Reports
SPRAWLING OUT IN DALLAS
John Aäsp
46th annual SP E Conference
Dallas
March 26–29, 2009
The 46th annual Society for Photographic Education (SPE) conference took place at the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Dallas, and while attendance
may have seemed a bit thin, enthusiasm was high. Events began on a positive note with John Pfahl receiving a much-deserved Honored Educator
award, reminding us of the relevance of this yearly gathering. The entire conference was well organized and augmented by an impressive portfolio
walkthrough, a lively tradeshow, and an enjoyable gallery hop in Dallas’s design district.
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RESISTANCE AND CELEBRATION
Lyell Davies
2009 Native American Film and Video Festival
Smithsonian/National Museum of the American Indian
March 26–29, 2009
New York City
In celebrating its thirtieth year, the Native Film and Video Festival at the National Museum of the American Indian serves as a barometer for the state of indigenous filmmaking in the United States and around the world. Drawn from ten countries, the fourteen features and forty-three shorts on exhibition during this year’s four-day festival include short and long fiction works, documentaries, and animations, depicting a multitude of themes ranging from ongoing struggles for native rights, to a celebration of native culture, language, and traditional ways.
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Features
REAL-TIME SPECTACLES:
TWO ARTWORKS AND THE
REPRESENTATION OF SOCCER
Sonja Simonyi and Niels Van Tomme
Two recent artworks take the soccer stadium as the arena in which to create two radically different representations of the game as a real-time spectacle. Both Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) and Harun Farocki’s video installation “Deep Play” (2007) have successfully infiltrated the world of professional sports. They have produced works of art that ultimately explore to what extent our view of this industry is defined by all-encompassing mediation. However, while Gordon and Parreno visually comment on this by producing a seemingly coherent filmic re-interpretation of a soccer game, Farocki analyzes and deconstructs in detail the various layers of data that are available to determine and evaluate the contemporary visualization of World Cup games.ng the form of documentary filmmaking, offers a space to reflect, create, remake, and document.
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ARCHIVAL MEANING:
MATERIALITY, DIGITIZATION,
AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY
PHOTOGRAPH
Andrea L. Volpe
Just as the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology was being founded at Harvard in 1866, Alexander Gardner was photographing native American tribal delegations in images that fused portrait with typology (now at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives at the National Museum of Natural History) and the geological surveys of the United States turned a similarly classifying eye to the American> West. At the Peabody, photographic images stood as documentary evidence in the study of culture or as evidence of processes and procedures by which those cultures became the object of study. Its nineteenth-century collections include over 10,000 glass negative plates and an estimated 100,000 to 125,000 prints. Ever since the 1980s, when daguerreotypes of Sea Island slaves commissioned by Louis Agassiz showed up in a storage cabinet, there has been a sense that the museum’s photography collections have much to say about the terms on which knowledge was constructed through the twin institutions of the nineteenth-century museum and photography.
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Exhibition Reviews
SELF AS OTHER
Tracey Fugami
Photographic Center Northwest
Seattle
March 2–27, 2009
A true sense of self means a certain amount of liberation from the past. A mesh of oppressive history and current cultural politics complicates the process of defining Identity. Some of the best-known photographers today such as Yasumasa Morimura, or Nikki S. Lee, delve into this examination, a common thread throughout much contemporary art from Asia. In particular, Korean artists have continuously investigated an intertwined identity, looking toward the West and Europe for inspiration, while also aware of their roots. Weaving years of traditionalism and avant-garde movements, the fabric of artmaking in Korea is vibrant but has been struggling with finding its voice.
