the insecurity of his perch on the plains. In most cases, however, the recognition that what is depicted no longer exists imparted the same message. Though both life and death appear in its title, the general drift of this exhibition was toward ends, toward ruins.

Many of photography’s earliest practitioners, such as Delamotte, had a Romantic predilection for photographing ruins; it’s as if the awareness of death upon which Smith focuses is encoded in the medium. But this is perhaps fitting, as an additional level of melancholy inheres in the recognition that photographs themselves are extremely fragile. Those early photo-postcards are rare survivors from an era that saw the creation and delivery of millions just like them. Photographs possess a rare power, granting us something akin to the capacity to time-travel, but that power lasts only as long as does the ability to read their surfaces. Thomas Ruff’s jpeg co01 (2004), in the show’s final gallery, draws together these themes. The wall-size print depicts the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, the iconic structures enveloped in a haze of smoke, ash, and dust. Yet because Ruff made the photograph by scaling up a compressed JPEG file, pixelization further obscures its ostensible subject. The momentous event, the erasure of the towers that had replaced what Danny Lyon so carefully captured on film, recedes from us ever further.

Tim Davis, Colosseum Pictures (The New Antiquity), 2009

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“Weegee: Murder Is My Business”

January 26th, 2012
Exhibition review, History, Miscellaneous publications, Photography

Weegee, Line-Up for Night Court, ca. 1941.

I reviewed the exhibition “Weegee: Murder Is My Business,” on view at the International Center of Photography until September 2, for Capital New York. An excerpt:

The Weegee that’s surveyed in this entertaining exhibition is not only the man, an immigrant born Usher Fellig in Austria, but also the myth, who described himself as both “Weegee the Famous” and the “official photographer of Murder Inc.”

Curator Brian Wallis has crafted a show that demonstrates how and why Weegee became one of the best-known photojournalists in New York City from the mid-’30s through the ’40s. Operating out of a sparse room across the street from police headquarters, he made nightly forays into the streets in search of breaking news. He nearly always found it, returning with pictures of lifeless bodies sprawled out on sidewalks and the inquisitive bystanders and pained relatives who had witnessed the crimes.

To read the rest, click here.

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“We Don’t Go ‘Gazing’ At Art”

January 7th, 2012
Art, Blog post, Books

Although Ingrid Rowland’s thoughtfully critical review of Hans Belting’s Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science is not available in full online, it contains a small disquisition on a topic of interest to theorists of and writers on contemporary art. The relevant excerpt:

Belting’s arguments suffer particular damage in English translation because they hinge so directly on the word almost always rendered as “gaze.” In academic English for the past three decades or so, “gaze” has conjured up a whole series of associations that originate with Jacques Lacan and his ideas about the way that sight shapes thought (or “scopic regimes,” which sounds only slightly less outré in French than it does in English). To our collective misfortune, “gaze” and “the gaze” entered the Anglophone vocabulary through a translator’s effort to find the right English word to match Lacan’s “regard.” But “gaze” is not that word. Lacan’s regard meant an incisive look that has nothing whatsoever to do with gazing. “Gaze,” like “berserk,” is one of the marvelous Scandinavian contributions to the English vocabulary for mental derangement. It means an unfocused, mindless kind of looking, the kind of stupefied contemplation that brings to mind operative lovers doting on miniature portraits of the beloved, the rapt stare that Narcissus showered upon his own reflection, and stargazers turned upward obsessively to the heavens in the minds of their unappreciative contemporaries. A gaze is, indeed, the exact opposite of a pointed and precise regard, or an equally pointed and precise German Blick. Translators of Chinese and japanese have usually used the word “view” for this kind of intelligent looking—a much more appropriate description of the activity at hand, as our own English usage proves: we say “point of view” and “viewer,” rather than “point of gaze” and “gazer,” because gazing never focuses on a point, and we don’t go “gazing” at art, or “gazing for” someone, we go “looking.” Tellingly, Belting drops the misleading term for his own discussion of Al-Hazen’s optics and speaks of “seeing” and “glancing.”

By now, however, one translator’s unhappy choice in rending Lacan has become the byword for two generations of English-speaking scholars who would classify themselves as “critical” and “theoretical” while accepting, uncritically and with utter lack of theoretical sophistication, a grossly misleading term for one of their fundamental concepts.

For the rest of Rowland’s review, see the December 29 issue of The New Republic.

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Simon Norfolk

December 29th, 2011
Artforum, Exhibition review, Photography

Published in Artforum, January 2012. An interview with the artist and images of several dozen works from the series are available here.

Homeless Family from Hazarajat, Camped in the Grounds of the Old Presidential Palace, 2010.

Simon Norfolk might be called a war-landscape photographer. He focuses on not only battles and resultant refugee crises but also the technological infrastructure that underpins conflict and the arenas in which those conflicts play out. Among his many subjects are the beaches where Allied soldiers landed on D-day in 1944; the electronic-spying equipment on Ascension Island, in the South Atlantic; Beirut during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah; and the material detritus produced during the early years of the current war in Iraq. This exhibition, his third at Bonni Benrubi Gallery, included medium-scale images from his latest body of work made in Afghanistan, “Burke + Norfolk,” 2010–11.

The majority of Norfolk’s audience, myself included, knows his work primarily through reproductions presented in some of the world’s leading news publications, from the New York Times Magazine to the Guardian Weekend to La Repubblica. Norfolk is a canny visual essayist, and his collaborations with the photo editors of those magazines have led to richly informative portraits of myriad locales. As gratifying as those stories can be, it was rewarding to see these photographs with the clarity afforded by a larger scale and lack of journalistic context. The exhibition consisted of seven color prints, each forty by fifty inches, depicting various sites in and around Kabul, and seven smaller, black-and-white group portraits.

Though unaccompanied by written reportage, the series, as its title indicates, is a kind of collaboration: Norfolk returned to Afghanistan under the influence of John Burke, a photographer who traveled with British troops during the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878–80. In an attempt to draw out the continuities between the earlier conflict and the current occupation, which Norfolk suggests should be called the Fourth Anglo-Afghan War, he has both retraced Burke’s steps and created pictures he imagined Burke would take today.

Among the color landscape images, such connections were difficult to discern; one imagines that the recent exhibition at Tate Modern of pictures by both photographers made the more explicit. (The publisher Dewi Lewis has released a lavish book that also juxtaposes their work.) We see a homeless father and daughter camped out on the grounds of the president’s former palace, now reduced to six broken brick columns; a deserted pizza shop adjacent to the piled bus carcasses in a Kabul depot; a lumpy pyramid of bags of apples for sale in a roadside market; and the garish decorative lights in the courtyard of the Sham-E-Paris wedding hall. Each of these smartly composed scenes is cast in the smoky-blue light of dawn or dusk. Norfolk, in an interview, has suggested this light is meant to convey his disillusionment with the situation in Afghanistan. But the lights transitional nature can also be read as optimistic, as can the effortful “normalcy” some of these images depict. Disdain for the occupation need not preclude admiration for the resilience of its victims.

The poise of Norfolk’s group portrait subjects suggests that despite his dismay, he understands this. Shooting in black-and-white, Norfolk deploys the somewhat stilted-looking portrait conventions of Burke’s day—frontal views, no interaction among the subjects—to depict both the military and civilian sides of contemporary Afghan life. There are police being trained by marines, pro-Taliban refugees, and a minesweeping team, but there are also boys learning traditional instruments at a music school, the crew and ground staff of a new airline, and girls who use an indoor skate park set up by American NGO volunteers. In both his landscapes and his portraits, Norfolk refuses to look away from the dispiriting aspects of this damaged place, while suggesting, perhaps against his own emotional response to what he encountered, that the situation there may yet change for the better.

A De-mining Team trom the Mine Detection Centre In Kabul, 2010.

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“The Greatest Grid”

December 23rd, 2011
Exhibition review, History, Miscellaneous publications

Earlier this week, Capital New York published my review of “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011,” an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.” The show is on view until April 15, an appropriate enough date given the prevalence in the galleries of tax assessments, land-sale auction handbills, and other ephemera related to the transfer of Manhattan real estate. The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated and informative catalogue, published by Columbia University Press (Amazon, Columbia).

Map of Property Belonging to C.C. Moore of Chelsea, 1835. Collection of the New-York Historical Society.

An excerpt:

The plan’s Cartesian rigor made it a machine for such frenzied growth, and the exhibition contains hundreds of artifacts that chart the city’s scramble uptown. There are surveyors’ maps and tools, land-sale auctioneers’ handbills, and ledgers documenting tax assessments. Numerous photographs reveal just how much labor went in to unifying the landscape: giant boulders had to be broken up and carted away; rolling hills had to be leveled; houses perched in the middle of planned roadways had to be torn down or carted to a new location.

At the exhibit’s center is one of the three original copies of the nearly nine-foot-long map of the Commissioners’ Plan, its size and detail a measure of the ambition it represented. Generations of canny politicians, imperious real-estate developers, and visionary architects have tried to implement changes or carve out exceptions to its rule, yet the Manhattan this map depicts is recognizable to us today: a somewhat claustrophobic, undifferentiated mass of right angles that cedes almost nothing to topography or the human need for variety.

To read the rest, click here.

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Alexander Gutke

December 15th, 2011
Art, Essay, Miscellaneous publications

This essay was written in 2009, and is published in Alexander Gutke (Fundação Caixa Geral de Depoósitos – Culturgest, 2011). For more information on the artist and images of his other works, visit his page on the Galerija Gregor Podnar website.

Exploded View, 2005. Installation view and detail images.

On September 26, 2003, the Eastman Kodak Company declared, in a press release, that it would stop making and selling slide projectors by the following June. “In recent years, slide projectors have declined in usage, replaced by alternative projection technologies,” the announcement noted. Alternative, of course, was a code word for digital, and for many people the decision represented yet one more nail in the coffin of analogue technology. Yet, as art historian Pamela M. Lee observed soon afterward, “Given its ubiquity in both studio and art-historical pedagogy, the modern slide projector… has played more than a supporting role in the visual arts from its inception.” Thus Kodak’s decision prompted a brief spurt of commemorative activity, including “Slideshow,” an exhibition held at the Baltimore Museum of Art in early 2005. Though not consciously a response to the Kodak announcement, Alexander Gutke’s slide-projection pieces Exploded View (2005) and Lighthouse (2006) stand out amid the stream of artworks and texts that it occasioned for their rigor, their austere beauty, and the conceptual complexity embedded in their seemingly simple execution. Like the staple technique of the art history class, these two works offer what can be termed a “slide comparison.” But, rather than juxtapose two images, Gutke’s artworks place two ways of understanding analogue projection technology side by side: Exploded View examines what a projector is; Lighthouse demonstrates what a projector does.

