Aperture's Blog, page 123

Beyond the Wall

Is the U.S.-Mexico border a political calculation or a humanitarian crisis?

By Josh Kun

Richard Misrach, Wall, east of Nogales, Arizona, 2014
© the artist

There is a line between Richard Misrach and composer Guillermo Galindo.

On the cover of this book, it is little more than a keystroke, a simple design flourish to mark an interdisciplinary collaboration: Misrach, photographer, to the left; Galindo, composer and musician, to the right. On the pages that follow, however, that line becomes something else, a hieroglyph of a new coauthored artistic language and a symbol of all the lines that both connect and divide them. It is a line between English and Spanish, between the United States and Mexico, between white and brown, and between sight and sound, looking and listening. It is a line between an American photographer who is perfectly happy driving the nearly two thousand miles of the U.S.-Mexico border in a rented 4×4 with a tripod, a high-definition camera, an iPhone he uses for shooting, and a bottomless supply of trail mix, and a Mexican composer living in the U.S. who is perfectly happy to stay where he is, hundreds of miles away from the border, free from checkpoints, suspicion, and Border Patrol stops.

Richard Misrach, No More Deaths, 2016. Pick-up truck filled with water and food to be placed in remote regions of the Arizona desert
© the artist

The line treats them differently and they treat it differently in return.

It is also, of course, not just a line, but the line—la línea, la frontera, el límite, el bordo—the international boundary first drawn in the sand and along the shifting banks of the Rio Grande to end the Mexican-American War in 1848. Back then, the U.S.-Mexico boundary commission set out to draw a “boundary line with due precision, upon authoritative maps, and to establish upon the ground landmarks which shall show the limits of both republics.” For most of its early years, the border was just that, little more than desert dirt and river currents punctuated by marble obelisks that ran like exclamation points from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico to help remind everyone—the ranchers, the vaqueros, the governors, the generals, the Indians, the tourists—what side of the line they were on. There wasn’t even a fence until 1911, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Bureau of Animal Industry built one in California to keep “stray Mexican animals” that might be infested with ticks from wandering onto U.S. land. “Such a fence,” the bureau wrote thirteen years before the U.S. Border Patrol even existed, “will also assist the customs officials in preventing illegal traffic between the two countries.” The border of today, with its dedication to security against human and drug traffic, its dedication to the spectacle of national defense, was an afterthought.

Guillermo Galindo, Fuente de lágrimas (Fountain of Tears), 2014
© the artist

Since the 1970s, Misrach has been photographing the shifting environmental and political landscapes of the American West, the border lurking in the background of his portraits of the new desert frontier but never actually in their frame. Since the 1990s, Galindo has been making music informed by the aesthetic and cultural avant-gardes of the U.S. and Mexico, the border always audible—without it, he would still be living in the Alta California of Mexico—but never pushed too high into the mix. In 2012, their paths crossed when both of them began responding to the effects of the most recent wave of border militarization. Misrach shot the Western landscape as it was being reshaped and remapped by hundreds of miles of new steel border walls, and Galindo turned the detritus of those new walls—animal skeletons, rusting Jumex juice cans—into electro-acoustic instruments. 

Richard Misrach, Border Patrol Target #3 (detail), near Gulf of Mexico, Texas, 2013
© the artist

Most materially, the border of these cantos is the one that dates back to 2006, when President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act and gave a green light to over seven hundred miles of new border construction and surveillance technology, a high security cocktail of imposing steel walls, checkpoint stations, radar towers, ground sensors, thermal imaging, drones, and beefed-up Border Patrol ranks. To “control the border,” between 2005 and 2015, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection paid out over $23 billion in private contracts to companies like Boeing, Raytheon, IBM, and Lockheed Martin, not to mention all of the private architectural design firms hired to make the secure border “aesthetically pleasing” (as the federal mandate put it), and all of the private prison firms—the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group—who profit from upticks in enforcement and detainment. The cost of the new wall was estimated to be $4 to $12 million per mile (dependent on terrain and difficulty of construction), a hefty price tag for any addition, but especially hefty when you consider that it can be scaled by a teenager in seventeen seconds flat, without a ladder. Even a 2008 Army Corps of Engineers blueprint suggested, in fine print, just how impermanent these new walls and fences might be by their very design: “This fence construction is to be dismantled readily.”

Richard Misrach, Effigy #2, near Jacumba, California, 2009
© the artist

The vast industry of this new border extends, informally, into Mexico as well, where drug cartels and human traffickers benefit from the increased desperation and vulnerability of Mexican and Central American migrants looking for safe passage across punishing, burning deserts. This too is part of the border of these cantos, what Pope Francis has called “the humanitarian emergency” produced by overzealous border enforcement and strict detainment and deportation policies. In the past decade, some expanses of desert borderlands have become sun-bleached death zones, blistering and unforgiving sites of mass migrant death and disappearance littered with the personal effects of the missing—miles and miles of trace evidence, forensic clues to lost lives and divided families that mostly lead nowhere. They have also become a particular staging ground for unprecedented femicide, a systemic naturalization of violence against women that the border’s merger of global industry and labor exploitation has helped nurture.

The Arizona-Mexico border can now be mapped the way the Humane Borders organization does it, through RHR maps, or recovered human remains. “Each dot,” their maps read, “represents one RHR.”

The maps are full of dots.

Roy Germano, still from The Other Side of Immigration, 2009
Courtesy the artist

The border wall, then, is not simply the material, built result of politically expedient legislation buttressed by defense budgets and national chauvinism. It is an ideological, social, and economic pressure point where the pulls and pushes of multiple political forces, past and present, converge in volatile and often tragic ways. To speak of the contemporary border is to speak of nineteenth-century U.S. expansionism and twentieth-century economic imperialism, decades of labor recruitment and labor deterrence, post–WWII industrialization and post–9/11 terror wars, pro-trade policies and antidrug policies, Mexican drug supply and U.S. drug consumption, the pursuit of human rights and the violation of human rights, U.S. golf courses with their ninth holes in Mexico and two-bedroom American homes with the border wall in their backyard, and the open frontier of the Old West and the carceral frontier of the New West, where campfires become klieg lights and young mothers carry their infants across live gunnery ranges because, somehow, they’re safer than the open desert.

Richard Misrach, Protest sign, Brownsville, Texas, 2014
© the artist

In her influential 1979 essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” art critic Rosalind Krauss noted a new school of American artists making large-scale sculpture that differed from traditional monuments because they were not commemorative or historical; they were the monument’s “negative condition.” Decades later, the border wall has truly become the monument’s “negative condition” but in moral and ethical terms, a statue of un-liberty that funnels the tired into desert bottlenecks and tracks the poor through gulches. It is a monument to the aesthetic and fiscal reaches of political theater, and a thuggish mirror of national and cultural phobias—to the limits, not the depths, of the democratic imagination.

The photographs of Misrach help us understand this. The musical instruments of Galindo help us hear it. When experienced together, however, they have the potential to do something else: to activate our own visions and our own scores for the American monuments that might still be possible to build.

Or tear down.

Josh Kun is a professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (2005).

This essay is an excerpt from “Misrach/Galindo,” originally published by Aperture in Border Cantos (2016).

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The Ready-made Dream No One Believes In

In Europe and the United States, Stéphane Duroy charts the course of “big” history.

By Wilco Versteeg

Stéphane Duroy, spread from the book Unknown, 2015
© the artist

Again and Again, Stéphane Duroy’s solo exhibition at Le Bal in Paris, arrives at the right time in history. Having won several World Press Photo awards in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Duroy has become an integral voice in documentary photography, defined by books like Distress (2011) and L’Europe de Silence (1979–89). His artistic development culminates in Unknown (2007–17), an ongoing attempt to exhaust the documentary, artistic, and political possibilities of his work. Seeing Again and Again, the first comprehensive exhibition to present Duroy’s work, is like being taken by the hand on an impressionistic journey through the decline of Europe and the United States.

Stéphane Duroy, Bradford, 1981, from Distress
© the artist

Duroy was born in 1948 in Tunisia, then a French colony, and his life coincides with the major moments of postwar European history. He took up photography in the late 1960s as a means to document national and international upheavals. But Duroy has shied away from exhibitions, instead preferring to share his vision in books that focus on political change in the ’70s in Great Britain, Germany, Eastern Europe, and the United States. Inspired by the writings of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner, Duroy’s theme is how “big” history—from World War I to the Holocaust to the end of Communism—is reflected in the daily lives of common people. The title of the exhibition, Again and Again, as well as the character of his work, underscores his historical fatalism. Duroy witnesses the societies of Thatcherite Great Britain, post-communist Eastern Europe, as well as contemporary America, in particular the downtrodden victims of capitalism’s excess, yesterday and today.