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CORPORATE GLOSS
Thomas McGovern
L8S ANG3LES
Annenberg Space for Photography
Los Angeles
March 27–June 20, 2009
The renowned Annenberg Foundation has created a 10,000-squarefoot multimedia photography center in Los Angeles, opening with the exhibition “L8S ANG3LES,” a group show of ten well-known artist/ photographers, photojournalists, and the legendary Conceptual artist John Baldessari. The Annenberg Space for Photography is clearly an intense and sincere effort, inspired by Wallis Annenberg’s own love of the medium. It is highly ambitious and a significant investment on the part of the foundation, which has a long history of supporting the visual arts. Unfortunately, the space does not have a curator, and its Century City location, surrounded by glass and steel corporate headquarters and luxury shopping, is about as far removed from the real city of LA as one can imagine.
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BOOK SENSE
Peter S Briggs
Matej Krén: Introspective
Bratislava City Gallery
Bratislava, Slovak Republic
November 26, 2008–March 8, 2009
Magazines, newspapers, and especially books supply Matej Krén, a Slovak artist who lives in Prague, with a steady source of raw materials. All five of his installations, under the banner “Introspective” at the City Gallery of Bratislava, reconstruct and translate these everyday “word warehouses.” Curated by the museum’s director, Ivan Jančar, the exhibition reframes Krén’s signature pursuit of the transformative and illusory capacity of memories, documents, and experiences—a pursuit that includes work in film, photography, sound, and installation. Four of the installations are new works created for the exhibition.
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THE MAGNIFICATION OF SPACE
Jody B. Cutler
Josef Schulz: Form
Yossi Milo Gallery
New York City
December 11, 2008–January 31, 2009
Luisa Lambri: Photographs
Luhring Augustine
New York City
January 10–February 7, 2009
David Haxton: Color Photographs
Priska C. Juschka Fine Art
New York City
January 15–February 14, 2009
Photography has a unique dialectical relationship with modernist architecture—each evolving at nearly the same moment in the framed glass daguerreotype and the Crystal Palace. The dichotomy between the most illusionistic and most experiential of cultural phenomenon was elided definitively by the rhetoric of light and lightness that accompanied the modular, open buildings of the Bauhaus and the International style, while the documentary truth of the photograph was analogous to the transparency of function, material, and method in modern construction. In a reciprocal vein, the limitless visual perspectives of photography and increasing dissemination of architectural knowledge through reproductions affected architectural style.
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HIS PUPILS’ NATURE
Luke Strosnider
Natura
Rochester Contemporary Art Center
Rochester, New York
February 6–March 22, 2009
John Pfahl’s work is a tireless investigation of our perceptions, encompassing a variety of approaches but always with a keen awareness of the interaction of vision, images, and nature. His series “Permutations on the Picturesque” (1993–99) challenged the pixel’s view of the landscape at a time when digital photography was just breaking through the soil, while his series “Picture Windows” (1978–81) framed the way we likely spend the most time seeing nature: gazing through panes of glass.
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CONTESTED SPACE
Lucy Gallun
Yael Bartana
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
Queens, New York
October 19, 2008–May 4, 2009
Framed by rising construction, figures work together. Dedicated to their tasks, they survey the landscape and wipe sweat from their brows. These individuals appear as upstanding folks, committed to a cause. Are they working as pioneers, erecting new structures in the area? Or are they rebuilding, putting energy into restoration so that generations can continue to survive, and thrive, on this land?
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BLACK DIAMOND
Luke Strosnider
From Dust to Gold
The Royal Library
Copenhagen
November 11, 2006–December 31, 2009
As George W. Bush prepared to leave the White House this past January, the National Archives began to fret that its computer system might choke on massive amounts of data created by the outgoing administration. Estimated at nearly one hundred terabytes, the data was more than fifty times that generated during the Clinton administration. Now comes President Barack Obama, Blackberry addict and the man many would consider the first netizen-in-chief. His administration’s digital output will no doubt swamp all who came before, creating new challenges for the archivists who must nimbly deal with new technologies, file formats, and storage challenges.