Exploded View appears to be a vivisection. Its eighty-one slides lay bare the innards of another Kodak Carousel projector. To create the work, Gutke had a technician slice apart a projector one slide bay at a time, a process that the artist documented in photographs. Each successive cut revealed more of the machine’s plastic, metal, and glass guts; each image projected onto the wall presents a different combination of wires, lenses, bulbs, small screws, and the body housing these elements. The images progress from representational to abstract and back again, as distinct elements of the projector’s body come into view and are diligently excised. (Since the carousel loops, the process never ends.) The precise articulation of the projector’s component parts calls to mind Albert Renger-Patzsch’s ultra-clear Neue Sachlichkeit-style photographs of industrial machines. Gutke’s images, tissue samples of an outmoded technology, could perhaps be used to reconstruct the machine.

Lighthouse substitutes lyricism for Exploded View’s quasi-scientific astringency, without lapsing into sentimentality. In this work, a rectangle of light is slowly rotated through 360 degrees, over the course of eighty-one slides. What begins as a flat plane of light resting on the surface of the wall seems to become an incision into the wall’s surface. At the carousel’s midpoint, the narrow sliver of light is ostensibly “perpendicular” to the wall onto which it is projected. As the slides progress, the “image” of light swings back into parallel alignment with the wall. Then the cycle is repeated. The work’s title evokes a tower erected by the coast, its searching beam of light aligning with the seafarer’s eyes once per revolution. But Lighthouse suggests other equally romantic interpretations. The light’s waxing and waning, for example, calls to mind charts of the lunar cycle.

Lighthouse, 2006. Installation view.

Exploded View and Lighthouse are attempts to find intrinsic content in a machine that is usually subservient to the images dropped into its bays. Gutke demonstrates how the projector can generate meaning on its own, without the assistance of Tintoretto paintings or technical diagrams or family photos slotted into its carousel. One way this can be interpreted is as a subtle rejoinder to the inexorability of the switch from analogue to digital projection technologies. The works remind viewers that something particular and distinctive is lost in the transition. What basically is this insistence on medium specificity, other than a protest against supersession? If the Kodak press release announced the “death” of the slide projector, then perhaps Exploded View is less like a vivisection and more like an autopsy. According to this view, having explored the projector’s guts and found something estimable, Lighthouse, with its “voided” image, becomes the scene of resurrection. The images have fled to some great beyond, but the autopsied machine returns to life and exhibits its essential dignity.

The way Gutke isolates particulars about his chosen medium to highlight their specific properties has an art-historical precedent in the experimental and conceptual artworks created in the 1960s and 1970s using film, slide projectors, and then-new video technologies. Exploded View and Lighthouse recall works by Dan Graham, Anthony McCall, and others. Lighthouse, in particular, through its tracing of a circle, brings to mind Robert Morris’s infrequently exhibited film installation Finch College Project (1969). For that work, Morris instructed cameraman Robert Fiore to film a crew of workers installing and de-installing a grid of mirrored squares and a gridded black-and-white photograph on the opposite walls of a room. Fiore set the camera on a turntable revolving at one revolution per minute, and the finished work was projected into the same space; the projection rotated around the now blank walls at the same speed. But, whereas Morris’s projection relied on filmic imagery to create a palimpsest of past and present, Gutke’s work deploys a contrived, though plausible, “function” of the slide projector to create a palimpsest of real and fictional space. Lighthouse and Exploded View are works in which the seemingly direct efforts made by the artist produce uncanny, manifold effects.

The slide projector’s historical antecedent is the magic lantern, which is generally thought to have been invented in the mid-seventeenth century by the Dutch scientist Christiaen Huygens. The relationship of this device to death and to haunting was noted early in the lantern’s history. A 1671 description of the lantern in Athanasius Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae was accompanied by illustrations depicting projections of a soul in purgatory and a skeleton holding an hourglass and a scythe. (Huygens’s device, used to entertain elites and royals, was called “the lantern of fright.”) The “phantasmagoria” magic lantern show would remain popular throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in both Europe and the United States. Gutke’s focused explorations of the slide projector ostensibly remove the “magic” from this magic lantern–like technology. There certainly seems to be nothing hiding behind Exploded View. Yet something ineffable and entrancing remains.

One might contend that what lingers is mere nostalgia for an obsolescent technology, though it’s hard to see how these two artworks are nostalgic. Art historian T.J. Demos has observed that a slide projection, by “locating the viewer between memory and anticipation, opens an indeterminate zone between the autonomy of the single-frame photograph and the uninterrupted continuity of filmic illusion.” This observation is astute, but does not seem to account for the particular effect of Gutke’s two slide-projection works. It seems to me, rather, that the enduring power Gutke confers upon the humble Kodak projectors arises from a tension between finitude and infinitude. Gutke’s exploration seems to have reached a logical conclusion (and is therefore finite) yet in doing so it highlights something endless: the circular carousel’s loop. His incisive reduction of the slide projector to its barest essences—what it is, what it does—coexists with the recognition of the machine’s ability to imply ceaselessness. And it is precisely this sense of perpetuity that counters any fatalism about the death of the medium. At the moment of the slide projector’s ostensible “death,” Gutke has invested the humble contraption with a dignified sense of life.

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Richard Benson

November 29th, 2011
Artforum, Exhibition review, Landscape and Environment, Photography

Published in Artforum, December 2011. For more information about the exhibition, click here.

Richard Benson, California, 2009

Puerto Rico, 2007, despite being one of only two photographs in this large exhibition to have been made outside the continental United States, is emblematic of photographer Richard Benson’s series “North South East West.” The image’s subject, an isolated fan palm tree at the edge of a parking lot, is representative in its humbleness and outdoor, out-of-the-way location. The sky behind it, as in many of the show’s photographs, is a rich cerulean, the clouds near the horizon puffy and white; shadows are nonexistent. And the palm’s visual similarity to a peacock’s tail feathers metaphorically represents a central element of Benson’s achievement: the rich and varied colors he creates with his “multiple impression pigment prints.” The slash of orange wending across the bottom of the frame is a bit unsettling in its brightness and purity. It must be seen in person to be believed—more so than usual, JPEGs on the gallery website do this work no justice.

We regularly encounter such saturation out in the world, yet when captured by a lens it has a tinge of surrealism, as if through digital manipulation the photographer is trying to trick us. Instead, Benson has devised a novel printing technique by which he isolates the image’s constituent parts into different layers, printing each separately after making minute color adjustments. (Benson even adapted his process for the related book, running each page through the press twice.) Traveling the country in an RV, Benson regularly stops to photograph what catches his eye—and sometimes, one suspects, what he thinks might make good use of his printing technique. There is a picturesque village of clapboard houses surrounding a village green clothed in snow. There are disused railroad cars and signage, as well as an image of tracks receding towards a far-off horizon. There is a mid-century commercial truck, parked alongside the highway to advertise Butch’s Place, and a row of roadside mailboxes, both with mountains in the distance. And a pile of hay bales is surmounted by an American flag. Each is rendered with precision, often from an oblique angle that invites the eye into the photograph.

The quality of light necessary to best achieve Benson’s chromatic splendor means that photographs taken in different parts of the country, or at different times of year, begin to look the same. Rhode Island, 2010, echoes New Mexico, 2006, which in turn echoes Nebraska, 2011. Because of this, our preconceived notions become what orient us in space: clapboard houses signify “New England,” while a lone utility pole in a vast, flat expanse of land signifies “The Great Plains.” Benson’s images rarely challenge our assumptions. And as the above list of his subjects indicates, Benson offers a vision of America that verges on kitschy Americana. There’s a glittering blue Ford Mustang on a lift at a mechanic’s shop in Virginia, a sailboat resting in a Rhode Island boatyard, and three small cabins abutting a Vermont lake. The colors in the latter photo are almost hallucinatory. Benson captures the precise moment when the setting sun turns both the sky and the lake’s surface cotton-candy pink, and at the same time describes accurately how the green of the grass differs from that of the painted cabins. The photograph is a compositional and technical achievement of the first order. It’s a disappointment that, cumulatively, this selection of Benson’s lovely travel images comes across like an antiques roadshow.

Richard Benson, Vermont, 2007

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Daido Moriyama

October 26th, 2011
Artforum, Exhibition review, Photography

Published in Artforum, November 2011.

Daido Moriyama, Stray Dog, 1971

Daido Moriyama, Stray Dog, 1971

Spanning more than half a century, “Daido Moriyama: On the Road” confirmed the artist’s importance to the story of Japanese photography. The quintessential street photographer, Moriyama has, since 1965, prowled avenues and alleys in Japanese cities and across the globe. His quarry is not only the unguarded human subject, often seen from the side or behind, but also our idealized, artificial replicas of ourselves, from store mannequins to movie-poster idols. Moriyama’s art, despite his penchant for surface and artifice, is anything but celebratory. If his touchstone is Warhol, whose art he seems to mimic in a 1974 silkscreen Harley-Davidson and who appears on a TV screen in Tokyo, 2011, it’s the Warhol of the 1962-63 “Death and Disaster” series. For Moriyama, despite his disavowal in a recent interview of any social or documentary mission, urban life is tragic theater.

The exhibition opened with two rooms encompassing the artist’s recent output. His newest photographs of Tokyo, in the first gallery, struck an anomalous note: Hung in three rows that encircled the room, the prints were both large and vibrantly colored. Though familiar themes recurred—a family of Western mannequins in a shop window counterbalanced a homeless man slumped on a narrow ledge—the saturated reds and blues made a bright contrast to the small-scale, grainy black-and-white images that predominated elsewhere. I couldn’t help but imagine them as an acrid response to Nobuyoshi Araki’s intimate studies of flowers. The second gallery sampled images taken around the world, from Taipei to Buenos Aires, Antwerp to New York. In this last city, Moriyama’s lens transforms a dented trash can found moldering in half-melted snow into a gorgeous play of surfaces. Though the can is perfectly legible as an object, the photograph epitomizes another aspect of Moriyama’s art: his almost hallucinatory focus upon texture. Urban grit is equated almost literally with the grain of the photograph, as if dirt had been rubbed into each print.