Stéphane Duroy, Manhattan, New York, 2004, from États-Unis
© the artist

The first part of the exhibition contains Duroy’s earlier work on the waning of Europe. The gallery walls are covered in demure gray wallpaper with a Second Empire pattern, a motif that returns in pictures such as one showing a chandelier in an abandoned hall in Portugal. One of his most striking pictures shows the falling of the Berlin wall. That epochal event is typically represented by images in which the wall is demolished by a jubilant crowd. Duroy, who has spent extensive periods of time in Berlin, managed the capture the wall while it was falling and suspended in midair; strangely, there are no people in sight. “In 1979, West Berlin became the link between cause and effect, the place where decisions were made about the major tendencies which have created the European tragedy and called our cherished values into question,” Duroy said last year. “Then from 1984 onward, the United States, splendid symbol of hope and great ready-made dream which nobody believes in, closed the circle.”

Stéphane Duroy, spread from the book Unknown, 2015
© the artist

Duroy is a historical pessimist, but this pessimism drives him forward. The forces of history inevitably lead to the trampling of humanity, but Duroy tries to restore this humanity in his latest, ongoing project Unknown, to which the exhibition’s second part is dedicated. Unknown is a Tentative d’épuisement d’un livre, or, in the official translation that reduces the philosophical feel of the original French, “The endless reworking of a book.” (I would have suggested, “Attempt at the exhausting of a book.”) Unknown, begun in 2007, is an impressive twenty-two-foot foldout catalog and an exhibition in of itself. Le Bal presents twenty-nine different versions: Over the last decade, Duroy has reworked Unknown, adding, removing, or manipulating its pages to constantly create new forms and juxtapositions.

Stéphane Duroy, Billings, Montana, 2003, from États-Unis
© the artist

Duroy no longer describes himself as a documentary photographer, but there is an undeniably documentary impulse at work; while he adds newspaper clippings, paint, and text, his own images remain the groundwork of Unknown. This manic—indeed, exhausting—search for a form that fits our age of economic displacement finds its culmination in his pictures of life in Butte, Montana, a former mining community. One of Duroy’s pictures features a house reminiscent of any of Walker Evans’s images of small houses and barns in decline, except that the house Duroy photographed is on wheels and is being driven to another, perhaps better place. In Duroy’s universe, there is no stability, only, as he says, a “closed theater” of struggles between power and failure, hope and duplicity.

Wilco Versteeg is a PhD candidate at Université Paris Diderot.

Stéphane Duroy: Again and Again is on view at Le Bal, Paris, through April 9, 2017.

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Work, Politics, Survival

Jo Spence rejected categorizing labels of her work and practice and preferred to wander.

By Charlene Heath

Jo Spence, Photo Therapy: My Mother as a War Worker (with Rosy Martin), 1984
© Terry Dennett and courtesy of the Jo Spence Memorial Archive, Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto

Though we know Jo Spence as an activist, feminist, and socialist photographer, she actually began her career in photography operating a High Street studio business in London between 1967 and 1974. She was perturbed watching parents socialize their young into “ideal children” in front of her lens, and so helped set up London’s Children’s Rights Workshop in 1973. In Spence’s 1986 book Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography she writes about volunteering there, and how she began to explore the role of photographs in establishing certain views of childhood and normative constructions of the nuclear family unit. It’s also where she met Terry Dennett, her long-time collaborator and romantic partner, with whom she began a lifetime engagement with photography and media literacy, studying how photographs operate in the construction of age, class, and gender-based identity.

Jo Spence, Alternative Health Treatment using Traditional Chinese Medicine (with Maggie Murray), from The Picture of Health?, 1982–86
© Terry Dennett and courtesy of the Jo Spence Memorial Archive, Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto

Spence’s political practice unfolded against the backdrop of 1970s London—that myriad of British counter-cultures and concomitant institutions shaped by a general desire to provide an alternative to dominant establishments and their modes of production. In 1974, Spence and Dennett co-founded Photography Workshop Ltd. in their apartment, a place where interested individuals could learn practical darkroom skills, participate in exhibitions, and engage in discussions around photography and photographic education. They also embarked on what would be Spence’s first attempt to work in the classic documentary mode, photographing inhabitants of illegal gypsy encampments throughout London. Spence refers to the project Gypsies and Travellers (1973-5) in Putting Myself in the Picture, stating:

. . . it was the classic introduction to documentary photography for me. I was both privileged and upset to be allowed to look at a world where people worked so hard to survive, whilst labouring under such terrible disadvantages. . . . It never occurred to me to teach people to take photographs of their own lives. . . . In retrospect I can see that although I was a nice liberal humanist, I had no clue as to the history of the gypsy and travelling people, or their real social, economic or political needs.

For Spence, the central question became: How can individuals—namely children, women and working class people—use photography to represent themselves, and take control of their own visual narratives? Although Dennett and Spence continued visiting gypsy communities throughout London, they did so in an old ambulance-turned-darkroom, teaching photography instead of taking photographs. Combining their technical photography skills with theoretical tools aimed at achieving agency-through-self-representation, Spence and Dennett continued teaching the marginalized, operating outside mainstream educational institutions and commercial gallery systems.

Jo Spence, Photo Therapy: The Bride (with Rosy Martin), 1984–86
© Terry Dennett and courtesy of the Jo Spence Memorial Archive, Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto

When Spence was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1982, her inclination towards self-representation and education continued, but took on new forms. The Picture of Health? (1982–6) deals with the politics of cancer as she took her physical and mental health into her own hands. By documenting her experience with Western medical orthodoxy, and recording her use of traditional Chinese medicine as an alternative, she continued her critical engagement with institutions and systems that make decisions on behalf of others, and how they treat and represent them. Her collaborative phototherapy work extends these concerns by marrying her holistic health practise of psychodrama with her applied skills in portraiture. By deconstructing and acting out scenarios from her co-counselling psychotherapy sessions—childhood abandonment when her mother was a factory worker during World War II, and anxieties around marriage and the female libido, for example—she complicates the efficacy of dominant, monolithic images of women by piecing together a portrait of herself that is multi-faceted and comprised of many selves.

Jo Spence, Untitled, from Libido Uprising (with Rosy Martin), 1989
© Terry Dennett and courtesy of the Jo Spence Memorial Archive, Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto

Spence resisted any notion of feminist or socialist photography as a style of art making during her career, and was reluctant to solely embrace a definition of herself as a capital-A artist. In fact, she preferred to use the term “educational photographer” or “cultural worker” when describing her work. Yet, confrontation with Spence’s work invites the question, Is it art? Activism? Self help? Or, is it all of the above? Responding to a question during the tour of her Review of Work (1985–6), Spence, who died in 1992, resisted any such labels: “Somebody like me wanders, without a category. In a sense, I don’t want a category. I like being a moving target, I feel I’ll survive longer.” The undeniable staying power of Spence’s work lies in her bold approach to picture making drawn from an embodied experience of everyday life, and our inability to pigeonhole it.

Charlene Heath is a Ph.D. student at York/Ryerson University studying Communication and Culture, and the Archivist at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto, where she works with the Jo Spence Memorial Archive.

Read more  from   Aperture   Issue 225, “On Feminism,” or  subscribe  to  Aperture   and never miss an issue.

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Roe Ethridge is a Good Southern Boy

The influential photographer, who once worked for JCPenney’s, riffs on nostalgic Americana.

By William J. Simmons

Roe Ethridge, Me and Auggie, 2015
Courtesy the artist and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

Few contemporary photographers are as productively resistant to categorization as Roe Ethridge, which likely made Kevin Moore’s task of curating Ethridge’s mid-career retrospective a herculean task. Roe Ethridge: Nearest Neighbor, currently on view at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, brings together the wide range of his enigmatic pictures in an unconventional manner with little discernable organization. This suits Ethridge’s characteristically paradoxical style—a combination of deadpan and emotional imagery that is neither documentary nor romantic, but sometimes a bit of both. I recently spoke with Ethridge about the multifaceted roots of his practice and his interests in classical music, David Lynch, Andy Warhol, and Lee Friedlander.

William J. Simmons: I’d be interested to hear about your relationship to conceptualism versus your relationship to documentary photography, and how this plays out in your current exhibitions.

