Aperture's Blog, page 129

South Africa in Black and White

In David Goldblatt’s photographs from apartheid to the present, a striking account of South African life.

By Ian Bourland

David Goldblatt, AM/PM. Travelers from KwaNdebele buying their weekly season tickets at the PUTCO depot in Pretoria, 1983
© the artist and courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

David Goldblatt is relentless. A titan among photographers who chronicled South Africa during and after the Apartheid years, Goldblatt began his career in the 1960s by shooting for newsmagazines and the Anglo American mining company. He later gravitated toward landscape and the built environment, from the farmlands, to the Johannesburg suburbs, to prim Cape Dutch homes. Goldblatt’s trenchant account of 1970s-era, middle-class white privilege in the 1982 book In Boksburg is a sobering counterpoint to the politically inflected photojournalism of the time, in which incendiary racial conflicts portrayed South Africa in a state of endless crisis. Now in his eighties, Goldblatt—whose many photobooks, including In Boksburg, are being lavishly republished by Steidl—has found a smooth trajectory into the contemporary art market through international group and solo exhibitions.

David Goldblatt, Blitz Maaneveld at the Terrace, Woodstock, Cape Town, where he murdered a man with whom he had been gambling, 7 October 2008
© the artist and courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

For his debut at Pace/MacGill, Goldblatt juxtaposes two series created thirty years apart. One, The Transported of KwaNdebele: A South African Odyssey (1983–84) is vintage Goldblatt, made under the cover of night amid cramped interiors and gloomy depots. The Transported offers a grainy account of coach buses taking workers to the Marabastad terminal in Pretoria and back to the “Bantustans”—reserved “homelands” for blacks—over two hours away. The other, Ex-Offenders at the Scene of the Crime (2008–15) depicts former criminals and features detailed personal narratives, based on Goldblatt’s interviews, installed on placards jutting from the wall.

David Goldblatt, 3:15 a.m. Going to work: The Wolwekraal–Marabastad bus is licensed to carry 62 sitting and 29 standing passengers, 1983
© the artist and courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Goldblatt has said that he is not an artist but, then, as he reminds the viewer here, he’s not exactly a journalist either. As a result, he notes, his “allegiance is to no one other than my subjects and myself.” Even so, he came to international recognition by capturing the effects of life under a repressive state and attended to such images with lengthy, detailed captions. In The Transported, the meandering buses, crowded with men exhausted from the day’s work or their journey from the night before, were integral to a state that kept whites separate from everyone else but relied, nonetheless, on the cheap labor of black and other, mixed-race populations.

David Goldblatt, 9:00 p.m. Going home: Marabastad-Waterval bus: For most of the people in this bus the cycle will start again tomorrow at between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m., 1983
© the artist and courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Goldblatt represents this complexity with precision and economy in modest, 10-by-16-inch prints, as in a photograph titled 9:00 pm. Going home: Marabastad-Waterval bus: For most of the people in this bus the cycle will start again tomorrow between 2:00 and 3:00 am (1983). In this now-iconic photograph, soft lighting haloes a congested aisle and recedes into the distance, while a man in the foreground cranes his head back and steals a few moments of rest. The title says it all, with clinical precision; so do captions noting bumpy roads or standing room for twenty-nine riders. As a white photographer, of course, Goldblatt surveyed such scenes with a degree of detachment unavailable to his notable black contemporaries, such as Peter Magubane and Santu Mofokeng. Still, Goldblatt’s images, which are not portraits as such, vividly track overlooked moments in everyday life under a regime that controlled not only a person’s space, but also his or her time.

David Goldblatt, Adellah Snape on Hagley Road, Birmingham where she worked as a prostitute, 13 September 2014
© the artist and courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

A similar investigative logic is at work in Ex-Offenders, but in this more recent work Goldblatt achieves a previously unseen level of poignancy—even rough beauty. These larger prints, tonally dense and rich in detail, show his technical prowess. Dialing in on the sitters’ wary faces, they are also his most startling portraits to date, as in Adellah Snape on the Hagley Road, Birmingham where she worked as a prostitute, 13 September 2014. Snape, a seemingly ordinary woman, is transfixing, as she gazes squarely from the frame. For the series, Goldblatt contacted ex-offenders through prison rehabilitation organizations and paid his subjects 800 South African rand (approximately fifty-eight dollars) for a photograph and an interview at the scenes of their crimes. These banal locations, Darling Street in downtown Cape Town, or the banks of the Thames River—in 2012, he extended the project to England—draw the figures into otherworldly depths of emotion, and remain consistent with Goldblatt’s longtime interest in physical sites of violence and trauma.