Moriyama achieves this effect, in part, by increasing the contrast in his images, a technique that in its consistency also serves to unite a disparate array of subject matter. A male actor wearing papier-mâché breasts in one early photograph can be compared to the mangy animal in the iconic 1971 image Stray Dog. Neither an automobile on fire nor the collision of two others in a pair of 1969 images is discordant with a frankly erotic 1976 study of a cabbage head. Moriyama’s interest in light and shadow is made explicit in a series of that title, made in 1981-82, which features, among other subjects, denim jeans, the vinyl top of a Jeep Wrangler, and the rusting hull of a Russian cargo ship. With so many coarse, dark pictures, a room of color prints, much smaller than those in the first gallery, offered a pleasing contrast. Ishinomaki, 1969, features multicolor lightbulbs strung along two delicate curves that arc away from Moriyama’s lens; they hang in the twilit sky like reddish-orange plants. Captured by any other photographer, the image of camellia petals on the pavement in Izu, 1982, would likely have a certain delicacy; with Moriyama, however, the petals seem to have fallen like hammer blows.

The bulk of the survey proceeded chronologically, and one could witness Moriyama’s subjects becoming more pedestrian—in both senses of the world—without his images losing their oddity or compositional acuity. At the outset of his career, Moriyama claims, he was “deliberately seeking a strange image.” These days, though, “everything looks strange.” We profit from this alienated vision.

Daido Moriyama, Records no. 15, 2010

Daido Moriyama, Records no. 15, 2010

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On Bruce Hainley

October 20th, 2011
Art, Book review, Miscellaneous publications

My appreciation of the Los Angeles–based art critic Bruce Hainley has appeared at the Los Angeles Review of Books. The publication of a slim collection of Hainley’s writing occasioned the essay. It is the fifth installment of Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer’s experimental periodical Pep Talk. Here’s an excerpt of my piece:

I became aware of Bruce Hainley’s writing on art a little more than a decade ago, while I was in college. Amid the monotony of a magazine’s review section, coming across his description of an exhibition by Ingrid Calame at Karyn Lovegrove’s Los Angeles gallery was like encountering a snake in a field. The review’s venom was poisonous and worked quickly: “The gimmick behind the project … was flimsy enough to begin with, and by now it’s just fatuous.” On the explanation of her onomatopoeic titles: “Yeah, right.” I was in Boston, hundreds of miles from an art-world center and frustrated by persistent critical obfuscation. The clarity of Hainley’s indictment was thrilling.

Thereafter, on the lookout for this Los Angeles critic’s byline, I learned quickly that the takedown was not his principal trade. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that in ensuing years I got to know Hainley a little; but more on this later.) Hainley’s occasional lashings are needles meant to puncture consensus, to deflate an overinflated reputation, and their rarity adds to their power. The majority of his reviews and essays instead grapple with the work of complex and often misunderstood artists, whether young or established. In the tradition of the great poet-critics whose work he relishes, Hainley’s mind follows his eyes. As he noted a decade ago, “I am a promiscuous looker. I will look at anything.”

To read the rest, click here. To cut out the middleman and read Hainley’s writing, I suggest browsing the archives of Artforum and Frieze magazines, where he has published a large number of reviews and essays over the past fifteen years.

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“Jill Freedman: Street Cops, 1978-81″

October 15th, 2011
Artforum.com, Exhibition review, Photography

Published on Artforum.com on October 13, 2011. The exhibition is on view at Higher Pictures, New York, from September 15 to October 29, 2011.

George Likes to Sit in Garbage Cans, 1981

George Likes to Sit in Garbage Cans, 1981

When photographer Jill Freedman embedded with the New York City Police Department’s Ninth and Midtown South Precincts in 1978, the city was just past its postwar nadir. Three years earlier, in the eyes of Daily News editors, President Gerald Ford had told the struggling metropolis to “drop dead.” The summer of 1977 had been marked by the tragic denouement of the Son of Sam killing spree, as well as rioting and looting under cover of the July blackout. In a city troubled by crimes both petty and spectacular, Freedman sought to counter the largely negative opinion of cops on the beat, to humanize the men and women behind the badge.

The officers with whom she cruised for three years were certainly busy: The Ninth Precinct covers the East Village, where junkies lay strung out in buildings burned for the insurance money and then abandoned, while Midtown South incorporated the hustling and vice of Times Square. There is a man Stabbed Twice in the Guts, 1980, and one Caught in the Act, 1978, while trying to boost a turntable, and one who tried to score a Free Lunch, 1979, by skipping out on his restaurant bill. Through it all, Freedman’s blue-shirts handle their duties with a sense of humor. They know that George Likes to Sit in Garbage Cans, 1981, and that this little boy in the cruiser is Always Running Away, 1979. Several of Freedman’s images match this humor with visual wit, as with the Partners, 1978, who are hopping a cinder-block wall with symmetrically outstretched legs, or the Street Cops, 1978, belly to belly in a cramped hallway, one holding his pistol while the other clasps a stogie.

Viewed today, after more than two decades of zero-tolerance “broken windows” policing and in the midst of overreaction to #OccupyWallStreet protesters, the humanity and self-awareness Freedman identifies in her subjects is all the more remarkable. She deftly captured a moment unlike our own in several ways. While I wouldn’t trade the safety of today’s city for its late-1970s incarnation, I do wish today’s officers, many of whom are high-strung and alienated from the communities they patrol, would learn from their predecessors’ relative good will.

Small Change, 1979

Small Change, 1979

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“The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-75″

October 15th, 2011
Artforum.com, Exhibition review, Film, History

Published on Artforum.com on October 4, 2011. The exhibition was on view at Third Streaming, New York, from September 8 to October 15, 2011.

Angela Davis, still from The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-75

Angela Davis, still from The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-75

During the past fifteen years, scholars have dramatically revised our understanding of the American civil rights and Black Power movements, proposing answers to questions such as: When did each begin and end? What traits, if any, do they share? What is the relative importance of acknowledged leaders and lesser-known participants? Historians including Charles Payne, Martha Biondi, Thomas Sugrue, and Peniel Joseph have crafted nuanced portraits of both movements’ protest dynamics and the merits of the gains each made. The visual record of the era, however, has not been given an equivalent boost, which makes the recent discovery of hours of documentary footage captured by Swedish television journalists all the more special. That material has been transformed into The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (2011), the feature-length documentary on which this exhibition of film stills, related footage, and ephemera is based.

The images selected for stills focus primarily on Black Power leaders. We see Angela Davis as a glamorous antihero, two dour officers at her elbows; Bobby Seale and Stokely Carmichael coolly addressing unseen gatherings; and Kathleen Cleaver next to a typewriter, taking a break from crafting revolution’s message to pensively drag on a cigarette. A small monitor displaying unused film footage contrasts this hero worship with images of children carousing in unkempt streets, cops cruising down sweltering avenues, and little boys in suits marching out of a school building.

There is, perhaps surprisingly, a precedent for the Swedish investigation of American social problems. Economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 study of American race relations, An American Dilemma, permanently inflected the conversation on civil rights and was even cited by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. While The Black Power Mixtape doesn’t aspire to the same influence, it is nonetheless a welcome addition to the body of evidence documenting a turbulent period in our recent past, one whose meaning is still up for revaluation.

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“Our Magic Hour”

September 21st, 2011
Art, Exhibition review, Miscellaneous publications

Review of the 2011 Yokohama Triennale published online at Art Agenda on September 13, 2011. The exhibition remains on view until November 6, 2011.

Henrik Hakansson, Fallen Forest, 2006

Henrik Hakansson, Fallen Forest, 2006.

Organizing an international biennial or triennial exhibition is, in principle, a thankless task. Your two main audiences, locals unfamiliar with recent artistic developments and globe-hopping art citizens eager for new discoveries, have opposing needs and desires. Apportioning artworks among multiple venues, securing the funding to meet an outsized budget, and coordinating the corporate, political, and cultural bodies with a vested interest in your efforts all present significant challenges. Add to this, however, the widespread devastation of a three-fold tragedy—earthquake, tsunami, nuclear power plant crisis—and one would have forgiven Yokohama Triennale 2011 artistic director Akiko Miki for walking away from her project. That she and her colleagues not only persevered but also managed to coordinate an impressive display of art spanning several centuries is, irrespective of one’s opinion of the show, worth commending.

This is the fourth edition of the triennale, and the first to make the Yokohama Museum of Art its primary venue. Titled “Our Magic Hour,” the show focused upon an ability to see the wonderful in the everyday that has long been popularly ascribed to artists. The magic invoked is not one of mysticism, but rather of the temporary suspension of disbelief: artists see things differently than you and me and can show us what that seeing feels like. Such a broad theme can encompass a wide variety of art, and, indeed, the show ranged from conceptually inflected video installations to ukiyo-e woodblock prints to ghost-themed movie posters.

The opening galleries engage a notion of wonder in a literal manner. The first artwork one encounters beyond the museum lobby is Aurélien Froment’s video Théâtre de poche (Pocket Theater) (2007), which depicts the artist performing a series of sleight-of-hand tricks against a black background. To either side of this gallery are minimal installations by James Lee Byars, Wilfredo Prieto, and Motohiro Tomii that invoke, with varying success, the viewer’s astonishment at the properties inherent in simple materials. Byars’s juxtaposition of five crystals and a silent performer conjures an atmosphere at once somber and strangely weightless. The works by Prieto and Tomii play with our notions of value by arranging humble materials—cubic zirconia, thumbtacks—such that they appear cherishable. However, the “trick” in Prieto’s circular floor arrangement, that one of the thousands of shiny objects really is a diamond, almost spoils the effect. Nonetheless, these rooms are a useful primer in seeing the way Miki and her artists would want us to, and the attentive viewer is rewarded in other galleries with hard-to-find surprises, such as Still White, Corridor (2011), an installation between two galleries for which Atsushi Saga has polished a wall to a subtle sheen.

In other rooms, however, these small didactic tricks seem overly simple or even somewhat manipulative. Take, for example, a number of mid-twentieth-century Surrealist paintings from the museum collection hung side-by-side early in the show. All of them depict stairways, and once one discovers this formal alliteration, the paintings’ other qualities recede into the background. (These canvases, like other works from the museum’s collection, are laboriously integrated into the Triennale. They would have been better served by being presented as a separate-but-related exhibition.) Elsewhere, a large room is given over to Massimo Bartolini’s whimsical sculpture Organi (2008), in which a series of pipes, arranged like scaffolding, have been transformed into musical pipes, with a small music box placed on the floor pushing its notes through them and out into the room. It is a remarkable feat of hare-brained ingenuity, and its placement in a roughly circular, high-ceiling room makes one think of chapels. But, just in case you hadn’t made the connection on your own, several large-scale collages of multicolored butterfly wings by Damien Hirst, shaped like stained-glass windows, line the wall on either side. Perhaps complaints about the literalism of these installations sound like the carping of a professional who believes in his own sophistication. On the other hand, one also hopes that curators can trust non-specialist viewers to appreciate such details without having them communicated so directly.