Roe Ethridge: I’ll go back to this critical moment of me coming out of art school in Atlanta. At that time, I would have called myself a Conceptual artist using photography, even though going further back to when I started, all I wanted to do was be a photographer. During that time in the early 1990s, I was exposed to the Düsseldorf School through Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky—the Becher students. It was clarifying. It eliminated some of the things associated with being in the South—romantic subjects, selective focus. Or maybe I was exhausted by the dampness, and the rot, and a romantic re-envisioning of a Walker Evans black-and-white, large format photograph. Even with William Eggleston, who was coming through as an influence, I was trying to hold off the seduction of the 35mm that you hold to your eye. I wanted to do something more structural. There was something about those Thomas Ruff portraits and buildings that made so much sense to me.

But I think my first loves were Lee Friedlander and Andy Warhol. Only recently have I been able to let those two names come out together. That almost tells the whole story right there. It’s Lee Friedlander and Andy Warhol—this droll, dry mirror but with composition and content. There’s some concept, there’s some color, there’s an eye. You can see the two trajectories, and they overlap in the concrete poetry that happens in a Friedlander photograph or Warhol’s Brillo boxes.

After getting my BFA, I started assisting catalog photographers in Atlanta. That’s the big photo industry there. I wanted to work in that industry, and I liked that it was the lowest common denominator form of photography, where the aesthetic was only 5 percent of it. The pragmatics of getting it done in a day, or getting the lights so you could see no shadow on the bra, were more important.

Roe Ethridge, Nancy with Polaroid, 2003–6
Courtesy the artist and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

Then I moved to New York and started working almost immediately as a commercial photographer. I kept wondering, When are they going to ask me for my license? I’m going to get in trouble! [Laughs.] But I never did. The New York Times sent me checks, and I thought, Oh my God. I just paid my rent as a photographer in New York. I was showing my work, and, at the same time, I was doing this commercial stuff and I realized that sometimes the commercial images were just so much better than my own ideas. I began to see myself as an editor, like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, with their processes of selection and appropriation.

At the same time I was reading Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman, which is about a dude from the South who is going to Princeton. He’s from the South. He’s around New York. I could relate to that notion of being a “good southern boy” in the biggest, baddest city. So the character in the story keeps going into these fugue states, which I guess was a thing that happened to people more often in the forties and fifties than it does now. It’s characterized by far flung travel in an amnesiac state. He kept waking out of this state on a Civil War battlefield in Virginia. At the time I was reading the book, I was going to Lexington, Virginia, to visit friends. I was homesick for Atlanta. So, in this Walker Percy book, he’s talking about the fugue as a mental state. It turns out a fugue is also a musical composition that Bach pioneered.

Glenn Gould famously played Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Basically, it’s two keyboards and he’s playing two at one time. The music, ironically, is the length of a pop song! You start off with a run, a line of notes. So one hand is playing one line of notes, and the other hand is playing another line of notes. And it goes through these variations fifteen times. The keyboards are playing over each other, and there’s this harmony and disharmony. It seems like some things are left to chance and some things are quite intentional, and for me, getting to that place of the musical definition just made everything click. I thought, That is what I’m doing. That’s what I’m up to. It’s more about that sound, the harmony, and disharmony, rather than making meaning or illustrating a thesis. It’s synesthesia. It’s a feeling. It’s a sound. It’s a vibration. It’s not a project. And so all of those things are coming into my young thirty-ish mind at the same time.

All of a sudden, I was like, I’m a photographer, but I’m also an editor. I’m also a lousy conceptual artist or whatever! [Laughs.] I’m a colorist. I’m a pictorialist. I’m a commercial photographer. Suddenly I was allowed to do all of that stuff at the same time.

Roe Ethridge, Coke Bottles, 2015
Courtesy the artist and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

Simmons: That is almost made literal in your 2016 book, Neighbors, where it starts out in the way that you might assume a normal photobook would, but then you have a movement between those categories, as you described, and a rejection of hierarchies. The images are very disparate. So is this project an illustration of that elimination of hierarchies?

Ethridge: I suppose so, although I don’t like the idea of an illustration.

Simmons: Well, maybe not an illustration, but a literalization.

Ethridge: Let’s look at it this way: This is, as far as Kevin Moore and I were concerned, a thematic survey show. It may not seem quite so because there is so much disparate imagery.

In Neighbors, “Nearest Neighbor” is just a middle section of the book. I was really trying to avoid having this survey show act as the final word. The idea of the book was to problematize the finality of a retrospective and, in a poetic way, to talk about other aspects of what I’m doing as an artist, photographer, father, and storyteller. There were also very grounded things like the kids and me on a walk, and the animals at the sanctuary—two very childlike, very earthbound, things. So there’s a constant juxtaposition.

As far as the salon aspect of the layout, and the hierarchies of it, it was very quickly arranged, on purpose, so that it wouldn’t get a chance to get too organized, though we had already done a layout of the show and knew what images would go into which rooms. So the spreads do relate to the groupings of the images.

Roe Ethridge, Thanksgiving 1984 (table), 2009
Courtesy the artist and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

Simmons: Your discussion of music and improvisation reminds me of the scene where they discuss the tritone in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, and in some way, André Breton’s notion of convulsive beauty—the obsolete train that can no longer make noise and steam. Do you consider yourself a composer?

Ethridge: Photographic images started working like songs for me. The white cube and the white wall created this place sequencing. That sequence is a lot like writing music—what song follows what, or what sounds follows what. I played in bands in my twenties. I can sort of read music, but it’s mostly self-taught. I mean, I played trombone in sixth grade. [Laughs.] That was embarrassing. It sucks to carry a trombone home in sixth grade.

Roe Ethridge, Durango in the Canal, Belle Glade, FL, 2011
Courtesy the artist and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

Simmons: That reminds me—I’m interested in hearing more about your relationship to nostalgia.

Ethridge: Well, I think there’s a difference between the romantic or nostalgic and the personal. I’m interested in weird America, David Lynch, German objective photography. How am I going to talk about the suburbs and my generic whiteness without coming off like a total dick? I need to address this identity. It’s a problem. It’s like a vacuum—the script that I was handed by my family and that particular southern Christian “good boy” bullshit.

It is such a bad script! I’m so glad that it didn’t happen. But I’m also reconciling with that identity. It’s part of the work in a way, too, but I think I’m talking about the mall, and not the country. I’m talking about working at JCPenney’s as a senior in high school, and then assisting catalog photographers making JCPenney’s catalogs. That’s a weird serendipity. One of the structural models that we were working with on the show was the notion of the department store.

Simmons: No wonder you brought up David Lynch!

Ethridge: There’s the hardware store in the beginning of Blue Velvet! It’s kind of like a pastiche of a Norman Rockwell, but it scares the fuck out of you, or it makes you cry. Blue Velvet is effective in a way, because it is stylized with nostalgic Americana. Then Lynch brings in other things that juxtapose with it and put these themes in stark relief.

Roe Ethridge, Refrigerator, 1999
Courtesy the artist and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

Simmons: This feels like what you are doing. You can either resist nostalgia or radically choose to fall into it. A lot of your images are intensely emotional, and affecting, and beautiful. But at the same time, you leave room for people to view them ironically.

Ethridge: You have to decide what kind of person you are. I’d like to help people understand the work, but by letting it float, there’s a risk that’s interesting to me. It’s like seeding for the future, and I love that—the idea that it will unfold over time or open up to you on a third read or later when you look at it again.

William J. Simmons is an adjunct lecturer in art history at the City College of New York, and a PhD student in art history and women’s studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Roe Ethridge: Nearest Neighbor is on view at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, through March 12, 2017 and is part of the FotoFocus Biennial, a regional, monthlong celebration of photography and lens-based art in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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Command the Gaze

A girl-powered social media movement becomes an interactive exhibition.

By M. Whiteford

Amal Said, Purple, London, England, from the exhibition #girlgaze, 2016
Courtesy the artist and the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles

On January 21, 2017, millions of people participated in Women’s Marches in the United States and around the world, representing 616 diverse marches in 151 cities from Washington, D.C. to Beirut, Lebanon. After a campaign season in which the female body was physically and psychologically abused, scrutinized, judged, and ultimately rejected on media outlets ranging from television to Twitter, women organized around the urgency for a unified and visible stance against the misogyny symbolized by Donald Trump’s ascent to the Oval Office. At the marches, all eyes were on women and their allies, only this time they were the commanders of the gaze.