David Goldblatt, Eric Allison at the side entrance to the former bank to which he and his friends had secret access for six months. Manchester, 4 May 2015
© the artist and courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

While Goldblatt remains committed to the power of place—the “structure of things” in society—Ex-Offenders suggests an intergenerational dialogue with younger photographers. Goldblatt founded the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg in 1989, and the bracing portraiture of such alumni as Zanele Muholi, Sabelo Mlangeni, and the late Thabiso Sekgala, to name a few, echos Goldblatt’s precise balance between banality and intensity, but commits more fully to portraiture as a means of framing postapartheid South Africa. The calm empathy of Ex-Offenders shows that, even now, Goldblatt’s practice continues to evolve—and to provoke, though images, the resonant questions he asks of his viewers: “Could they be my children or grandchildren? Are they you or me? How did they come to do this? What are their lives?”

Ian Bourland is an assistant professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

David Goldblatt is on view at Pace/MacGill in New York through October 29, 2016. Read more about David Goldblatt in Aperture Issue 220, “The Interview Issue.”

The post South Africa in Black and White appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The 2016 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist

 

Aperture and Paris Photo are pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2016 PhotoBook Awards. This year, the awards have been organized in collaboration with C/O Berlin, a Berlin-based charitable institution and exhibition venue committed to photography and visual media.

The shortlist selection was made by Ann-Christin Bertrand, Curator, C/O Berlin; David Campany, independent curator and writer; Lesley A. Martin, Creative Director, Aperture Foundation and Publisher, The PhotoBook Review; Becky Senf, Chief Curator and Norton Family Curator of Photography, Center for Creative Photography at Woodstock; and Christoph Wiesner, Artistic Director, Paris Photo.

Established in 2013, the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards celebrate the photobook’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography, with three major categories: First PhotoBook, Photography Catalogue of the Year, and PhotoBook of the Year.

Murray Ballard, The Prospect of Immortality (GOST Books), 2016

Dan Boardman and Aspen Mays, Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why? (Houseboat Press and Conveyer Editions), 2016

Andre Bradley, Dark Archives: 1–41 (Image Text Ithaca Press), 2015

Michael Christopher Brown, Libyan Sugar (Twin Palms Publishers), 2016

Cheng Xinhao, The Naming of a River (Jiazazhi Press), 2016

CJ Clarke, Magic Party Place (Kehrer Verlag), 2016

Amy Elkins, Black Is the Day, Black Is the Night
(Self-published), 2016

Adam Golfer, A House Without a Roof (Booklyn), 2016

Curran Hatleberg, Lost Coast (TBW Books), 2016

Katrin Koenning and Sarker Protick, Astres Noirs (Chose Commune), 2016

Quentin Lacombe, Event Horizon (Self-published), 2016

Jack Latham, Sugar Paper Theories (Here Press), 2016

Sara-Lena Maierhofer, Dear Clark,: Portrait of a Con Man, 2016

Sohei Nishino, Tokyo (amana), 2015

Christine Osinski, Summer Days Staten Island (Damiani Editore), 2016

John Radcliffe Studio, Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016 (Self-published), 2016

Dominique Somers, 00A (Art Paper Editions), 2015

Kate Stone and Hannah Schneider, How We End. (Self-Published), 2016

Paul Turounetm, Estamos Buscando A (We’re Looking For) (Self-published), 2016

David Campany, a Handful of Dust: from the Cosmic to the Domestic
(LE BAL and MACK), 2015

Karolina Puchała-Rojek and Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska, Wojciech Zamecznik: Photo-graphics (Fundacja Archeologia Fotografii), 2015

