Thomas Struth, Grazing-Incidence-Spectometer Max Planck IPP, Garching, 2010, color photograph, 46 7/8 x 58 1/4".

In this exhibition of new large-scale color photographs, Thomas Struth discloses realms largely hidden from public view: experimental science and high-tech industry. Struth’s images do not offer a comprehensive representation of how the plants and laboratories he portrays actually function. Nor, for that matter, can we understand from viewing the photos how the industries depicted therein—pharmaceutical production, space exploration, physics research, offshore drilling—are integrated in a globalized market. But the claustrophobic images of wires, tubes, and rarefied machinery reveal something else altogether: Beneath the rhetoric of continual discovery and behind the millions of dollars given over to such research lies a surprisingly fragile, patched-together infrastructure. Tubes are fastened together with blue tape; pipes are hastily enclosed in crumbling insulation or torn bubble wrap; the rubber casings on various machines reveal cracks. In a way, Struth’s dispassionate, analytic photographic style is more imperviously machinelike than the physical plants themselves.

These images are also remarkable as compositions. The show’s largest photographs pull one’s eyes deep into the background at the center of the image. In Space Shuttle Endeavour Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, USA, 2008, the tiled underside of the shuttle blocks a view of the full height of the hangar in which it sits; a phalanx of scaffolding and ladders, scattered beneath it in a V-shape, creates a passageway that points to the shuttle’s nose and beyond. Semi Submersible Rig DSME Shipyard, Geoje Island, South Korea, 2007, achieves a similar effect. Rusting steel chains stretch back from the immediate foreground to the enormous four-legged rig they help anchor. Most of the other photographs, however, are insistently frontal. That they are reminiscent of the series “Paradise,” images of verdant forests that Struth first photographed more than a decade ago, ingeniously reminds viewers that a strict division between the natural and the artificial is overly simplistic.

Alan B. Stone, Untitled (Lachine Canal), 1954, black-and-white photograph

We’re drawn to the past for countless reasons and revisit it in myriad ways, but analytic, interrogative approaches to what has come before us predominate in today’s art world. Even nostalgia itself is codified and anatomized: Witness, for example, how the phenomenon of “Ostalgie,” or nostalgia for life in the former East Germany, has been cross-examined in exhibitions and essays. In this context, “Alan B. Stone and the Senses of Place” is refreshing for the ways in which guest curator David Deitcher has woven his own biography and hometown memories into a sophisticated appreciation of his subject. The exhibition is an exercise in neither formalist connoisseurship nor rote history. Sampling a little-known body of photographs created by Stone in the 1950s and ‘60s, under his own name and that of his Mark One Studio, the show deftly evokes what mid-twentieth-century Montreal looked like from a gay man’s point of view.

The bifurcation of authorship is the first hint of the social, cultural, and legal divisions that marked gay life in that time and place. As himself, Stone produced street views of the city’s historic downtown; admiring portraits of sailors, stevedores, Boy Scots, and others; and images of recreation, whether swimmers in and around the Lachine Canal or young men playing ice hockey. Sober depictions of newsstands and granaries contribute to a useful understanding of Montreal as a working city tied to its waterways. On the other hand, Stone’s Mark One Studio, established in 1953 in the basement of the home he shared with his mother and sister, produced “beefcake”—erotic images of male bodybuilders in scant attire that, passing under the sign of either art or sport, were distributed as small-scale bundles of prints or in magazines with titles like Physique Illustrated and Ahoy. These images, here presented in a vitrine, reorient the viewer’s impression of Stone’s more or less innocuous black-and-white photographs, as do the reproductions of homophobic newspaper articles from the era.