Dominique Booker, Believe, Berlin, Germany, from the exhibition #girlgaze, 2016
Courtesy the artist and the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles

Regardless of their economic circumstance, gender identity, physical ability, or nationality, many women share the experience of being watched, and sense intuitively that their worth and safety can be determined by the capricious nature of another’s gaze. This near-universal experience of being defined as an object, instead of an inherently valuable human being, influenced #girlgaze: a frame of mind, currently on display at the Skylight Studios at the Annenberg Space for Photography. As part of the ongoing #girlgaze project, the exhibition argues that a visual politics that challenges the patriarchal definitions of “female” and “woman” must be embedded in the creative work of people who identify as female, and who advocate for women. Put another way, the artists demand that we must go out to the streets and wield the agency we are afforded with empathic and creative power.

Monica Lek, Turkish Delight, from the exhibition #girlgaze, 2016
Courtesy the artist and the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles

The project is made up of an interactive multimedia exhibition of over 150 images that represents a swath of identities, each from the perspective of “people who identify as girls.” #girlgaze was founded by Amanda de Cadenet, a photographer and CEO of The Conversation, an interview series dedicated to women’s voices, and fashion and art photographers Inez van Lamsweerde, Collier Schorr, Lynsey Addario, and Sam Taylor Johnson, as well as model and activist Amber Valetta. This group of prominent photographers envisioned the social media campaign as an expansive way to challenge and redirect the viewer’s attention away from the female body as an object to be consumed in favor of the concept of female agency and multiplicity. Mobilizing social media, Instagram users became active participants in the movement by sharing and supporting photographs made by female-identified photographers. Those visiting the feed will see images of everyday women, such as a snapshot of a young Brit picking up takeout, as well as overtly political photographs, like a startling image of a domestic abuse survivor.

Luisa Dorr, Maysa, Brazil, from the exhibition #girlgaze, 2016
Courtesy the artist and the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles

Visitors to the Annenberg exhibition will find the curatorial strategy of the exhibition mimics the experience of discovering pictures via hash tag: photographs are grouped in broad categories. These related images, which include pictures of homeless encampments, race-car drivers, and institutionalized women, are set in conversation with one another on facing makeshift walls, which distinguish the disparate communities without resorting to enclosure. The audience can interact with the material through physical movement, weaving in and out of an open floor plan. In addition, several digital projections are scattered throughout the space and a photo booth welcomes visitors to upload their own portraits to the #girlgaze Instagram account.

Melanie Knight, One Size, Manchester, England, from the exhibition #girlgaze, 2016
Courtesy the artist and the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles

Though their backgrounds vary, the artists are united by the use of the camera as a mirror on which to reflect, examine, and scrutinize a woman’s relationship to herself and to the world. In a similar way, the multimedia elements of exhibition create an inclusive space in an equitable display of age, beauty, race, religion, class, and ability.

Francesca Milano, New Romantics, Milan, Italy, from the exhibition #girlgaze, 2016
Courtesy the artist and the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles

When I entered the exhibition, I was overwhelmed by the representation of proud faces not normally portrayed with nuance by the media—the infirm, the addict, the obese, the impoverished—none of whom were shown with shame or lack. I lingered on a particular portrait of a gender-ambiguous subject—a bored face staring at her reflection in a vending machine, a thin teenage mustache lining unsmiling lips. I was hypnotized by the capacity for both the photograph and the photographed subject to hold several identities at once, rejecting narrow judgments and definitions constrained by the mainstream gaze. What’s more, here was a portrait of a person in a relatable, everyday snapshot—not a composed, manipulated, or impossible ideal.

Emma Craft, Daydreaming in Silver, Jackson, Mississippi, from the exhibition #girlgaze, 2016
Courtesy the artist and the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles

Our weapons in the women’s fight for equal representation and visibility are potent: the pen, the voice, the camera, and our bodies—our presence on the streets. We must declare: I am Woman. Hear Me, See Me, Let Me Be. Our roar must be directed against the patriarchy, the structures of inequality, and the troublesome gaze that objectifies and endangers our bodies. The Instagram account and the #girlgaze exhibition not only demand this of us, but they also testify to the power of images both to inspire and provoke. #girlgaze implores all participants to stand firmly and meet opponents eye to eye. To be loud. To offend acceptable visions of female decency, behavior, beauty, and body image. To march. If photography is a record of light, the work of #girlgaze chronicles the radiance that emanates from women behind the camera and in the frame.

M. Whiteford is a writer based in Los Angeles, a contributor to Artforum and the managing editor of the Art Book Review.

#girlgaze: a frame of mind is on view at the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, through February 26, 2017.

The post Command the Gaze appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Meet the Press

At the Getty, all the news that’s fit to screen.

By Travis Diehl

Donald R. Blumberg, Untitled, from the series Television Political Mosaics, 1968–69
Courtesy Donald R. and Grace Blumberg

 

Those seeking to unplug from the ongoing spectacle of Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments may find a grim kind of solace at the Getty Center’s exhibition Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media, where an incisive array of photography and video reminds that the Republican administrations of yesteryear were no picnic either. To wit, one of the Television Political Mosaics (1968–9) by Donald R. Blumberg, like televisions splayed out on a contact sheet, includes row after row of vintage talking heads from the vetting of Richard Nixon’s own unlovable cronies. Others in the series superimpose a faltering transmission of then-candidate Nixon’s profile into a black and gray miasma. Further Zen might come from Blumberg’s Television Abstractions (1968–9), a picture of a grid of sixteen TVs, all tuned to static. The white noise has never been worse, yet this exhibition offers critical insight for those who would turn today’s cameras on today’s screens.

Catherine Opie, Debate, from the series Close to Home, 2004
© the artist and courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

The grid—a format employed by half the artists here—is one way to wield the still photo against the moving image. Several works by Masao Mochizuki, for instance, compile dozens of thumbnails shot off television into single prints, from a story about quintuplets to a program on warplanes. The works effectively pause the media barrage, and set TV up for the kind of aesthetic scrutiny to which a photograph is more vulnerable. So too does the shock of the single drama tend to dissipate into deeper, disturbing patterns. In Alfredo Jaar’s Searching for Africa in LIFE (1996), a grid surveying the popular magazine reveals that in sixty years only five covers depict the continent. Jaar’s Untitled (Newsweek) (1995) is more damning. A cover lineup from 1994 comprises a timeline of the Rwandan Genocide; months passed before the magazine gave those mass murders a cover story—during which time O.J. Simpson had three.

Martha Rosler, First Lady (Pat Nixon), from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, ca. 1967–72
© and courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY

In concise but caustic subversions, the artists here zoom in, redact, and collage the supposed authority of the print photograph. Martha Rosler’s well-known series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967–72), in which scenes from Vietnam haunt fashion shots of well-appointed American bedrooms and kitchens, is here twenty strong. Sarah Charlesworth, in April 20, 1978 (1978), redacted all but the mastheads and photographs on the front pages of national dailies, leaving the prioritizations of their editors as bare as, on the London Times, a lone paratrooper dropping into a blank page. Two decades later, Ron Jude reshot the lo-fi, largely reader-submitted photos of the Idaho Alpine Star, clipping hazy mementos from events of brief, forgotten importance.

Robert Heinecken, TV Newswomen (Faith Daniels and Barbara Walters), 1986
© The Robert Heinecken Trust

Uniquely attuned to media’s aesthetic sleights of hand, other artists perform the work of specialists or consultants. Robert Heinecken finds a typology of newscaster emotion in T.V. Newswomen Corresponding (Faith and Barbara) (1986). His series A Case Study in Finding an Appropriate TV Newswoman (1984) couches a serious analysis of news media in what he calls a “docudrama,” fictionally framed as a commission for CBS, through which superimposed images of male and female morning show anchors become the target of the artist’s satirical physiognomy. One gets the sense that the networks actually do operate on a rubric of superficial qualities thought to convey sexuality and authority. As Heinecken observes, the men appear more often backed by world maps, the women by flowers.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, War Primer 2, Plate 10: President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton along with members of the national security team, as they receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House May 1, 2011, 2011
© and courtesy the artists and Lisson Gallery

The double-entendre of this exhibition’s title betrays its optimism, as if reiterating how reiterative these crises are might break the cycle’s hold. On the other hand, Breaking News might only update a pornographic resignation to media’s horror show. The most graphic images on view are also the most recent. Rosler reprised her Bringing the War Home in the mid-2000s, as America swapped its jungle fatigues for desert. In Broomberg & Chanarin’s War Primer 2 (2011), the pair pasted photographs from America’s antiterror exploits into copies of Bertolt Brecht’s 1955 War Primer, a bitter reprise of WW II-era press photos captioned with four-line epigrams. The sharp verticals of the burning World Trade Center rise out of a ruined German city; the bright red corpse of an Iraqi, hovered over by a US soldier’s camouflaged camera, blocks the blindfolded one of a Frenchman. Under this jarring revision, Brecht’s lilting quatrain feels defeated by having held true for fifty years: “And then to show you all / What came of him, we photographed the scene.” In our war of lens against lens, there’s no end in sight.