Marc Roig Blesa and Rogier Delfos, Werker 2—A Spoken History of the Young Worker
(Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art and Fotomuseum Winterthur), 2016

Frances Terpak and Michelle Brunnick, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive (Getty Research Institute), 2016

Matthew S. Witkovsky, Carol S. Eliel, and Karole P. B. Vail, Moholy-Nagy: Future Present (Art Institute of Chicago), 2016

Barbara Bosworth and Margot Anne Kelley, The Meadow (Radius Books), 2015

Siân Davey, Looking For Alice (Trolley Books), 2015

Eamonn Doyle, Niall Sweeney, and David Donohoe, End.
(D1), 2016

Mark Holborn and William Eggleston III, The Democratic Forest (Steidl), 2015

Annett Gröschner and Arwed Messmer, Taking Stock of Power: An Other View of the Berlin Wall (Hatje Cantz), 2016

Gregory Halpern, ZZYZX (MACK), 2016

Ron Kurtz and Hank O’Neal, Berenice Abbott: Paris Portraits, 1925–1930 (Steidl and Commerce Graphics), 2016

Peter Puklus, The Epic Love Story of a Warrior (SPBH Editions), 2016

Batia Suter, Parallel Encyclopedia #2 (Roma Publications), 2016

Daniel Traub, Wu Yong Fu, and Zeng Xian Fang, Little North Road: Africa in China (Kehrer Verlag), 2015

First PhotoBook

 

Murray Ballard

The Prospect of Immortality

Publisher: GOST Books, London, 2016

Designed by Stuart Smith

Dan Boardman and Aspen Mays

Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why?

Publisher: Houseboat Press and Conveyer Editions, Jersey City, NJ, 2016

Designed by Elana Schlenker



Yannick Bouillis

I Absolutely Forbade All Public Photographs of Myself

Self-published, Amsterdam, 2016

Designed by Virginie Gauthier and François Girard-Meunier

Andre Bradley

Dark Archives: 1–41

Publisher: Image Text Ithaca Press, Ithaca, NY, 2015

Designed by Elana Schlenker



Michael Christopher Brown

Libyan Sugar

Publisher: Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, NM, 2016

Designed by Michael Christopher Brown and Ramon Pez

Cheng Xinhao

The Naming of a River

Publisher: Jiazazhi Press, Ningbo, China, 2016

Designed by Yanyou Di Yuan and Cheng Xinhao



Photographer: CJ Clarke

Magic Party Place

Publisher: Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, 2016

Designed by Teun van der Heijden, Heijdens Karwei

Amy Elkins

Black Is the Day, Black Is the Night

Self-published, Los Angeles, 2016

Designed by Amy Elkins and Ania Nałęcka/Tapir Book Design

Adam Golfer

A House Without a Roof

Publisher: Booklyn, Brooklyn, 2016

Designed by Ghazaal Vojdani



Curran Hatleberg

Lost Coast

TBW Books, Oakland, CA, 2016

Designed by Paul Schiek and Lester Rosso

John Radcliffe Studio

Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016

Self-published, London, 2016

Designed by Thomas Saxby



Photographers: Katrin Koenning and Sarker Protick

Astres Noirs

Chose Commune, Paris, 2016

Designed by Guillaume Allard and Vanessa Gœtz, Atelier Pentagon

Quentin Lacombe

Event Horizon

Self-published, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2016

Designed by Giliane Cachin

Jack Latham

Sugar Paper Theories

Publisher: Here Press, London, 2016

Designed by Ben Weaver

Sara-Lena Maierhofer

Dear Clark, Portrait of a Con Man

Publisher: Drittel Books, Berlin, 2016

Designed by Sven Lindhorst-Emme

Sohei Nishino

Tokyo

Publisher: amana, Tokyo, 2015

Designed by HIDEKI INABA Design



Christine Osinski

Summer Days Staten Island

Publisher: Damiani Editore, Bologna, Italy, 2016

Designed by Beverly Joel, pulp, ink.



Dominique Somers

00A

Publisher: Art Paper Editions, Ghent, Belgium, 2015

Designed by Studio Jurgen Maelfeyt

Kate Stone and Hannah Schneider

How We End.