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GEO TOPO
Ryan Holmberg
Toshio Shibata: Landscape
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
Tokyo
December 13, 2008–February 8, 2009
Toshio Shibata is known for photographs of civil engineering projects in the Japanese countryside—dams, spillways, channel linings, roadside retaining walls, and gabions—that have transformed mountain and stream into geometrical earthwork. Hillsides appear as warped grids or monumental tessellated surfaces, channels as stepped troughs with sharply zigzagging walls. There are other sorts of photographs in his oeuvre—for example, his early “Night Photos” series (1982–86), consisting of crisp shots mainly of tollbooths and rest stops along the Tōmei Expressway—but such divergent series are few. For Shibata, geometrical topography approaches the status of a monomania, a fact made clear in “Landscape,” the partial retrospective of Shibata’s work recently held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
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EXACT SEEING
Harriet Riches
Do Not Refreeze: Photography Behind
the Berlin Wall
German Embassy
London
September 17, 2008–January 17, 2009
First shown at Manchester’s Cornerhouse in 2007, “Do Not Refreeze: Photography Behind the Berlin Wall” found its final exhibition at the German Embassy in London’s Belgrave Square. A discreet brass plaque identified the location of the show in the white-stuccoed elegance of the Ambassador’s Residence.
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Book Reviews
ON PONDERING PROPAGANDA
Travis Nygard
Art power
By Boris Groys
MIT Press, 2008
224 pp./$22.95 (hb)
Boris Groys is well known for his scholarship on state-produced art—a subject that he previously explored in The Total Art of Stalinism (1992). His most recent book, Art Power, continues to explore this topic. The first half of the book is a series of essays on the state of contemporary art. It provides insight into the ways that the art world functions, including chapters on diversity, innovation, curatorship, bio-politics, film, digitization, coauthorship, tourism, and art criticism. These discussions are nuanced and grounded through the use of specifi c examples. The second half of the book focuses on political propaganda, with especially strong discussions of warfare, Nazism, Communism, Post-Communism, and “Others.” Almost all of the essays in this book were published between 2000 and 2007, but by organizing them thematically a new cohesion emerges.
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ORDINARY UNCERTAINTIES
Robert Moeller
William Eggleston: democratic Camera—
photographs and Video, 1961–2008
Whitney Museum of Art, 2008
320 pp. /$65.00 (hb)
“Democratic” is a word often associated with William Eggleston’s work but as one English wit barked after hearing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, “All the Isms are Wasms.” Granted, the term “democratic” when applied to art is often a specious appliqué—democratic as opposed to what … Orthodoxy? More often than not, it is more banter than belief and simply a catchall for something too idiosyncratic to place rationally.
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A WINDOW SLAMMED SHUT OPEN
Damon Stanek
Still moving: between Cinema and photography
Edited by Karen Beckman and Jean Ma
Duke University Press, 2008
312 pp./$84.95 (hb), $23.95 (sb)
When Tom Gunning took the stage at Princeton University in 2005 to deliver the fi nal talk of the symposium Dark Rooms: Photography and Invisibility, he chose to comment on the previous lectures. Noting the skepticism many had held toward spirit photography by emphasizing the hukster’s fakes over the scientist’s facts, and how that skepticism had permeated the auditorium, Gunning pointed out that while fairy photographs may be dubious objects, fi gures like Arthur Conan Doyle investigated them with the utmost seriousness, and we should take that seriousness earnestly. This simple observation rippled through the auditorium, relieving the growing frustration of many, and clearing a receptive mental space for his lecture. Why, many of us wondered, did we have to wait for the fi nal lecture for such a simple and important corrective?
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OPERATING WITHOUT A LICENSE
Heather Diack
Appropriation
Edited by David Evans
Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2009
240 pp./$24.95 (sb)
Appropriation (2009) is the latest addition to the series “Documents of Contemporary Art” published as a joint effort of the Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press. This particular anthology is compiled and edited by David Evans, a scholar who has published extensively on photography and photomontage, including research on the Situationist uses of photography and a signifi cant catalogue raisonné of the German montage artist John Heartfi eld. Evans’s background lends itself perfectly to this fi rst compendium on the prevalent and often incongruent practices of appropriation art throughout the twentieth century to the present day.