At the outset, however, I suggested that art-world insiders are forever in search of the new, and this edition of the Yokohama Triennale presented to me several revelations. Whether the decision to include a greater proportion of local (i.e., Japanese) artists than is typical for such exhibitions was conceptual or logistical, I was particularly happy to encounter work by Keiichi Tanaami, Ryosuke Imamura, and Taro Izumi, as well as from the Koichi Yumoto Collection. Tanaami’s contribution is a series of short nonnarrative animated videos created in the 1970s. Their bright colors, collaged aesthetic, and surrealistic content call to mind Western counterparts such as Terry Gilliam, creator of animated Monty Python sketches. Small details such as an envelope bearing a Soho address testify to Tanaami’s familiarity with the psychedelic art then popular in the United States (and elsewhere). Imamura’s ingenious sound-art hybrid installations are in the tradition of cross-disciplinary elder statesmen like Christian Marclay. And Izumi’s accumulation of everyday objects, placed on pedestals of varying heights that crowd several rooms in the BankART Studio NYK, a second venue, were delightfully strange and evocative. So, too, is the Yumoto Collection, of which only a small portion is on view. It focuses on yokai, or ghosts, and includes movie posters, toys, traditional paintings and prints, and other ephemera, offering a welcome peek into vernacular Japanese culture.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Breathing is Free: JAPAN, Hopes & Recovery, 2011.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Breathing is Free: JAPAN, Hopes & Recovery, 2011.

The three-level BankART Studio, a nearby waterfront building, housed large-scale works by a range of well-known international artists. Here the theme of wonderment was somewhat harder to discern, but a handful of works stood out. Foremost among them was Peter Coffin’s utterly strange and spellbinding untitled computer animation, which I now think of as “3F,” for “Fruit: The Final Frontier.” The video, which presents an endless, never-repeating pattern, depicts eighteen semitransparent images of fruit accelerating towards the viewer at a leisurely version of warp speed. The images, succulent and oddly haloed, were created with the help of a specialist in 3-D medical scanning. At the other end of the technical spectrum is Henrik Hakansson’s Fallen Forest (2006), a DIY version of the “living walls” of foliage currently in vogue with certain interior designers and architects. Hakansson’s vertical surface of greenery, however, comes from simply turning large-scale potted trees on their side and inserting them into industrial metal shelving. Spotlights give the object an additional charm.

It’s worth noting that the disastrous events of March 11 not only affected the show’s production—making certain works logistically infeasible, say, or causing insurance rates to skyrocket. It also inspired some of the participating artists to devise new proposals as a direct response to the tragedy. The smartest of these is also one of the last visitors come across (if following the proscribed route through the venues). Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, known in the West for his haunting videos of men struggling to pull submerged rickshaws along the seabed, has here created a memorial video installation that also serves as a participatory public art project. Using GPS technology, Nguyen-Hatsushiba has plotted paths through Ho Chi Minh City, his current home, and Yokohama that, when drawn on a map, resemble cherry blossoms. Members of the public are invited to jog along the routes to metaphorically trace onto the surface of the earth these symbols of transience and renewal. The runs are themselves ephemeral and bring to mind the concept of mono no aware, an awareness of the pathos and impermanence of things. The artwork is moving but not maudlin, and at a moment when the labor of recovery means that permanent memorials are still far off on the horizon, it seems thoughtful and noninvasive. And, by virtue of the idiosyncratic paths that cut through the city like Situationist dérives, it also defamiliarizes Yokohama for its resident joggers, thereby involuntarily slotting them into the exhibition’s theme. One can imagine such a run, though tinged as it must be by the awareness of pain and suffering in the northeastern part of the country, as a magic hour indeed.

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Essay in “Taking Aim”

June 25th, 2011
Art, Book or exhibition catalogue, Essay

To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of its Artist in the Marketplace program, the Bronx Museum has published Taking AIM: The Business of Being an Artist Today. The book, edited by Marysol Nieves, features essays by and interviews with figures who play numerous roles in the art world, among them artist, dealer, curator, art advisor, collector, art fair director, and foundation executive. I contributed an essay to the section devoted to critics; it appears alongside a survey of five other critics–slash–art historians conducted by Raphael Rubinstein. In my text, I use reviews of the annual Artist in the Marketplace exhibitions published in the New York Times to trace recent developments in art and the art world, including the fluctuations of the market, the ethnic diversity of artists, and the rise of the MFA program. Below is an excerpt. Related exhibitions, “Taking AIM” and “Bronx Calling,” are on view at the museum from June 26 through September 5.

Those who created the Artist in the Marketplace program recognized important, and relatively new, aspects of the art world in 1980: its increasing complexity and the differentiation of roles within it. Successful artists based in New York would henceforth have to negotiate not only with dealers, the small coterie that had been their professional face for decades, but also with curators, lawyers, critics, and others. To run a studio, the program’s founders suggested, required management skills that until roughly that time one could mostly avoid having. The title of the program, and particularly the use of the word “marketplace,” acknowledged another new reality. Despite the rapid proliferation of “arts professionals,” power, however one wished to define it, was increasingly concentrated in the abstract space of the “marketplace”—a space into which only a few people could see clearly. The definition of artistic success had been channeled into a narrower frame: market acceptance. Artist in the Marketplace aimed to demystify both developments. It would introduce emerging artists to the dense thicket of people they would have to engage and it would explain many of the ground rules for that engagement.

Critics sensitive to such systemic changes recorded them in print, though their tone was not often one of such pragmatic adjustment. Rather, they lamented the flight of power from their hands. Peter Schjeldahl inaugurated his column in the Village Voice in 1981, only one year after AIM’s founding. His opening salvo explained the ascendant dynamic with typical flair: “Such purposeful power as critics used to have disappeared with the time lag between the appearance of something new and its acceptance, a transition dealers manage now seemingly in a matter of hours. The art-worldly function of critics has become largely ceremonial: after-dinner speakers at the victory party. Thus critics tend to dig in their heels.” [1] Indeed they did, and in subsequent decades critical handwringing became its own art form, as evidenced in the contentious collections The Crisis of Criticism (1998) and Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of Their Practice (2006). [2] Though each participant in these debates offered a different answer to the question of what is to be done, a majority voiced Schjeldahl’s concern that the elevation of artists to canonical status was no longer a slow, thoughtful process in which critics actively participated. What was to become of connoisseurship and taste?

Such rhetoric, of course, should be taken with a grain of salt. The glory days, for which the height of Clement Greenberg’s career in the 1950s and early 1960s is shorthand, were not always glorious. And the downward trajectory these critics lament hasn’t been a slide into complete irrelevance: Artists still seek thoughtful critical responses to their work; being selected for the cover of an art magazine remains an important career milestone; and critics are, after all, still invited to speak with AIM participants each year. One ironic result of this (at times overwrought) concern with supersession was that some critics unselfconsciously followed the dictates against which they railed. As one critic phrased it in a review of a group exhibition in 1987, “Few if any of these artists have yet staked out a personal territory. Partly, it is a matter of youth but mostly it has to do with the press’s view of artists as athletes and its compulsion to beat the bushes for ever younger champions.” [3] By seeking to ensure their own influence upon art, at least some writers felt they ended up playing the game by the marketplace’s rules.

The mild mea culpa offered by this writer was published in a review of the 1987 AIM exhibition. Tracing the developments outlined above through reviews of AIM exhibitions is difficult; The New York Times has been the only consistent venue for interpretation of these shows. (This fact in itself prompts useful thoughts about what is considered the proper object of traditional forms of art criticism.) The sample size is not only small—limited to a handful of the paper’s staff critics—but also atypical. Unlike trade magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, and Art in America, which often feature writing by congenital worriers who contribute to books on the state of art criticism, the Times has a mass audience. Its writers must demystify the arcana of contemporary art objects—in a manner akin to the AIM program’s mandate to explain the social milieu that surrounds those objects.

While one can’t precisely diagnose the health of art criticism through these reviews, reading thirty years’ worth of them does offer interesting lessons about the possibilities and limitations of the form. It quickly becomes apparent that AIM program exhibitions are a kind of Rorschach blot. The shows are large and include work in a range of artistic media. The artists are represented by only one or two objects and are often unknown to the writer. Times critics therefore have neither the ability nor the space to engage with any individual artist or object in depth. In many instances, they use the cross-disciplinary “representativeness” of the exhibition, as well as the selectivity of the AIM program, to make grand pronouncements about the state of art.

[...]

What remains unexplored in these texts is the unique structure of the AIM program itself. The newspaper review must adhere closely to the objects readers will encounter upon a visit to the gallery, and the trade magazine editor often won’t consider nonthematic group exhibitions of young artists worth analyzing in her pages. Yet these annual summertime presentations are not regular group shows; they are the culmination of an intensive, months-long educational and social process. Should the AIM program’s distinctive structure—and its effects, if any, upon the objects presented in the gallery—be analyzed critically? This is where a more broadly conceived criticism should step in. The singular nature of the AIM program calls out for equally idiosyncratic examination; critics should feel encouraged to explore the boundaries of the review format. The changing media environment that we are currently navigating—especially the proliferation of new distribution technologies—may provide opportunities for such efforts. What would it mean for a critic to “embed” with an AIM cohort for some time prior to reviewing the exhibition? Or to discuss the maturation process itself? The newspaper review remains an important rite of passage for young artists; it allows them to see how the ambiguousness and richness of their work is distilled by the mind of an astute viewer, and it introduces them to a wider audience than they might otherwise have found. But during the past thirty years, both criticism and the marketplace have undergone fundamental changes. Marking the anniversary of Artist in the Marketplace provides an opportunity to rethink the ways in which critics evaluate the capstone exhibitions. Doing so thoughtfully could provide benefits to both artists and critics.

[1] Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 63.

[2] Maurice Berger, ed., The Crisis of Criticism (New York: The New Press, 1998).

[3] Raphael Rubenstein, ed., Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of Their Practice (Lenox, Mass.: Hard Press Editions, 2006).

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Max Kozloff

June 8th, 2011
Artforum, Exhibition review, Photography

Published in the Summer 2011 issue of Artforum. To see additional images from the exhibition, click here.

Max Kozloff, Antique Store with Engraved Mirrors, 1978.

Max Kozloff, once the executive editor of this magazine, is best known for his writings on modern art. Much of this work has explicitly focused on photography, a subject upon which he has trained his formidable intellect almost exclusively since the mid-1970s, publishing three collections of essays, organizing museum exhibitions, and contributing to numerous artists’ monographs. In that time, he has also been an active photographer, using the camera to capture first the environment and then the citizens of his adopted hometown. This show, wryly titled “New York Means Business,” collected twenty-five images taken between 1977 and 1984, nearly all depicting storefront window displays.