Self-published, Brooklyn, 2016

Designed by Margot Laborde

Paul Turounet

Estamos Buscando A (We’re Looking For)

Self-published, San Diego, 2016

Designed by Paul Turounet

 

Photography Catalogue of the Year

David Campany

a Handful of Dust: from the Cosmic to the Domestic

Publisher: LE BAL and MACK, Paris and London, 2015

Designed by Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine and Lewis Chaplin

Karolina Puchała-Rojek and Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska

Wojciech Zamecznik: Photo-graphics

Publisher: Fundacja Archeologia Fotografii, Warsaw, 2015

Designed by Anna Piwowar and Magdalena Piwowar

Marc Roig Blesa and Rogier Delfos

Werker 2—A Spoken History of the Young Worker

Publisher: Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Kraków, Poland, and Winterthur, Switzerland, 2016

Designed by Marc Roig Blesa and Rogier Delfos

Frances Terpak and Michelle Brunnick

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive

Publisher: Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2016

Designed by Catherine Lorenz

Matthew S. Witkovsky, Carol S. Eliel, and Karole P. B. Vail

Moholy-Nagy: Future Present

Publisher: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 2016

Designed by Roy Brooks, Fold Four, Inc.

PhotoBook of the Year

Barbara Bosworth and Margot Anne Kelley

The Meadow

Publisher: Radius Books, Santa Fe, NM, 2015

Designed by David Chickey

Siân Davey

Looking For Alice

Publisher: Trolley Books, London, 2015

Designed by Emma Scott-Child

Eamonn Doyle, Niall Sweeney, and David Donohoe

End.

Publisher: D1, Dublin, 2016

Designed by Pony Ltd. 

Mark Holborn and William Eggleston III

The Democratic Forest

Publisher: Steidl, Göttingen, Germany, 2015

Designed by Gerhard Steidl and Duncan Whyte

Annett Gröschner and Arwed Messmer

Taking Stock of Power: An Other View of the Berlin Wall

Publisher: Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, Germany, 2016

Designed by Carsten Eisfeld

Gregory Halpern

ZZYZX

Publisher: MACK, London, 2016

Designed by Lewis Chaplin

Ron Kurtz and Hank O’Neal

Berenice Abbott: Paris Portraits, 1925–1930

Publisher: Steidl and Commerce Graphics, Göttingen, Germany, and New York, 2016

Designed by Gerhard Steidl and Duncan Whyte

Peter Puklus

The Epic Love Story of a Warrior

Publisher: SPBH Editions, London, 2016

Designed by Marco Campardo, Lorenzo Mason, and Simone Spinazzè, Tankboys

Batia Suter

Parallel Encyclopedia #2

Publisher: Roma Publications, Amsterdam, 2016

Designed by Roger Willems

Daniel Traub, Wu Yong Fu, and Zeng Xian Fang

Little North Road: Africa in China

Publisher: Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, 2015

Designed by Masumi Shibata

The post The 2016 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

5 Photography Exhibitions to See This Fall

From modern dance to postwar portraits, here are this fall’s must-see exhibitions in New York.

By Genevieve Allison

Alex Prager, Orchestra East, Section B, 2016
Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

Alex Prager: La Grande Sortie

Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie Street, New York

Through October 23, 2016

Through a synthesis of photography, film, and performance, Alex Prager’s third major solo show at Lehmann Maupin considers the fraught relationship between artist and audience. At the center is Prager’s eponymous film La Grande Sortie (2015), commissioned by the Paris Opera Ballet, which dramatizes the famed prima ballerina Émilie Cozette’s anxious return to the stage after an “unexplained hiatus.” The audience—populated by veteran performers of the company—is the subject of multiple still images reproduced as archival pigment prints. Like much of the Los Angeles–based artist and filmmaker’s most recognizable work, this exhibition reflects on aspects of staging, crowd dynamics, and the assumption of roles. Focusing on sections of the audience who are indicated by their location, the film portrays what appears to be a cross-section of “types” in the crowd: the young, the elderly, the single, the enthralled, the bored. The cinematic artifice in Prager’s photographs borrows heavily from Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills but is equally informed by William Eggleston’s striking use of color and sense of portent in the ordinary. Known for her lush, almost cartoonish images of Hollywood screen types and richly stylized mise-en-scènes, here Prager casts her subjects in a more tenebrous light, and inhabits a kind of twilight zone between life and affect.