Travis Diehl is a writer based in Los Angeles.

Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media is on view at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, through April 30, 2017.

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Shattering the Gold Ceiling

Marilyn Minter brings her brand of glittery feminism to the Brooklyn Museum.

By Maika Pollack

Marilyn Minter, Blue Poles, 2007
Courtesy the artist, the Brooklyn Museum, and Salon 94, New York

During these dark times, Marilyn Minter’s brand of empowered woman shines bright. Minter not only shared a bill with Madonna in a conversation at the Brooklyn Museum on January 19, the eve of the Presidential inauguration, but the sixty-eight-year-old artist herself has been a visible presence at a number of anti-Trump protests in New York and Washington, D.C., and her work figures prominently in fundraisers for Planned Parenthood. Minter’s retrospective Pretty/Dirty, curated by Bill Arning and Elissa Auther, currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, also kicked off a series of ten exhibitions called A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum. These projects feature women artists from Georgia O’Keeffe to the terrific Beverly Buchanan, whose subtle work is presented in the museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art concurrently with Pretty/Dirty. Together, the Year of Yes feels timely even if so far—a week into the Trump presidency—2017 feels more like the year of “God, no.”

Marilyn Minter, Coral Ridge Towers (Mom Making Up), 1969
Courtesy the artist, the Brooklyn Museum, and Salon 94, New York

Pretty/Dirty opens with Minter’s 1969 series Mom in Mirror. The mom, in Minter’s black-and-white images, an aged woman the artist describes as a “reclusive Southern Belle,” is defined both by her liver spots and perfectly penciled-in eyebrows. In the 1970s, Minter’s first, somewhat tedious paintings show the life of domestic surfaces: close-ups of linoleum, tinfoil, and plywood. By the late 1980s, we are deep into Minter’s Porn Grid (1989), in which the banality of domestic spaces gives way to the canned shock of rasterized blowjobs—some feature three women to one cock. Trying the same application of paint with yet a third subject, Minter finds food: 100 Food Porn (1990) features phallic corncobs, swollen zucchinis, and items evocative of female genitalia (melons, artichoke hearts). Fingers splay a split salmon like a vagina. Minter, in her application of enamel to metal, is an indifferent painter, but her politics deftly take a page from Joan Semmel’s porn-positive feminism. We’ve recently seen other shows that celebrate women depicting sexually explicit material, in particular, Coming to Power, at Macaronne, in which Minter’s early work also appeared.

Marilyn Minter, Big Girls, 1986
Courtesy the artist, the Brooklyn Museum, and Salon 94, New York

At this point, the work in Pretty/Dirty suddenly shifts as we jump a decade forward and find large, photorealistic enamel-on-metal paintings—the Minters we often see at art fairs today. At first they seem to focus on the “flaws” that are edited out of commercial images of women: stubbly armpit hair, or the pink impression sock elastic leaves on white skin. In Blue Poles (2007), a single zit sits between two eyes, dappled with blue glitter. Titled after the iconic Jackson Pollock painting, the work is pretty and carries a low-wattage critique of beauty norms. But soon they lose this grain of commentary: Pop Rocks (2009) is just a woman’s mouth close-up, orgiastic, fellatio-like, on the verge of abstraction. In Drizzle (2010), a model appears with gold paint dripping from her mouth. A mixture of vodka and metallic food coloring create the effect of liquid metal, the wall text informs us. What beauty norm might this critique? It’s not so simple anymore. Instead, the interest of the piece lies in the way gold paint drips from a woman’s mouth—it’s seductive, and silky, and while the pleasure is somewhat sensual and pornographic, the content is just paint meeting body.

Marilyn Minter, Wangechi Gold 4, 2009
Courtesy the artist, the Brooklyn Museum, and Salon 94, New York

Another room features Minter’s recent work in fashion, music, and advertising. A concert backdrop created for Madonna, Green Pink Caviar (2009), features women’s lipsticked mouths that that look like Bukkake anemonies, sucking and spitting up various colorful and slimy substances. The series Plush (2014), commissioned by Playboy, celebrates public hair and the nailpolished female hands that caress it. In an adjacent chamber, a video titled Smash (2014) shows a well-heeled woman’s foot breaking a glass wall. The message is clear—as clear as Hillary Clinton hiring the Javits Center with its glass ceiling for her never-consummated victory party in New York.

Marilyn Minter, still from Smash, 2014
Courtesy the artist, the Brooklyn Museum, and Salon 94, New York

I remain uneasy about Minter’s signature work. Sure, she is riffing on Baudelaire’s equation of painting with makeup; at best, it’s decadent and rich, smeary and brushy stuff, with technique that might suggest, to some, a feminist Gerhard Richter. Yet Minter’s project also feels limited. Women are all sexy silver body glitter, goo-sucking lips, and alligator eyes. I like that Minter got “hers,” in the sense of commercial and even critical success, and I respect her political commitment: she doesn’t have to be a great artist to be a good feminist. But her images, at least in this later phase of her career, appear too market-ready, and their large scale reads as expensive, deluxe, and ultimately inoffensive.

Marilyn Minter, Glazed, 2006
Courtesy the artist, the Brooklyn Museum, and Salon 94, New York

Minter seats her viewer squarely in a quintessentially male position of power and erotic surveillance—what Laura Mulvey might have called “the male gaze.” Her relationship to Surrealist photography or historical experimental work is shallow, while its relationship to corporate tie-in culture and art-fair capitalism is profound. I find myself wondering if her empowered woman is too easy to assimilate with the often-violent visual pleasure of patriarchal visual culture and winner-take-all capitalism. Meanwhile, Minter’s earliest work is too dull to spark much interest. Pretty/Dirty is an evolutionary step in thinking about how to make art by women a serious and central part of museum culture. A Year of Yes is doing that subtle work, but the bold, ostentatiously successful, “one-of-the-boys” feminism of Minter’s work provides just one model.

Maika Pollack is an art historian teaching at Sarah Lawrence College.

Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty is on view through April 2, 2017 at the Brooklyn Museum.

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Picturing Dissent: 50 Years of Protest Photographs

The photograph has long been instrumental to the act of protest. Though photographs have always played a defining role in our collective memory, they have never been more immediate or reproducible. Advancements in technology have given rise to new avenues for self-documentation and citizen journalism, while social media has allowed us to bear witness in real-time. Just as the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989 are widely remembered in relation to Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin’s iconic “Tank Man” photograph, the viral Facebook Live videos showing law enforcement deploying water cannons on a crowd of activists throw the spotlight on recent protests at Standing Rock.

In anticipation of the Women’s March on Washington on January 21, 2017, Aperture’s editors highlight images of protest that are a testament to the ever-evolving visual language of dissent.

Sharon Hayes, In the Near Future, Vienna (detail), 2006. Multiple-slide projection installation
Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin

Sharon Hayes

“Sharon Hayes draws on the tradition of women performing actions in public spaces as a challenge to gender norms, male power, and the patriarchal monopoly on authorship. For Hayes’s series In the Near Future (2009), she had herself photographed in public spaces carrying placards from historical protests, such as one that reads “I AM A MAN,” from the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, and another demanding “Ratify E.R.A. NOW!,” from the failed struggle to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 1970s. Hayes’s photographs, depicting herself as a lone picketer protester adopting a pastiche of historical issues, bring up discomfiting issues of artistic agency and political efficacy, as the collective and performative nature of protest becomes a gesture of remembrance.” —Eva Díaz

Eva Díaz is Associate Professor, History of Art and Design, at the Pratt Institute. Sharon Hayes’s work originally appeared in Aperture 225, “On Feminism.”

Radcliffe Roye, Colours, 2014
Courtesy the artist

Radcliffe Roye

“Roye is especially concerned with what it means to belong. To that end, injustice and inequality are at the center of his focus . . . He has walked in rhythm with foot traffic all over the United States in the past few years, hoping to show ‘the faces of those whose lives are spent living in protest.’ The resulting series, When Living Is a Protest, reminds us that to walk is to bear witness, for we are pilgrims, all.” —Garnette Cadogan

Garnette Cadogan is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Radcliffe Roye’s photograph originally appeared in Aperture 223, “Vision & Justice.”