As Kozloff readily admits, he was working at the time under the influence of Eugène Atget, whose efforts were ostensibly documentary in nature and have been interpreted as recording the final remnants of “Old Paris.” During the last three decades, finance capital has rewritten the built environment in New York as radically as the abstract forces labeled “modernity” upended nineteenth-century Paris. Seeing Kozloff’s pictures now, one appreciates their documentary value: “Old New York,” once visible to anyone walking in the streets who cared to notice, is now mostly gone. As Kozloff had already presciently noted in 1986, a “familiar corporate sterility” in New York would replace the zipper and twine shops, the pawned-watch purveyors, and the other idiosyncratic and independent enterprises he diligently captured with a lens.

Kozloff is interested not only in his subjects’ intrinsic worth, but also in their relationship with the semitransparent reflections of urban fragments caught in the windowpanes. Befitting his long fascination with photography, such juxtapositions allow him to engage self-consciously with historical precedents and to experiment with representational possibilities. The complex interplay of reality and reflection is paramount in Antique Store with Engraved Mirrors, 1978, in which the titular items, haphazardly arranged, capture objects from all directions—a passing taxi, an upper-story apartment window, the underside of flowers in a crystal vase—but, somehow, not the photographer himself. Ne York Under Glass, 1981, is also exemplary, dizzy with referents, portraying reflected apparitions floating in a space of indeterminate depth. Near the “back” of this complex image hangs a poster of midtown Manhattan in the evening, the skyscraper windows glowing yellow like kernels on a corncob. As Kozloff surely knew, the poster is reminiscent of a 1932 photograph by Berenice Abbott taken from the Empire State Building’s then-new observation deck. But such elevated, glorifying vantage points are not for Kozloff, who celebrates the streets, so the soaring midtown high-rises are overlaid with the reflection of unfussy mid-rise apartment buildings in the immediate vicinity. The storefront glass likewise reflects pennants hanging from a street lamp, which slice dynamic lines across the composition, as does a string of lightbulbs framing the poster. In the midst of all this falls a shower of fake currency, tens and twenties and hundreds, a metaphor of the force behind the changes Kozloff was witnessing around him. Kozloff has written that Atget “dramatized a historical process” in his immense body of work, and the complex symbolism of New York Under Glass achieves something similar.

Max Kozloff, New York Under Glass, 1981.

Among other theses, Kozloff’s 2002 curatorial effort “New York: Capital of Photography” contended that street photography is uniquely able to capture a city that “shuffles, obliterates, and reconnects appearances” at will. With its lost world so artfully staged, this exhibition made clear that he was arguing from experience.

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“Hiroshima Ground Zero”

June 3rd, 2011
Exhibition review, History, Miscellaneous publications, Photography

Published at Art-Agenda on June 3, 2011. To see the review in context, click here. The exhibition remains on view until August 28, 2011. To learn more, visit the museum’s website.

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division. Distorted Steel-frame Structure of Odamasa Store, Hiroshima. November 20, 1945.

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division. Distorted Steel-frame Structure of Odamasa Store, Hiroshima. November 20, 1945.

At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, the Japanese city of Hiroshima was momentarily “covered by a bluish-white glare.” [1] An atom bomb, the first to be dropped on a human population, had exploded 580 meters above the ground. A 4.4-square-mile section of the city center was more or less instantly flattened, and subsequent fires, which raged for more than eight hours, consumed much of what hadn’t been pulverized by the bomb’s concussive force. It is now estimated that nearly two-thirds of the approximately seventy-six thousand buildings in Hiroshima were completely destroyed or burned; approximately seventy thousand, or more than nine out of ten, were at least “half-destroyed/half-burned/slightly damaged.” Soot from the fires, along with dirt and mud, was swept up into the air by whirlwinds and returned to earth as highly toxic, sticky “black rain.” Those who happened to be within 1.2 kilometers of the detonation point (known as “air zero”) had only a fifty percent chance of surviving; any closer and the mortality rates jump to between eighty and one hundred percent. The city’s population that August is estimated to have been 340,000, and it is now believed that approximately 140,000 people died as a result of the bomb. These are the accepted facts about the devastation wrought in Hiroshima, ostensibly to bring the war with Japan, and thus World War II, to a close. A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, killing an additional 80,000 people, and on August 15 Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s surrender.

We know what such explosions look like: a tall stem of smoke and debris, often several miles high, that disperses horizontally once it reaches sufficient altitude. While natural forces such as volcanic eruptions can cause these mushroom-shaped clouds, they are most closely associated with nuclear detonations. The United States government conducted hundreds of nuclear-bomb tests between 1945 and 1962, and images of the explosions have passed from the realm of scientific and military documentation into the broader culture. The mushroom cloud is the icon of the nuclear age.

It is much harder, however, to picture what the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked like. This is not for lack of visual evidence. Japanese photographers catalogued the grim aftermath of concrete rubble and seared skin. A companion plane laden with photographic equipment, later dubbed Necessary Evil, accompanied the Enola Gay on the fateful mission that dropped the bomb. Hiroshima was targeted, at least in part, because its infrastructure presented a near-ideal environment in which to study the effects of the bomb, and after the attack President Truman duly sent members of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) to Japan. A team of photographers made over 1,100 images, two-thirds of which were included in a secret three-volume report submitted to the government in 1947. Such images, however, despite occasionally appearing in books and other public venues, have not permeated Western consciousness. The presentation at the International Center of Photography of several dozen photographs from the USSBS archive is therefore a chance to become better acquainted with the fearsome power at human disposal.

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division. Rooftop view of atomic destruction, looking southwest, Hiroshima. October 31, 1945.

These small, black-and-white pictures were taken with technical rather than aesthetic intent. The seven photographers were interested in the effects of the bomb on the built environment, and therefore few people appear in the images. Most of the photographs are portraits of commercial or civic buildings; so few residential structures, which were typically made of wood, survived that the photographers decided not to document them. Standing amid the rubble is the façade and dome of the city’s commercial exhibition hall. So, too, is the coal-distribution company headquarters, the front of which seems to have been punched into the ground. There are views of school buildings, banks, insurance company headquarters, and the interior of Hiroshima City Hall’s auditorium, barren save for fine layer of burned litter scattered across the main floor and balcony. Other photographs reverse the perspective, and provide dramatic context for the close-ups and interior views. To make them, the photographers ascended to upper-story windows or the roof of standing buildings and pointed the camera lens outward at the desolate landscape. Because Hiroshima lies on a large, flat plain, the photographers could see relatively far into the distance. The horizon line is the meeting point of two undifferentiated shades of gray: on the one hand, the mostly featureless sky, and on the other the uninterrupted expanse of dusty concrete and plaster that once was a great city. The “burned-over area,” as it was called, extends all the way to the horizon, and it is in these pictures that viewers can most clearly discern the scale of the devastation.

A map presented in the gallery allows viewers to reconstruct some of the scientific findings of the photographers. Reproduced from a USSBS report, it includes not only lines demarcating the physical extent of the devastation but also points indicating the location of the buildings depicted in the photographs. Those willing to correlate between the map and the photographs can discern, in an amateur fashion, some of the scientific results of the USSBS survey. For example, buildings closer to ground zero (the point directly beneath the detonation) were likely to suffer from collapsed roofs or other structural damage that indicates the downward pressure of the blast. Those farther away were subject to the horizontal force of the explosion as it spread outward: normally upright steel beams torque away from ground zero as if blown by a strong wind. Farther away still, tree trunks and telephone poles remain upright, but the former have been shorn of all their branches—testament to the fact that the irradiated earth from which they grow is itself no longer natural.

The most complex and haunting photographs in the show, however, depict “flash burns.” In one image, the shadow of a valve used to seal off a pipe is projected onto the metal surface of the container to which it is attached. Visual habit leads viewers to believe that this is the effect of a sunny day. The caption belies this commonsense response: “‘Shadow’ of a hand valve wheel on the painted wall of a gas storage tank; radiant heat instantly burned paint where the heat rays were not obstructed.” In effect, the nuclear blast—its “bluish white glare”—turned some objects in Hiroshima into light-sensitive surfaces, resulting in what might technically if uneasily be called photograms. I say uneasily because of another, altogether sadder image also included in the show. Here we see the surface of a road, on which is chalked an arrow labeled the direction of blast. Two somewhat shapeless discolorations stretch away from small points in the direction indicated. Once again the caption, its neutral language betraying the photograph’s scientific purpose, redirects our understanding of the image: “Flash-burn on asphalt on bridge 20, 3,500 feet south from [air zero]. Shadow was cast by a man.” Two small circles marked in chalk indicate the placement of the man’s feet; one is slightly in front of the other, as if he were mid-stride. The “shadow,” this photogram-within-a-photograph, is likely the only extant evidence that someone died on that spot.

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division. "Shadow of a hand valve wheel...." October 14 - November 26, 1945.

The terrible details disclosed by these photographs give ballast to the 2005 Japan Society exhibition “Little Boy,” curated by artist Takashi Murakami, which examined some of the artistic and cultural fallout of the 1945 attacks. (Its title came from the nickname of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.) The photographs included in this exhibition were originally meant to document the bomb’s effects and were used in the service of bettering civil defense architecture in the United States, yet seeing them in a public museum, shorn of their narrowly utilitarian purpose, allows them to serve other functions. These photographs can, for example, give specificity to debates over the proliferation and potential abuse of nuclear weapons, a prospect that will haunt us until the bombs’ abolition. And their presentation affords us an arena in which to sharpen the terms of debate about the contrary claims of secrecy and transparency upon violent government actions. Ditto the conversations about the necessity of such Necessary Evils, their moral and ethical implications. More than six decades have passed since we dropped the bomb, making this a politically safer exhibition for the museum to mount than its autumn 2004 show of Iraqi prison photographs from Abu Ghraib. “Hiroshima Ground Zero” is nonetheless in line with that earlier, daring curatorial effort, and reveals that temporal distance hardly depletes the shock of the images themselves.

[1] The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, trans. Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 21. Additional details about the bombing and its effects described in the text are drawn from this volume.

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Victoria Sambunaris

May 15th, 2011
Artforum, Exhibition review, Landscape and Environment, Photography

Published in Artforum, May 2011. To see additional photographs from this series, see this post on Time‘s Lightbox blog. To learn more about the exhibition, visit the Yancey Richardson Gallery website.