Marco Breuer,  Untitled (C-1807), 2016
© the artist and courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Marco Breuer: Silent Speed

Yossi Milo Gallery, 245 Tenth Avenue, New York

Through October 29, 2016

In this striking body of new work, Breuer presents a series of chromogenic paper prints marked by semi-organic shapes—paroxysms of searing color and tense edges. Pursuing stark articulations of form, the German photographer rips into the surface of light-sensitive paper. Through this process and other abrasive, incisive techniques that have become the hallmark of his practice, areas of highly saturated color emerge. Studies for these works and various pieces of ephemera, many in woodblock ink on black card stock paper, illuminate the highly methodical work process underlying the seemingly spontaneous violence of production. (Breuer’s previous drawing implements have included twelve-gauge shotguns, the guts of electric frying pans, modified turntables, razor blades, and power sanders.) The raw binary structures exposed—between negative and positive space, color and monochrome, field and line—are concerns that painters and sculptors have extensively explored, but rarely modulated so lucidly by artists utilizing photographic techniques. By taking up these formal interests, Breuer strides into a realm dominated by abstract painting but with a photographer’s studio and a sculptor’s sense for subtraction. In a separate but closely related series, Breuer photographed his body mimicking the abstract shapes produced in his cameraless images. These whimsical yet elegant distillations are reproduced in a sixteen-page black-and-white newsprint tabloid accompanying the exhibition.

Sergei Tcherepnin, Games, 2016. 10 double-sided hanging color photographs mounted on sintra, copper, brass, arduino, touch sensor, sound 
Courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York

Sergei Tcherepnin: Games

Murray Guy, 453 West 17th Street, New York

Through October 15, 2016

Vaslav Nijinsky’s Jeux stands as one of the most veiled, prophetic works in the modern canon of ballet. Composed by Claude Debussy and performed only a few times after it was completed in 1913, Jeux (Games) was a high-concept dance of flirtation instigated by a man and two women when a tennis ball is lost during a match. The piece, which drew upon classical reference by replicating poses from antique frescoes and sculptures, connected sports and sexuality, and predicted the link between the clubby, insular language of athletic teams and queer culture. In a new series of ten double-sided color photographs floating down from the ceiling, the performance and installation artist Sergei Tcherepnin substitutes tennis for basketball, and replaces the cast with three male athletes, a return to Nijinsky’s homoerotic intentions. (Jeux was originally meant for three male dancers.) His brightly colored prints are hooked up to sensors that, when touched, trigger a sound component. In an adjoining gallery, several sculptures set up a domestic tableau, which Tcherepnin characterizes as a “private locker room,” but more closely resembles a bedroom. Photographs taken in a gay cruising area on Fire Island known as the Meat Rack hang on the wall. Chairs, a lamp, and a side table all produce recorded sounds when touched. Despite the almost comical, animating effects of these audio-extensions, the images and objects remain resolutely static. As visitors create their own soundscape and impose effects on non-responsive objects, they reenact Najinsky’s probing scenario. There is a lightness, however, in Tcherepnin’s reinterpretation of the art of the chase. The exposed wiring systems, the fumbling ballplayers—all allude to an honest, if accidental, unbuttoning of the rules of attraction.