Mehmet Kacmaz, Protesters holding a sign calling for the resignation of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during protests in Gezi Park, Istanbul, June 2, 2013
© the artist/NAR and courtesy Redux Pictures

Mehmet Kacmaz

“When a small group of protesters occupying Gezi Park in Istanbul, opposed to its proposed transformation into a shopping mall, were teargassed by the police, Turks were outraged both by the disproportionate use of force and by CNN Türk’s failure to report on the protests. Referencing CNN Türk’s decision to air a documentary about Antarctic penguins instead of the protests, a gas-mask-wearing penguin became an unofficial protest mascot, and Turkish activists adopted a disciplined process of self-documentation, producing photos and videos that demonstrated the peaceful nature of the protests and the disproportionate responses of the police and the military.” —Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman directs the Center for Civic Media at MIT and is a principal research scientist at MIT’s Media Lab. Mehmet Kacmaz’s photograph originally appeared in Aperture 214, “Documentary Expanded.”

Laura Hanna, Untitled (Tijuana), 2007
Courtesy Hanna Archive

Laura Hanna

“I was filming on-site in Tijuana when I took this picture. One man stares ahead while the other reads a gossip magazine, possibly avoiding my gaze. Resting under their makeshift shelter, they tell me that many here are orphans.

“Outside the frame: a man squats along the hillside, his face buried in a scavenged Marie Callender’s fettuccini alfredo; a Caterpillar tractor buries waste from a massive mountain; people scurry at its base, collecting copper pulled from wire (it’s in high demand); seagulls swarm. Some here describe journeys made to the United States to work construction. They slept in canyons outside construction sites. When their jobs were done, they were deported.

“A friend once described his hometown of Tijuana as a future city. Now, I wonder how many more people find themselves here, on the front line.”—Laura Hanna

Laura Hanna is a filmmaker, media activist, and political organizer. Her photograph originally appeared in Aperture 224, “Sounds.”

Jeff Lautenberger, Occupy demonstrator in Tulsa, Oklahoma, October 15, 2011
© the artist/AP Photo and courtesy The Tulsa World

Jeff Lautenberger

“When revolution is understood not as a will to seize or preserve power but instead as a reorganization of the body politic, revolution emerges as a language that is constantly shaped by those who use it, as we have seen in the last decade around the globe . . . The future of journalism cannot be limited to journalism as a profession but to our capacity to imagine new forms that will help transcend the genealogy of colonies, mandates, and sovereign states and their knowledge regimes. This is what makes our historical moment so exciting. All around the globe, people are inventing—and sharing with others—different forms of colaboring, cothinking, comapping.” —Ariella Azoulay

Ariella Azoulay is the author of Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (2012). Jeff Lautenberger’s photograph originally appeared in Aperture 214, “Documentary Expanded.”

Devin Allen, Daughter of Michael A. Wood, Jr., retired Baltimore police officer who spoke out against corruption and excessive force in the Baltimore Police Department, Million Man March, Washington, D.C., October 10, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Devin Allen

“From scenes of a community’s joy to scenes of anger and protest, Allen’s work expresses a profound cultural shift toward grassroots, proletarian ideals that in recent years have influenced millennials across the country. Resonating with a long history of social justice photojournalism, his images reveal influences of the Black Lives Matter ideology, both as a political program and as an ethos. In Allen’s more confrontational photographs, the sense of injustice and indignation conveyed by the people who populate his images is palpable. These are people who understand that through action and mobilization it is possible to create change.” —Aaron Bryant

Aaron Bryant is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Photography at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution. Devin Allen’s photograph originally appeared in Aperture 223, “Vision & Justice.”

Mídia Ninja, Barricade protesting the FIFA Confederations Cup Brazil, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, from the project Ruas de Junho (June Streets), 2013
Courtesy the artist

Mídia Ninja

“During the 2013 protests, Mídia Ninja became one of the most instrumental collectives to provide on-the-scene coverage: Several videos posted on Twitcast reached as many as one hundred thousand viewers. With a huge portfolio documenting conflict situations, they were able to confront major news providers whose coverage had been critical of the protests, forcing some to adjust their content and provide a more nuanced portrayal that included not only scenes of vandalism on the part of protesters but also scenes of police violence.” —Ronaldo Entler

Ronaldo Entler, a researcher and photography critic, is a professor at the School of Communication of Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP), in São Paulo. Mídia Ninja’s photograph originally appeared in Aperture 215, “São Paulo.”

Arty Pomerantz, Bruce Dancis with Abbie Hoffman after a stunt at the New York Stock Exchange, 1967
© the artist and courtesy the New York Post

Arty Pomerantz

“At first, we only had the oral history to inspire us. In 1989, I was organizing some ACT UP activists to disrupt trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to protest the high price of AZT, the first drug approved to treat AIDS. We knew that activists had done this only once before, in 1967. Abbie Hoffman had led some Yippies in a counterculture prank, throwing dollar bills from the visitors’ gallery onto the trading floor below. We drowned out the opening bell with marine foghorns and threw fake hundred-dollar bills that read “FUCK YOUR PROFITEERING” as our homage to Hoffman. Finding this photograph online years later completed the circle. I know that joy well when all of your planning pays off and your activism succeeds. I too smiled as I was led out of the exchange, and I pumped my fists as the price of AZT was lowered three days later.” —Peter Staley

Peter Staley is a long-term AIDS and gay rights activist, first as a member of ACT UP New York, then as the founding director of Treatment Action Group (TAG). Arty Pomerantz’s photograph originally appeared in Aperture 224, “Sounds.”

Goshka Macuga, Preparatory Notes, 2014. Installation view at the New Museum, New York, 2016
Photograph by Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio © the artist and courtesy the New Museum

Goshka Macuga

“Rights for women to be treated as equal citizens have been won over many centuries, a process requiring countless protests and demands for recognition, and in struggles marred by frustration and defeat. Yet equality has not been accomplished. Parity in wages and income between men and women has not been attained, and sexism and violence against women are still prevalent. Hell, studies show that women are still doing more housework than men.”—Eva Díaz

Eva Díaz is Associate Professor, History of Art and Design, at the Pratt Institute. Goshka Macuga’s work originally appeared in Aperture 225, “On Feminism.”

Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, from the series Circulation: Date, Place, Events, 1971
© the artist and courtesy Osiris, Tokyo, and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Takuma Nakahira

“Takuma Nakahira, who got his start in photography and criticism only around 1965, had by the end of that decade already become one of the most influential figures in contemporary culture in Japan. Nakahira’s incisive writing cut apart standing views in literature, film, politics, and especially photography, and he published both articles and photographs at a feverish rate. He wanted a relation between these two activities that could come closer than complementarity—a joint force of action, perhaps . . . Provoke: Provocative Materials for Thought—the short-lived photography journal that Nakahira helped to found, which blazed its trail across the Tokyo cultural scene in those years—took its name from such intertwined desires. Writing and photography should illuminate the world, explosively, and they should set each other ablaze as well.” —Matthew S. Witkovsky

Matthew S. Witkovsky is Sandor Chair of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. Takuma Nakahira’s photograph originally appeared in Aperture 219, “Tokyo.”

Keiny Andrade, Demonstrators block traffic on 23 de Maio Avenue during a protest against raising public transportation fares, São Paulo, June 20, 2013
Courtesy FotoProtestoSP

Keiny Andrade

“One of the more stringent collectives to rise out of the unrest of 2013 is FotoProtestoSP. Its thirty members include several well-established veterans of Brazilian photojournalism, such as Maurício Lima, Marlene Bergamo, Fernando Costa Netto, Keiny Andrade, Ignácio Aronovich, and José Francisco Diório. Their manifesto radiates indignation with the country’s political structure and asserts a desire to explore the critical power of photography beyond private media platforms and art institutions . . . According to Renato Stockler, one of the group’s members, its objective is to occupy the city’s leisure spaces and to remind residents of the power people have when they unite around a common cause.” —Ronaldo Entler

Ronaldo Entler is a professor at the School of Communication of Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP), in São Paulo. Jeff Lautenberger’s photograph originally appeared in Aperture 215, “São Paulo.”

The sun as seen from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, September 17, 2011
Courtesy NASA/SDO and the AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams

Micah White

“In 1922, Alexander Chizhevsky, a maverick Russian scientist, argued that revolutions and social movements are influenced by the eleven-year solar sunspot cycle. He claimed that for the last two thousand years, mass upheavals have tended to occur during periods of peak sunspot activity. Chizhevsky’s heterodox theory of revolution contradicted Marxist historical materialism and landed him in a Stalinist gulag.