Untitled (Santa Elena Canyon), 2010

The border between the United States and Mexico has been contested since 1848, when the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended war between the countries. It took survey teams six years just to draw the line, then marked with small obelisks and stone mounds. Disputes arising from population growth and other forms of development necessitated that this survey work be redone in the 1890s, when more than two hundred additional monuments were erected. During the twentieth century, as towns and cities along the border grew, five hundred more markers were dedicated; in recent decades, they have been connected by fences, owing to fears of illegal border crossings. Throughout this history , images have played an important role in the recognition and policing of this boundary, from Arthur Schott’s ink drawings, created for the initial surveys, to contemporary video surveillance footage. Victoria Sambunaris, who drove twenty thousand miles along the border to take the photographs in her new, ongoing series, “The Border,” 2009–, aims to “transcend political, ethical, or environmental ideology.” Yet political questions give these serene, large-scale, mostly uninhabited views a palpable undertow.

What one notices first are the broad swaths of blue sky; the dun-colored Rio Grande River, wending sluggishly across the diptych Untitled (Boquillas del Carmen, Big Bend National Park), 2009; and the striated rock faces of Untitled (Santa Elena Canyon), 2010. The natural environment dwarfs the eighteen-foot-high fence that cuts through several of Sambunaris’s compositions like a rusty scar, and which, contrary to expectation, rarely serves as their primary focus. Sambunaris achieves this effect in part by taking her pictures from elevated vantage points, always situating the ostensible subject of her compositions within a much broader context. Though her work employs the visual clarity of nineteenth-century survey photographers like Timothy H. O’Sullivan, such practitioners served a government that saw the American West’s natural landscape as an untouched site of expansionist fantasy. Arriving more than a century later, Sambunaris can’t help but acknowledge that “the frontier” is now “the border”: Man and machine have transformed this landscape and its meaning, of which the fence is but one manifestation. This sentiment is in line with her recent images of the Alaskan oil pipeline and of western dams and mines, and helps to situate the pictures included here that feature freight trains and industrial-scale farming.

David Taylor, whose photographic series “Working the Line,” 2007–, began with an attempt to photograph all the remaining nineteenth-century boundary-marking obelisks, has come to incorporate border patrol agents, migrants, checkpoints, drugs, and guns into his photographs. Despite the fact that such subjects do not appear in her images, and that in some pictures she downplays the fence or even leaves it out altogether, Sambunaris’s series is nonetheless conditioned by political realities. She would not doubt acknowledge this if queried, since each of the eight photographs presented in this exhibition was shot from the American side of the border. For unstated reasons, she has yet to shoot from Mexico. Though she grants viewers visual access to the “other side,” as it were, the fact of her remaining in the US is nonetheless a reminder of what’s at stake in even the most tranquil of her images. Even where there isn’t a fence, as in her magisterial 2010 view of grasslands in Hereford, Arizona, there’s a divide. After all, swim halfway across the Rio Grande River, and you’ve illegally crossed into another country.

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Bright Colors in the News

May 15th, 2011
Blog post, Miscellaneous

Police shoot water cannons as Jammu Kashmir state government employees shout anti government slogans during a protest outside the civil secretariat in Srinagar, India, May, 5, 2008. (Dar Yasin/AP)

The use of bright colors has entered the news in two unexpected ways this week. On Friday, Time’s Lightbox blog reported on the use of pink dye in the water cannons the government uses to fight political protesters in Uganda. The report included a stunning-looking—if dispiriting to think about—slide show demonstrating how the dyes, in a rainbow of colors, have been used elsewhere in recent decades. Today’s New York Times includes a story about the riotous colors—a “scourge” of tastelessness, according to some—used in the rebuilding of Baghdad. A slideshow accompanies the report.

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O. Winston Link

March 29th, 2011
Artforum, Exhibition review, History, Photography

Published in Artforum, April 2011. For more information and additional images, see Robert Mann Gallery’s website.

O. Winston Link, NW883 Gooseneck Dam and No. 2, Maury River, Buena Vista, VA, 1956

O. Winston Link’s magnificent photographs of steam-powered locomotives, taken half a century ago, appear now to prefigure artistic projects with which gallery-goers are likely more familiar. In one image, the speeding locomotive seen through a living room window calls to mind Martha Rosler’s Vietnam-era collage series “Bringing the War Home, 1967-72.” Link’s picture of a massive engine racing across a railway bridge, beneath which a boy shoos cows and a couple sits in a car, or his image of a man sitting at the window of a third-floor apartment as a train lumbers along Main Street, offer a just-plausible surrealism perfected in recent decades by Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson. The railroad’s presence, even in images seemingly focused upon other aspects of small-town life, is akin to that of the nuclear reactors that hover forebodingly in several of the photographs published in Mitch Epstein’s book American Power (2009).

Yet unlike these successors, who self-consciously tell stories that are explicitly political or charged with psychological ambiguity, Link undertook a project that was relatively straightforward. He was a commercial photographer based in New York whose early love of trains was resuscitated while he was on assignment in 1955, when he took a side trip to watch a steam engine pass through town. Fascinated by the hulking machine and realizing that the Norfolk and Western lines comprised, as the exhibition title suggests, “The Last Steam Railroad in America,” Link tried to capture the tail end of the country’s century-long devotion to steam-powered travel. It was a five-year labor of love, resulting in more than two thousand images, each accompanied by a painstakingly detailed caption describing the location, the film used, the type of engine depicted, and the names of people included in the shot.

Link’s pioneering use of multiple flashbulbs to create dramatic nighttime images of unusual clarity and focal depth remains remarkable today. So, too, does his talent for directing the station managers and local citizens who populate his scenes and who often give the staged images an improvisational air. His compositional sense was unerring, as evidenced by the dramatic image of kids splashing in a creek beneath two bridges, across one of which chugs a train. Like Charles Sheeler’s iconic 1927 photograph of crossed conveyors at Ford’s River Rouge plant, the bridges in Link’s image form a dynamic X; in addition, the train and the children, at different distances from the lens, are both in focus, and all of this activity is framed by inky black sky and water.

O. Winston Link, NW1126 Hawksbill Creek Swimming Hole, Luray, VA, August 9, 1956

But no matter the photographs’ individual merits, which are many, their value accrues when seen in aggregate. Consider that Link began his project the same year that Robert Frank began his series “The Americans.” Consider, too, the vastly different Americas the two men captured. In contrast to Frank’s astringent scenes of a diverse and increasingly fragmented population, Link hymns small communities that swap news in the country store or congregate at the drive-in theater. These Virginia towns, Link’s photographs suggest, were held together by the steel rails that carried people and mail from one place to another and that provided many citizens a means to their livelihoods. It can be argued that we still live in the world Robert Frank first revealed to us. By contrast, even in our country’s remotest corners, the life Link so painstakingly captured has perished—not least due to the centrifugal effects of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, passed while Link was working on this series. The social, spatial, and economic relationships he revealed, not to mention the omnipresent engines themselves, are an important aspect of our nation’s history. We are lucky not only that he arrived to capture them when he did, but also that he documented them with such determination and flair.

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Sara VanDerBeek

February 12th, 2011
Art, Essay, Miscellaneous publications, Photography

Published in Aperture 202, Spring 2011.

Sara VanDerBeek, A Composition for Detroit, 2009. Installation view, MoMA, New York.

Sara VanDerBeek’s contribution to the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography 2009 exhibition was A Composition for Detroit, a quartet of photographs made that year. Like the photographs she had been exhibiting for the previous half decade, it is made up of images of images: each panel depicts a geometric scaffold, erected against a dark backdrop in the artist’s studio, to which she affixed reproductions of other photographs, including ones by Walker Evans and Leonard Freed. Unlike her earlier works, however, A Composition for Detroit also includes images VanDerBeek herself shot while visiting Motor City. Some of these component parts are in the background, obscured by the scaffolding or a painted pane of glass hung on it; others are depicted whole. VanDerBeek has said that the idea for the work came from a bank of broken windows she saw in Detroit, and the blank spaces in her composition—both within and across the four panels—deftly evoke that inspiration and give the work a syncopated rhythm. A Composition for Detroit is a threnody for a place laid low by the mid-century flight of manufacturing and its middle-class tax base, a place now grappling with the additional traumas of the current economic recession. With its inclusion of careworn photographic reproductions and its spacing across multiple panels, the work is also, more broadly, a meditation on time and entropy.

The photographs for which VanDerBeek first became known were, like the piece exhibited at MoMA, created in the studio with techniques borrowed from sculpture and collage. Most feature a single, somewhat rickety construction, laden with both photographic reproductions and talismanic objects—feathers, necklaces and chains, ribbons, and the like. The pictures are themselves invocations, calling forth the spirits of modernist precursors, from Constantin Brancusi and Alexander Calder to László Moholy-Nagy and Max Ernst; of classical cultures and historical figures; and of the artist’s father, the experimental filmmaker and artist Stan VanDerBeek, for whom the canny juxtaposition of images was second nature. Sara VanDerBeek brought together items ripped from the pages of art-history surveys and mass-market magazines or extracted from her father’s archive or from her own collections, placing them in exquisite if somewhat precious arrangements that she bathed in dramatic light. The resulting photographs, with evocative titles like A Different Kind of Idol, Ziggurat, and Mrs. Washington’s Bedroom (all 2006), are long on atmosphere and rich in allusions: each fragment is a keyhole into another world. Everything is suspended within shallow, anonymous spaces. These images, while possessing the qualities of a dream, are also commentaries on the erosion of boundaries in today’s media environment and on the instantaneous retrieval of historical information made possible by modern technology. They present history as image, or as a palimpsest of images. VanDerBeek makes calculated use of light, shadow, color, and the boundaries of the picture plane. Yet the prints are unusual in a distinct way. Each image is a one-to-one-scale replica of its subject: that is, a tabletop arrangement of twenty-by-sixteen inches results in a print of approximately the same dimensions. Each photograph is not only an index of something that once existed in the world; it is a direct copy of that worldly presence.

Having developed a unique pictorial language, VanDerBeek spent several years honing it, a process that first entailed the stripping away of extraneous elements and later the near total exclusion of photographic reproductions. The busily referential works she exhibited in 2006 gave way to a series of increasingly spare compositions, such as Eclipse I (2008). In that image, two photographic reproductions of ancient sculptural figures are affixed to a vertical, white-painted wooden pole. Also affixed to it is a thin metal ring from which emanates a series of string “rays” (likely the source of the work’s title). Subtle details animate the composition, reminding viewers that they are looking at a sculpture in space, not a flat image composed on a screen: one of the classical reproductions is affixed to the side of the pole and one to its front face; the entire arrangement is not perpendicular to the lens but slightly off-kilter; the “rays” slice diagonally downward, while the shadows the construction projects onto the white backdrop canter off in the opposite direction. After (2009) achieves a similar complexity without recourse to other images, relying instead on the play of angles and simple washes of paint over plastic and glass for incident.