One notices, first, how Stone’s Montreal is almost entirely out-of-doors, as if in acknowledgment of the constraints placed upon gay men who wished to congregate in residential or commercial venues. Likewise, as Deitcher notes in his catalogue essay, the pictures seem taken “on the sly”: The photographs are shot from odd vantage points, and dynamic compositions lend several of them a superficial resemblance to vertiginous shots of ‘20s Paris by modernist masters such as Brassaï or Cartier-Bresson. The historical interest of Stone’s pictures rests in these subtle hints of gay life being carried out by necessity in the interstices of the dominant culture. Yet Deitcher, a gay man who grew up in Montreal during the era of the pictures on view, chooses to explain as well the personal interest Stone’s work holds for him. In doing so, the frisson of desire is rendered central in images that might otherwise be primarily understood as illustrations for an argument about injustice. Untitled (Torso), 1963, for instance, which depicts the sculpted bare chest of a man standing behind a tree trunk, his head obscured by the bark, is not merely a record of the use of parks as trysting locations. It is exhibited on a wall that contextualizes it historically, with a photograph of a sign that reads PERSONS OF GOOD EDUCATION AND MORALS ARE INVITED TO THIS PARK and the reproduction of a newspaper story that describes homosexuals’ “mincing gait.” But, especially as framed by Deitcher’s tales of his fugitive interactions with beefcake pictures as a teen, Untitled (Torso) also retains its original, mildly illicit heat.

Alan B. Stone, Untitled (Steve by Mark-One), 1964, black-and-white photograph

]]> http://www.briansholis.com/alan-b-stone-and-the-senses-of-place/feed/ 0 http://www.briansholis.com/john-gray-on-the-shock-of-the-global/ http://www.briansholis.com/john-gray-on-the-shock-of-the-global/#comments Sun, 25 Apr 2010 17:19:22 +0000 brian http://www.briansholis.com/?p=3344 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.

Eirik Jonson, Below the Glines Canyon Dam on the upper Elwah River, Washington, 2008, color photograph, 50 x 40"

Wandering, Pac-Man-like, along Manhattan’s street grid on a sunny afternoon, it’s easy to romanticize the Pacific Northwest: air heavy with moisture, smeary gray sky, carpet of deep green foliage on every nearby hillside. Such pastoral imaginings are obviously deficient, not least because human traces so rarely intrude upon them. A recent spate of creative work, however, emphasizes more complex negotiations between people and this corner of the national landscape. There is, for example, the dreary, anonymous Portland depicted in Kelly Reichardt’s 2008 film Wendy and Lucy, or musician Phil Elverum’s emotionally freighted relationship with Mt. Erie in rural Washington State. Photographer Eirik Johnson’s series “Sawdust Mountain,” 2005–2009, the subject of this exhibition and a related book, depicts sites located somewhere between a colorless urban fringe and a mystical rural retreat: Nature predominates, but it is heavily worked. Shot over four years in Washington, Oregon, and northern California, the series concentrates on logging and fishing. Johnson’s lucidness about environmental despoliation and economic finitude manifests itself most clearly in pictures taken from elevated vantage points, which allow viewers to see how landscape is constructed. This distance is nicely counterbalanced by the intimacy of Johnson’s portraits, which betray sympathy both for his human subjects—hatchery employees, ecologists doing fieldwork, independent shopkeepers—and for the region in which he was raised.

The overall narrative is of decline and germinating hope for renewal. This point is made explicit in Johnson’s juxtaposition of photographs depicting a stack of logs in a multinational company’s sort yard and a nursery of western larch seedlings. It’s visible as well in the rust-stained, dilapidated former Masonic lodge now rehabilitated as The Sweater Store, South Bend, Washington, 2005. It may not be much, this picture seems to say, but it’s a living. The building itself is centered in the frame and depicted frontally, echoing Walker Evans’s churches and storefronts. Other images play with reflections in windows; stagger objects from foreground to background; or present pictures within pictures. The influence of older photographers, from Carleton Watkins to Robert Adams to Joel Sternfeld, can be detected in these works. But no forebear dominates, and Johnson’s vision of a Pacific Northwest resilient in the face of difficulty is clearly articulated and entirely his own.