“Now fast-forward to September 17, 2011—the first day of Occupy Wall Street. In the very early morning a coronal mass ejection hits earth, triggering spectacular auroras. And while Occupiers establish their Zuccotti Park encampment in Lower Manhattan, the sun is erupting in an abnormally high number of sunspots. Coincidence?” —Micah White

Micah White is the author of The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution (2016) and the cocreator of Occupy Wall Street. This photograph of the sun originally appeared in Aperture 224, “Sounds.”

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Jason Fulford: CHANCE

 

Order from Chaos; Surrealist Games; Psychogeography; Impracticality; In Praise of Idleness; Where Function Ends and Play Begins; Dumpster Diving; Keeping It Weird, Photographer as Editor, Scavenger, Author, Comedian, Critic & Wanderer; Maximum Effort for Minimum Result.

In a rigorous two-day workshop, filled with physical and mental exercises, you and Jason Fulford will explore various ways that CHANCE can improve your life (and possibly your photography).

Jason Fulford is a photographer and cofounder of J&L Books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and a contributing editor to Blind Spot. He is a frequent lecturer at universities, and has led workshops across the United States and in Japan, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain. His monographs include Sunbird (2000), Crushed (2003), Raising Frogs for $$$ (2006), The Mushroom Collector (2010), Hotel Oracle (2013), and Contains: 3 Books (2016). He is coauthor with Tamara Shopsin of the photobook for children This Equals That (Aperture, 2014), and coeditor with Gregory Halpern of The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture, 2014).

        Fulford’s photographs have been described as open metaphors. As an editor and an author, a focus of his work has been on the subject of how meaning is generated through association.

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Participants can expect to:

Experiment with various methods of using chance.

Edit photographs in group and individual exercises.

Discover new perspectives on their own work.

Be tired, and inspired, when it’s all over.

Materials to bring:

25 photographs from your personal work* (from the same body of work if possible)

25 found photographs* (not taken by you)

One object from your house/apartment. The object should be smaller than a football.

Digital camera (smartphone is OK)

Laptop (if possible)

 

 

*Image files will need to be sent to Aperture one week in advance of the workshop. More details regarding file requirements will be sent upon registration. Please contact us at education@aperture.org with questions.

Preparation (requested):

Prepare an introduction of yourself that lasts 3 minutes and 33 seconds.

Preparation (optional):

Rearrange the furniture in your house/apartment.

Listen to some Banda polyphonic music.

Watch the film Slacker by Richard Linklater.

See the Francis Picabia show at MoMA (up until March 19).

Tuition:

Tuition for this two-day workshop is $500 and includes lunch and light refreshments for both days.

Currently enrolled students and Aperture Members at the $250 level and above receive a 10% discount on workshop tuition. Please contact education@aperture.org for a discount code. Students will need to provide proper documentation of enrollment.

 

 

REGISTER HERE

 

 

Registration ends on Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

 

 

GENERAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Please refer to all information provided regarding individual workshop details and requirements. Registration in any workshop will constitute your agreement to the terms and conditions outlined.

Aperture workshops are intended for adults 18 years or older.

If the workshop includes lunch, attendees are asked to notify Aperture at the time of registration regarding any special dietary requirements. Please contact us at education@aperture.org.

If participants choose to purchase Aperture publications during the workshop they will receive a 20% discount. Aperture Members of all levels will receive a 30% discount.

 

RELEASE AND WAIVER OF LIABILITY

Aperture reserves the right to take photographs or videos during the operation of any educational course or part thereof, and to use the resulting photographs and videos for promotional purposes.

        By booking a workshop with Aperture Foundation, participants agree to allow their likenesses to be used for promotional purposes and in media; participants who prefer that their likenesses not be used are asked to identify themselves to Aperture staff.

 

REFUND AND CANCELLATION

Aperture workshops must be paid for in advance by credit card, cash, or debit card. All fees are non-refundable if you should choose to withdraw from a workshop less than one month prior to its start date, unless we are able to fill your seat. In the event of a medical emergency, please provide a physician’s note stating the nature of the emergency, and Aperture will issue you a credit that can be applied to future workshops. Aperture reserves the right to cancel any workshop up to one week prior to the start date, in which case a full refund will be issued. A minimum of eight students is required to run a workshop.

 

LOST, STOLEN, OR DAMAGED EQUIPMENT, BOOKS, PRINTS, ETC.

Please act responsibly when using any equipment provided by Aperture or when in the presence of books, prints etc. belonging to other participants or the instructor(s). We recommend that refreshments be kept at a safe distance from all such objects.

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The Renegade Video Artist

In the late 1970s, Mary Lucier pointed her camera at the sun and broke the rules of a new medium.

By Kris Paulsen

Mary Lucier, Equinox, 1979
Courtesy the artist

When video emerged as an artistic medium in the mid-1960s it was, as Mary Lucier puts it, a “renegade” form: low-resolution, ephemeral, woefully connected to the debased cultural products of television, and, for some, hopelessly “narcissistic” in form and content. It was a medium that had no past and seemed to have no rules, except one: never point the camera at the sun. Doing so would permanently burn and scar the vidicon tube inside. Lucier, who has worked across media including film, photography, performance, and choreography in her nearly fifty-year career, made her mark by breaking this rule. Her early video installations, such as Fire Writing (1975), Dawn Burn (1975), and Equinox (1979), which was just recently restored and exhibited at the Columbus Museum of Art, used the medium against itself, overwriting real-time images with indelible accretions of the past.

Kris Paulsen: I want to focus our conversation on Equinox (1979), a seven-channel video installation that was recently restored for the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) exhibition, The Sun Placed in the Abyss. Before we get there, I want to ask how you got into video in the late 1960s, when it was still a very new medium?

Mary Lucier: I got into video primarily because I was doing performances at the time, in the mid-’60s into the ’70s. I was working with my first husband, the composer Alvin Lucier, and I was involved with the time-based work that was happening at that time in dance and in music, and I thought it was really the most advanced art of its time. I got involved in performance art and I was very close to Shigeko Kubota and Nam June Paik. At some point through their influence, I decided I wanted to use video, so I borrowed a camera and started shooting video and that became a whole thing in itself—not just a part of the performance. So eventually that moved into installation. I had studied sculpture as a college student, and video installation struck me as a form of sculpture. I thought, this is three-dimensional, this is how I want to work.

Mary Lucier, Dawn Burn, 1975. Installation view at the Columbus Museum of Art, 2016 
Courtesy the artist, the Columbus Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Paulsen: Equinox is on display for the first time since it was commissioned in 1979 for the CUNY Graduate Center. I want to ask about the impulse behind this work and others you made in the 1970s, particularly Dawn Burn. In these works, you break the number one rule of analog video making: you point the camera directly at the sun. Doing so burns a permanent black spot into the vidicon tube. Everything you record from there on out is marked in that same way. In Equinox, you point the same camera at the sunrise for seven days straight. Each day is on a different monitor and shows the day-by-day accretion of tube burns in a series of arc across the frame. What inspired you to break that rule?

Lucier: Well, I have to say the first impulse was probably just to break that rule. In the early 1970s, video itself was still a new medium, and a medium that in many ways was breaking rules with conventional film and other kinds of visual art making. It was not universally liked as a medium. It was renegade and its quality did not match film, even 8mm, of the time. And yet it was very expensive. It had this roguish quality, as if we were doing something that was a little bit elicit. So, since I was already breaking the rules by using video, I then decided I wanted to break its very first rule and see what would happen.

Paulsen: Was the result what you expected?

Lucier: I did tests before I actually made a complete work. So, I did know what was going to happen, more or less, and how the sun was going to scar the internal tube of the camera. That’s the other thing I was certainly interested in—the scarring process and how, if the camera is the substitute for the eye, you’re actually, in a sense, scarring the retina of the camera.

Mary Lucier, Dawn Burn, 1975
Courtesy the artist, the Columbus Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Paulsen: That’s one of the things that I think is so visually, metaphorically, and poetically powerful about Equinox and Dawn Burn. It makes the video image material, and makes the camera into an individual, particular thing. It’s not a disembodied eye but an embodied, unique individual machine, and that camera tube is marked physically by that vision. There’s an incredible double-sidedness or reciprocity in the image: You see the eye that is seeing at the same time as you see the image itself.

Lucier: And obviously the tube retains what I call “the memory of that moment,” and anything else that you look at through that camera with that tube is going to have the markings of that memory, of that moment.

Later, I reused some of the damaged tubes that I burned with lasers in a series of pieces called Fire Writing, where I wrote in the air, so to speak, with laser beams aimed at the camera. I tried to replicate text that was being spoken in the room. The burn marks of the lasers are much more intense—they’re very white. So you have this build up of white calligraphy on the tube that becomes quite extraordinary after a while. I later exhibited them as drawings.