Sara VanDerBeek, Caryatid, 2010.

In more recent works, color too has been drained from the image—VanDerBeek shoots with color film but prints in black and white. Caryatid (2010) is one example of this technique. A column of six cast-plaster forms rests on a sun-dappled wooden floor between two windows. The light streaming through them washes out the upper corners of the composition, leaving an inverted T to offset the thin vertical presence in the center of the image. Mirrors resting on the floor reflect VanDerBeek’s caryatid, hinting at Brancusian endlessness. Such a simple figure seems to aim for the impassiveness and iconicity of an architectural column or a totem pole, yet the handmade quality of VanDerBeek’s construction remains evident. Here is something stark and timeless, yet expressive of an individual maker.

VanDerBeek’s series of reductive gestures approaches an endpoint with images like Treme (2010). Two blocky forms, white over blue, rest against a neutral gray and white background; they too are cast in plaster, and have been painted in simple vertical washes. Despite its reticent minimalism and its genesis within the walls of VanDerBeek’s studio, the picture has a real-world referent: its juxtaposition of colors mimics the stairway outside an abandoned modernist schoolhouse the artist encountered in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans.

Treme is part of To Think of Time, the three-part suite of new photographs (all 2010) comprising VanDerBeek’s first solo exhibition in a museum, presented last autumn at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. In advance of that show, VanDerBeek returned to the field, this time visiting two new sites that lend themselves to meditations on past and present: New Orleans, which was then about to mark the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and Baltimore, the artist’s hometown. The locations symbolize VanDerBeek’s attempt (begun with the work created after her foray to Detroit) to examine how both private and public memories are encoded in the physical environments we inhabit. Inspired by the observational acuity and sensitivity of Walt Whitman, from whom two of the exhibition’s photographic arrangements draw their titles (Song of Myself and Sleepers), the roughly three dozen small-scale images present fragments, whether captured in the field or constructed in VanDerBeek’s Brooklyn studio. In the image Treme School Window, one windowpane opens to reveal a metaphorical black hole at the center of the composition. Another, Baltimore Window, depicts an antique leaded window, exhumed from dusty seclusion in the basement of the artist’s childhood home, resting in a slot carved into a rectangular block of plaster; a narrow shaft of light cuts through the window and falls directly behind it onto the wall.

Sara VanDerBeek, Baltimore Window, 2010.

Such resonant images, gathered into a halting frieze around the Whitney’s first-floor gallery, were punctuated by nearly abstract photographs of building foundations in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. The concrete slabs carry evidence of the houses they supported, such as rust-caked holes into which rebar once slotted, and the scraps and gouges left behind by the storm. As VanDerBeek told exhibition curator Tina Kukielski, “I felt when looking down upon them for the first time that these foundations retained in their surfaces the entire history of our civilization. They reminded me of early pictographs, and with their pale fragments of color and texture, they echoed the images of fractured frescoes or ancient Greek and Roman art.” The works’ grayscale tones are joined by hints of dusky blue or sunrise pink, indicative of the natural light in which all the images, whether shot inside or outside the studio, were made. The light itself is a subtle indicator of time’s passage. Reading the installation from left to right, the amount of light in each image gradually rises and then dissipates. It would be easy to extrapolate from this sunrise-to-sunset narrative a tragic tale of decay: urban infrastructure enters into terminal decline, its only remaining function to bear noble witness to the lives lived in its midst. But to do so would be to neglect an idea that the generative, studio-based half of VanDerBeek’s work speaks to: around the corner there is always a new dawn.

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H.W. Brands, American Colossus

December 23rd, 2010
Book review, History, Miscellaneous publications

Published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2010. To see this review in context (subscriber-only), please click here.

Because we are still recovering from the most spectacular breakdown of corporate capitalism since the Great Depression, any study of that system’s rise to economic preeminence in America is inherently timely. What transformed our country from a land of yeoman farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans into the home of multinational corporations capitalized at hundreds of millions of dollars and employing tens of thousands of workers? Was the American system of free enterprise foreordained? If not, what alternatives once existed, and who championed them? Historians can follow many paths in search of answers to these questions. Alfred Chandler, in his classic business history The Visible Hand (1977), focuses upon innovations in corporate structure and strategies. Sven Beckert, in The Monied Metropolis (2001), and Thomas Kessner, in Capital City (2003), reconstruct the bustling world of late-nineteenth-century New York, engine room of the capitalist transformation. Now H.W. Brands, a prolific chronicler of the American past, turns to the era of astonishing economic and social change these historians have examined. He brings to the task his gifts as a biographer (of Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, and both Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and as a popular historian (of the California gold rush and the Cold War). But while his briskly paced, accessible book features the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Pierpont Morgan, American Colossus is not a fine-grained history of the business revolution they wrought or its effects on American workers. It is instead a broad survey of the period that uses “the triumph of capitalism” as a loose interpretive framework.

Brands is a reliable, even-handed guide. He strings together scores of engaging set pieces that draw liberally from first-hand accounts of society’s upheavals. These include not only famous chroniclers like Henry Adams and Booker T. Washington but also more obscure figures like Gertrude Thomas, an Augusta woman whose family had to give up its slaves not long after General Sherman marched through Georgia, and Mary Antin, a Russian Jew who emigrated to Boston two decades later. Many of Brands’s tales, from the expansion of the nation’s railroad network and the strikes of 1877 to the populist revolts of the 1890s and Morgan’s two “bailouts” of a faltering U.S. financial system, stick close to his central focus: how in “accomplishing its revolution, capitalism threatened to eclipse American democracy.” (Politicians, as indicated by Brands’s portraits of Boss Tweed in New York, Congressman bribed by proponents of the Central Pacific railroad, and William McKinley in the White House, certainly helped.) Other vignettes, while required of a textbook survey of the era, seem less fundamental here, especially a chapter on the legal battles of the Jim Crow South and lengthy descriptions of actual battles fought between Indian tribes and an ever-expanding white populace. But while some threads are only partly woven into his narrative, Brands has a gift for explanation, and he describes even tricky economic subjects like bimetallism and protectionist tariffs lucidly.

Students of this period of American history may be frustrated by Brands’s book, which is neither a sharply defined reinterpretation nor a thorough synthesis of up-to-date scholarship. Such readers may profit more from Jackson Lears’s Rebirth of a Nation (2009) or Heather Cox Richardson’s West from Appomattox (2007). But as an introduction to the giddy corporate expansion and alarming financial panics of the age, as well as the demographic shifts and social tumult that accompanied them, American Colossus succeeds with panache.

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short takes

“Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph”

While in Chicago last week, I visited the exhibition “Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-77” at the Art Institute. It’s a remarkable show. Although its argument about the role of Conceptual Art in bringing the photography “definitively into the mainstream of contemporary art” is debatable, it succeeds in several other arenas: first, as an exhibition of conceptually oriented objects that is neither dry nor didactic; second, as a sketch of the precedents available to the artists included in Douglas Eklund’s 2009 exhibition “The Pictures Generation”; third, as an eloquent testimonial to the importance of southern and eastern European art to the histories of Conceptualism (a reclamation project spurred on a decade ago by Jane Farer’s wonderful “Global Conceptualism” exhibition). “Light Years,” curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky, is on view in Chicago until March 11, and I highly recommend it. The catalogue, too, is well done, and available for more than forty percent off at Amazon. For those who can’t visit, Witkovsky published a reconsideration of photographic abstraction in the March 2010 Artforum, the text of which is available here.

40 Watt Sun

Brandon Stosuy’s roundup of the best metal albums of 2011 alerted me to the London-based band 40 Watt Sun, now also one of my favorite discoveries of this year. Other reviewers were sharply divided on the record’s merits, something Stosuy acknowledges when he notes that the “sweeping hooks, painful, introspective lyrics, and [Patrick] Walker’s clear, soaring voice” are “elements that could be cheesy if not handled with such delicacy or well-earned confidence.” Four of the album’s five tracks stretch over nine minutes each, and their consistency means you’ll know very quickly know whether you’ll like the whole record. Imagine a British Eddie Vedder singing over the top of Jesu, or Isis covering Red House Painters, or a 45 RPM record by mid-1990s emo band Mineral played at 33 RPM. The songs are crunchy, drawn out, and so sluggish as to seem static—perfect for late-night cross-country drives, as I discovered last night. Find out more and listen to samples here.

Arizona Politics, Considered Twice

By coincidence I’ve just read two sharp analyses of Arizona politics in separate publications. At The New Inquiry, Alex Aums and James Broulard discuss the #OccupyWallStreet-influenced protests in Phoenix, and meditate in the process upon geography, demography, and “symbolic politics.” Meanwhile, in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, Jeremy Harding reports on the state’s transformation into a “militarized desert principality.” His thoughtful presentation of first-person accounts from both sides of the border is well worth the time it takes to read his 11,000-word essay.

Simon Kuper’s Soccer Men

In a recent interview with the New York Times, journalist Simon Kuper, coauthor of the acclaimed 2009 book Soccernomics, claims that he thinks “people are almost as interesting as numbers.” His new collection of soccer profiles, titled Soccer Men, gave me a chance to test that claim; having done so, I think the emphasis in his statement should be placed on the word almost. To read my review of the book, head to Bookforum.com. “Kuper’s admiring portraits of an earlier generation of great talkers—from Johann Cruijff to Lothar Matthaüs to Jorge Valdano—reveal that his irritation with today’s players is due as much to broader developments in the game as it is to their individual traits.”

Ferguson and Faust

Last week, during the friendly match between Manchester United and the New England Revolution, the ESPN commentators said that United’s coach, Sir Alex Ferguson, is a Civil War buff, and that during last summer’s tour of the United States he made a pilgrimage to  Gettysburg. Today the Telegraph presents a slide show of the English club’s “extra-curricular” activities on this year’s tour, including a visit to Harvard University. Does Ferguson know that Harvard’s President, Drew Gilpin Faust, who is standing next to him in this photo, is a world-renowned Civil War scholar? Has he read her most recent book, This Republic of Suffering? This could be a Missed Connection of epic proportions.

Foner and McGirr, eds, American History Now

Today I received a copy of American History Now, a brand-new collection of historiographical essays edited by Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr. Published for the American Historical Association by Temple University Press, the book supplants The New American History, which came out in 1990 and was revised in 1997. The new volume is an imaginative overhauling of the invaluable sourcebook of essays on recent developments in American history, increasing the total number of texts and dividing them roughly evenly between accounts ordered chronologically and those ordered thematically. If you have the earlier edition—I do, and it was very useful for my comprehensive exam—you’ll want this one, too, as the editors have invited a new generation of scholars to weigh in with fresh surveys of their particular fields of expertise. A few examples will suffice: Alan Taylor on the colonial era; Kim Phillips-Fein on the last four decades; Erez Manela on “The United States in the World”; Sven Beckert on the history of American capitalism; Mae Ngai on immigration and ethnic history.