Paulsen: And after a while of recording the light writing with the laser in the room, does the image of the room become completely obscured by the remnants of the laser burn on the tube?

Lucier: It can and the longer it goes on, the more the tube is obscured. But one of the things I did like about it is that even near the very end of that “performance” you can still see faces; you see them through the veil of this calligraphy. I have always liked that.

Mary Lucier, Fire Writing, 1978. Performance at The Kitchen, New York
Courtesy the artist and the Columbus Museum of Art

Paulsen: That’s fascinating, since video’s essential properties, at least as they were being discussed around that time in the 1970s, were connected to the idea of an unrelenting present. But you have this way of retaining a kind of past in live image, whether it’s of this physical, embodied memory or these more literal inscriptions within the image. The image becomes thick with time rather than just delivering the real-time image of the present.

Lucier: That’s absolutely true. It actually imprints the moment. It also compresses whatever is happening. Particularly, in the writing pieces, it compresses the entire text. By the time the piece is finished, all the text theoretically is there on the screen even though you can’t read it but theoretically, you could unravel it and read it somehow. That was one of my ideas about it. When I displayed them as other installations, I also left the cap off the camera so that you can see—

Paulsen: Yourself?

Lucier: Your own face through the burn markings.

Paulsen: The present in the background is being renewed but the past is always in the foreground clouding that vision.

Lucier: You’re right: the markings are always in the foreground and then the real-time image becomes kind of background.

Paulsen: In that way, it erases that idea of transparency or immateriality that video images seem to have. We assume that they give us a direct view of the world unfolding in front of the lens. But this camera’s previous life is always going to be present and affect it, rather than the image being constantly renewed again or refreshed.

Lucier: Exactly.

Mary Lucier, Fire Writing, 1978
Courtesy the artist and the Columbus Museum of Art

Paulsen: When I was watching you install Equinox at the CMA, you were “tuning” the colors across the seven monitors. It made me wonder about your use of color in Equinox. A sunrise is, of course, a colorful thing, but color seems to be a definite choice, especially since Dawn Burn and Paris Dawn Burn were black and white.

Lucier: Well, everything was moving toward color when I started making video in the very early ’70s. Somebody, maybe Nam June Paik, brought back the first color camera from Japan and everybody kind of flipped and started experimenting with color. The thing about black and white when I made Dawn Burn was that the black markings were so heavy.

Paulsen: Yeah, they are almost sooty.

Lucier: You could look at it as though it was charcoal drawing, let’s say, and when you look at the whole image of the river and the boats and the sun marks on the tube, they’re like black-and-white drawings to me. The marking was very important to me in black and white and how the markings revealed this shape of the earth moving around the sun. It has a very specific shape. It starts as a smallish thing and seems to get larger as it rises in the sky.

Color became the central thing about Equinox. I realized that this summer when I was transferring it from analog to digital and just staring at these images on the screen and thinking, my god—it’s all about color!

Mary Lucier, Equinox, 1979
Courtesy the artist

Paulsen: You bring up transferring and restoring the work this summer. What was the experience of seeing this work again after almost forty years?

Lucier: It was kind of thrilling. I got very wrapped up in making the transition into digital. I had never thought the color aspect of it as being as critical as it is. When you’re transferring from analog to digital qualities change, and I certainly think this was one of the qualities. The color really popped up in the transition and I was just blown away by how much I enjoyed it.

Paulsen: I wonder if that pleasure was a product of digital transfer or the distance that you’ve had from it. Maybe you were also surprised by the particular look of analog color after it’s been gone from our daily lives for so long? We don’t see those kinds of colors anymore. It moves across the screen in such a fluid way. For Equinox, this was the critical moment for transferring a nearly forty-year-old videotape, which is nearing the end of its lifespan. This is the case for all early video works. I wonder what you are doing to preserve your work?

Lucier: Preservation of video is a major issue now. Even if you successfully transfer something to a digital format and you have it as a digital file, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to play that forever, either. It’s essential to get it all down on digital in some format that I can live with, and then that’ll be its copying format for the future, not the original tape.

And that’s scary because what’s to guarantee that this file will play in even ten years? What’s to guarantee that there’ll be a device that will play it, that you’ll be able to insert it into a computer that accepts that format? Will you always be able to do that?

Mary Lucier, Paris Dawn Burn, 1977
Courtesy the artist and the Columbus Museum of Art

Paulsen: Do you ever think about a kind of “living will” for your works, indicating what you would want or intend for them especially once collected? Would you be willing, for example, to allow them to be shown on flat monitors? Have you thought about contingency plans if these old style analog monitors are no longer in production?

Lucier: Yes, I think there is an advantage of there being a living artist attached to these works as museums collect them. SFMOMA did a huge interview with me, asking how I saw the future of this work, what I wanted Dawn Burn to be. I think that’s very important. If you can catch the artist while they’re still alive and get their take on what they want for the future and what they would allow. You’ve got to be able to think about ways that you can transform the work as the technology transforms. So, I am indeed thinking about that.

Paulsen: This is a particularly important question for works like Equinox and Dawn Burn, which are on analog technology but are also about analog technology.

Lucier: Right, and I really wanted this piece to be in its more or less original context. This was something I talked about with Greg Jones from the CMA: what is the best compromise we can strike between the way it looked originally and the way it could look now and still be authentic? I could never do anything to change Dawn Burn. It exists as is. It is a programed piece. It is fixed. It’s a conceptual piece that cannot change whereas I don’t feel that way about Equinox. I feel that as long as I keep it essentially the same, I could change many interior things. I feel I have the liberty to change them in certain ways if I wished.

Paulsen: So, do you?

Lucier: Embellishments—not to the change the essential concept of it, and maybe not to change the original materials, but to change certain aspects of presentation.

Mary Lucier, Paris Dawn Burn, 1977
Courtesy the artist and the Columbus Museum of Art

Paulsen: Do you think that the work that you’ve had to do around preservation has prompted some of these re-imaginings?

Lucier: It does make you look back at things, and it does open you to the question. I keep thinking of Bruce Nauman, because his pieces keep being redone, and he made a comment about a recent piece he did—a new piece—he hadn’t made a new piece in two years. It’s a version of his contrapposto walk. He said there were things he felt he needed to redo and I applaud that because if there’s anybody who you would think wouldn’t change a thing, it’s Bruce Nauman. It was process art. So I love the idea that he would take the liberty to go back to an older idea and rework it in some way, and I think that’s a great liberty now for many of us because we’ve had some great ideas in the past and they haven’t been used up.

Paulsen: Hearing you talk about Equinox just a little while ago was really wonderful. I loved your surprise realization that the color was different than you had remembered and that it was more important. Its effect on you was different. Encountering a work from the past can give it a new narrative, even to you.

Lucier: Absolutely. That’s a great way to put it.

Paulsen: It’s like a long feedback loop.

Lucier: It’s a loop and you’re allowed to make changes in that loop as it comes around again. There are certain scores written on paper that would do the same thing. Lamont Young, Yoko Ono, John Cage, Robert Ashley, all the composers I knew, wrote scores that weren’t music notes on a staff but were conceptual ideas. I think some of the best scores were like that and I still very much admire that way of working and see the permissiveness to go back into it and to make some changes.

Paulsen: Right, scores are meant to be interpreted—

Lucier: Interpreted!

Paulsen: And played again.

Lucier: Exactly. Who knows, I might change my mind someday. I could imagine completely redoing Dawn Burn. Let’s say, reshooting it from beginning to end. That would be permissible, because in a sense, it’s a score, too.

Mary Lucier, filming site of Paris Dawn Burn, 1977
Courtesy the artist and the Columbus Museum of Art

Paulsen: And it seems like that score gave birth to Paris Dawn Burn and to Equinox, so it is already in a series of interpretations and reopenings.

Lucier: You’re right—you’re absolutely right about that. Probably if I had more opportunities, I could continue doing various iterations of that overall idea. Already Paris Dawn Burn is different from Dawn Burn. Dawn Burn has no sound. Paris Dawn Burn has a wonderful soundtrack with the morning bells of Paris.

Paulsen: That’s the thing about sunrise: a trip around the sun or a rotation around our axis, it’s iterative everyday. It happens again each day but each day it’s different.

Lucier: Each day is different—exactly.

Kris Paulsen is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Film Studies Program at The Ohio State University. Her first book, Here/There: Telepresence, Touch and Art at the Interface, will be published by MIT Press in February 2017.

The Sun Place in the Abyss was on view at the Columbus Museum of Art from October 7, 2016 to January 8, 2017.

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