The Los Angeles Review of Books

I’d like to point you to the Los Angeles Review of Books, a new and ambitious book-review publication. A temporary site was launched last spring, and despite its interim nature it boasts some wonderful review-essays. I’ve been reading it since April, and scanning its Table of Contents reminds me of some thoughtful and sharply written pieces, including Kathryn Schulz on Sarah Bakewell’s life of Montaigne; Barbara Ehrenreich on human-animal relationships; Chris Kraus on Simone Weil; and Mark McGurl’s controversial response to Elif Batuman’s controversial review of his book on MFA fiction-writing programs. I eagerly await the unveiling of the full LARB site, and hope its funding (from UC Riverside and other places) creates a sustainable platform for such writing for a long time to come.

The 1970s

For those whose thirst for commentary on the 1970s wasn’t quenched by Rick Perlstein’s recent summary of a dozen or so books on the topic, the December/January issue of Bookforum features another such round-up, this time by historian Kim Phillips-Fein. For assessment of another side of life during that decade, consider the discussion taking place at the US Intellectual History blog concerning Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s paper, delivered at the group’s recent conference, on Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Lastly there the recently published anthology The Shock of the Global, edited by four eminent historians, which I mentioned in passing here.

Luc Sante on “The Last Newspaper”

Several years ago, when Robert Silvers spoke at 192 Books, the New York Review of Books editor was asked what subject he felt was the most difficult to write about. “Contemporary art” was his answer, and he said that he was hoping to cover more recent art in the pages of his journal. While I haven’t seen much that qualifies as discussion of contemporary art from the likes of Sanford Schwartz, Luc Sante visits the New Museum exhibition “The Last Newspaper” and reports back for the NYRBlog. He doesn’t like what he finds: “For all that numerous artists and curators genuinely believe themselves to be engaged, the art world is too rich, too hermetic, and too pleased with itself to have any more rapport with what is happening ‘on the street’ than did the art establishment Hans Haacke and cohorts were trying to overturn circa 1968. But then, in taking on the lame-duck medium that is the newspaper, the show is even further insulated from actuality.”

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

In recent weeks I’ve found myself thinking frequently about Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, an experimental 2008 documentary by filmmaker John Gianvito. I saw it that summer at Anthology Film Archives, and was happy to learn that this hour-long plaintive meditation on radical American history—and how it has been encoded in the country’s landscape—is available as a free online stream at SnagFilms. As A.O. Scott noted in the New York Times, “The calling of birds and the rustle of trees provide most of the commentary, and the effect is somehow to make history more mysteriously distant and more concrete—a matter of stone and weathered plaques inscribed with the records of half-forgotten deeds.” Here is a longer meditation on two of Gianvito’s films by Jonathan Rosenbaum, who compares the film to those by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Rosenbaum says, “Gianvito’s various ways of approaching the graves, memorials, and shrines through the surrounding landscapes that nestle and sometimes hide these largely unremarked sites is every bit as important as their inscriptions.” I highly recommend the film.

Blogging the Civil War

Huge fanfare surrounded the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in February 2009—and occasioned a flood of books on our sixteenth president. (Here is Sean Wilentz’s controversial take on seven of them.) The ruckus has hardly died down, yet historians of nineteenth-century America are once again being tapped by newspaper opinion pages, this time to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. The Washington Post has already launched Civil War 150, a site that has incorporated A House Divided, a blog about the war run for two years about Linda Wheeler. In recent weeks it has featured posts from the eminent historians Joan Waugh, David W. Blight, Kate Masur, and others. The New York Times is getting in on the act, too, with Disunion, a subset of its Opinionator blog mostly written by Adam Goodheart (though already featuring a few guest posts by Ted Widmer). The torrent of writing will only increase in the coming weeks: South Carolina seceded on December 24.

Stanley Greenberg

Urban Omnibus has published an interview with Stanley Greenberg, whose “photography explores hidden systems, infrastructures and technologies, both state-of-the-art and antiquated. New York City’s unseen workings, the region’s complex water systems, architecture mid-construction, physics labs, telescopes and a decommissioned dam have all been the subject of Greenberg’s careful eye.” A slideshow of Greenberg’s photographs accompanies the text; to see more, click here for a page on the Gitterman Gallery website and here for a selection published at the site of the Architect’s Newspaper.

The Original Tea Party

Why not spend this election day, in which the modern Tea Party figures so largely, reading Benjamin L. Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the Making of America (Yale University Press)? The well-timed book is not only a lucid, detailed explanation of what took place in Boston from the mid-1760s to that fateful December night in 1773. It also sets those events into a global context, with a chapter on the East India Company and “Great Britain’s struggle to manage its expanding empire”; highlights women’s roles in the related boycotts and non-importation agreements; and builds on the nexus between the urban environment and political mobilization that Carp laid out so clearly in Rebels Rising, his first book. Carp offered a brief summary of “the real history of the Tea Party” in the Wall Street Journal, and spoke about the book in this podcast.

Pied La Biche

This summer I caught World Cup fever, which has morphed into an obsession with European soccer. I’ve been watching a game or two a week, as well as watching highlights from dozens of others and reading blogs and newspapers’ sports sections. There are a handful of intersections between the sport and contemporary art—another of my interests—most notably Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s 2006 film Zidane: A 21st-century Portrait. Now I’ve come across Pied La Biche, an artists’ collective that has riffed on soccer several times. Their video Refait re-creates, on the streets of Villeurbanne, France, the final fifteen minutes of the 1982 World Cup match between France and Spain. The group has also realized artist Asger Jorn’s 1964 proposal for a three-sided football match, which was played in Vénissieux, France, in October 2009 during the Lyon Biennale. Learn more about the group at their French-language website. (Via soccer blog From a Left Wing. Also, if you’re wondering, I’m rooting for Arsenal.)

Interview with Jace Clayton (aka DJ/Rupture)

My friend Alan Gilbert recently conducted a lengthy and fascinating interview with Jace Clayton (aka DJ/Rupture) for Bomb Magazine. Clayton is behind the consistently great blog mudd up!; is the creator of stunning DJ mixes that incorporate music from around the globe; is the author of insightful articles (one, two) on changes in music culture; and lives, I think, down the block from me. Clayton’s Gold Teeth Thief Mix, released in 2001, opened up my ears to musical cultures with which I was unfamiliar, and was a large part of the reason why, when his 2008 album Uproot was released, I was not surprised to discover I was familiar with many of the “obscure” musicians it samples, including Ekkehard Ehlers, whose 12″s under the collective title Plays (later released as a CD on Staubgold) remain favorites of mine. In the interview, Clayton discusses “friction as a process,” the computer as the “folk instrument of composition,” and the economics of DJing. And really—if you haven’t yet heard Gold Teeth Thief, go download it. It’s free.

Michael Greenberg

For several months I have read, in a fugitive manner, Michael Greenberg’s essay collection Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life. A compilation of roughly thousand-word essays he has published in the Times Literary Supplement, the book, so far as I can tell, amounts to a haphazard index of New York, a careful and sympathetic accounting of its odd places and characters. I peruse it standing up. I read in a West Village bookstore about a longtime fixer in the Brooklyn neighborhood where Greenberg grew up, and in an Upper West Side indie about Hart Island, a potter’s field where thousands of New York’s anonymous dead lie buried. Now I’m pleased to discover that Greenberg has inaugurated a new column, “The Accidentalist,” in the new issue of Bookforum. Read his first entry, about a “strange fever,” here.

Reconsidering Christopher Lasch

One of my summer goals is to read (or re-read) several of Christopher Lasch’s books, from The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963 (1965) to The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1994), as a prelude to reading Eric Miller’s new biography of Lasch, Hope in a Scattering Time. Reviews of Miller’s study have begun coming in over the transom. Andrew Bacevich warmly welcomes the book in the new issue of World Affairs, and Alan Wolfe reviewed it in a recent issue of The New Republic. Rochelle Gurstein, once a student of Lasch’s, takes issue with Wolfe’s piece, recommending Bacevich and Jackson Lears as better guides to Lasch’s thinking. (Lears’s 1995 consideration is not yet available online.) I would add two enjoyable, deeply thoughtful essays to Gurstein’s recommendations. One is the reminiscence Lasch’s University of Rochester colleague Robert Westbrook published in Reviews in American History in 1995, and the other is Louis Menand’s 1991 NYRB essay. Unfortunately both require subscriptions to read online, though Menand’s piece was reprinted in his 2002 collection American Studies (it begins on page 198). Also useful is the Christopher Lasch bibliography-in-progress, maintained until 2003 by Robert Cummings. UPDATE, 5/25: Former Lasch student Chris Lehmann reviews the biography in the summer issue of Bookforum.

Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes”

For several years I have enjoyed Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes” column in the New York Times. This morning, looking online, I discovered Gray has been writing about buildings and blocks in New York for over two decades. These pieces comprise a huge and diverting archive, from which I learned, for example, that until the early 1990s my block housed an Episcopal church constructed in 1838 on land donated by Clement Clark Moore. Moore is the author of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” (more commonly known as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”), and his family estate, Chelsea, is the source of my neighborhood’s name. Click here for the archive with a brief introduction to the column by Gray. Two books, Changing New York (1992) and New York Streetscapes (2003), also contain materials from the column.

The Voice Literary Supplement

I’ve just surfaced from a particularly pleasant internet-as-black-hole experience. After reading Craig Fehrman’s entertaining article on Mark Twain’s house, I wandered over to his website. There I found a link to Rick Perlstein’s 2002 essay on plagiarism and writing history, published in the Voice Literary Supplement. From there I found a page with links to the contents of more than a dozen issues of the VLS. Good reads abound: Mike Davis on Jane Jacobs (April/May 2000); Luc Sante on street vendors (December 1999); Benjamin Kunkel on W.G. Sebald (June 2000); Michael Eric Dyson on Stanley Aronowitz (September 1998); and much, much more. For those wanting to learn more, Joy Press compiled a brief oral history of the VLS on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary.

John Gray on The Shock of the Global

John Gray has written the first review I’ve seen of The Shock of the Global (Harvard), an anthology of historians’ writings about the 1970s edited by a super-group of three Harvard-based historians and a colleague from Berkeley. His assessment: “While what one contributor calls ‘the declining autonomy of the United States in international affairs’ is occasionally acknowledged, the idea that globalization might be undermining America’s position in the world is nowhere systematically examined.” Read more in The New Statesman.

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