Zoe Leonard, DP Camp, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Zoe Leonard: In the Wake

Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, New York

Through October 22, 2016

This spare but extensive exhibition sprawls across three floors of Hauser & Wirth’s Upper East Side townhouse gallery and seamlessly knits together a personal history of war and displacement with the rise of popular photography in the twentieth century. Taking a conceptual approach to reproduction, Zoe Leonard displays re-photographed snapshots of her mother’s family, who fled Poland and were stateless for more than a decade after World War II. Though Europe was in disarray in the immediate postwar years, the ever-growing industry of amateur photography nonetheless emerged as a cultural force. The reach of this mass phenomenon is represented by volumes of 1950s-era instructive manuals with titles such as How to Make Good Pictures and Photography Is …, collected in piles throughout the gallery. Together, the personal snapshots and generic books contrast society’s insatiable desire for artistic and technological advancement with the unpredictable realities of lived experience: while thousands of books were published on how to improve one’s photography technique, millions of people were struggling with the conditions of displacement. With her deliberate obfuscation of some reproductions, Leonard appears to question the nature of historical truth as it is represented by photographic documentation; in some of her images we see only the glare or torn edge of an original photograph’s surface. Illustrated history, Leonard implies, whether personal or global, is fragmented, partial, and opaque.

Stephen Berkman, Conjoined Twins, undated. Albumen print from wet plate collodion negative
Courtesy the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery

A New and Mysterious Art: Ancient Photographic Methods in Contemporary Art

Howard Greenberg Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, New York

Through October 29, 2016

“It is now more than fifteen years ago that specimens of a new and mysterious art were first exhibited to our wondering gaze,” the British art critic and historian Lady Elizabeth Eastlake wrote in 1857. Fifteen decades later, the “ancient” photographic methods of the nineteenth century, and the vaporous, alchemical images they render, once again appear “new and mysterious.” Curated by Jerry Spagnoli, a leading practitioner of the daguerreotype, this beguiling exhibition presents works by contemporary artists mining photography’s rich technological and material history. The most notable are those in which artists use heritage techniques to amplify contemporary visions. At just over seven feet long, Vera Lutter’s gelatin silver print of the Venetian skyline, Campo San Moise, Venice, VIII: March 4 (2006), produced using a camera obscura, dominates the room. In an age of endless mutability and reproducibility, her unique negative print suspends the image of a sinking city in a single, eternal moment. The acclaimed Japanese photographer Takashi Arai has been making daguerreotypes since 2010 to create individual records, or “micro-monuments,” of subject matter relating to nuclear history. His piece A Maquette for a Multiple Monument for B29: Backscar (2014), from the series Exposed in a Hundred Suns, shows how an historic practice becomes, by virtue of size, instantly contemporary.

Genevieve Allison is a writer and editor based in New York.

The post 5 Photography Exhibitions to See This Fall appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Bruce Conner’s Rebellion

In film and photography, the subversive artist confronted American life in the Atomic Age.

By Maika Pollack

Bruce Conner, BOMBHEAD, 1989. Collage of found illustration and photocopy
© the artist and courtesy Conner Family Trust and Artists Rights Society, New York

Kansas-born counterculture hero Bruce Conner has been something of an enigmatic figure in New York, despite several recent monographic exhibitions at Paula Cooper Gallery. The Cooper shows tended to focus so closely on Conner’s projects or series—for example, with his Max Ernst-like collages of found illustrations from the 1960s—in a space so small that it was hard to step back and get a view of the breadth, ambition, and interconnectedness of Conner’s radical practice. By contrast, Bruce Conner: It’s All True, organized by Museum of Modern Art and SFMOMA curators Stuart Comer, Laura Hoptman, Rudolf Frieling, and Gary Garrels, is a wide-ranging examination of Conner’s films, photographs, works on paper, and sculptural assemblages that gives exactly the broad view that previous exhibitions lacked.

Bruce Conner, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, 1959–67. 16mm film, 3 minutes, color, sound
© the artist and courtesy Conner Family Trust

In this exhibition, the artist’s prescient commitment to subverting image-culture emerges clearly. From the first work on view, A MOVIE (1958)—a twelve-minute genre-defying collage of appropriated footage rhythmically edited to pop music—Conner can be seen as a forefather of the Pictures Generation. His assemblages of the 1950s and early 1960s are mystical-looking, Merz-like compositions. Dolls’ heads and costume jewelry crop up from dusty-looking surfaces; these feature cut-out photographs from “girlie” magazine pages alongside the postage stamps, nylons, bobby pins, and metal foil. Pictures are brought together in omnivorous disregard for a distinction between “high” and “low” art and life, popular culture and museum culture, just as his great films collage go-go dancers and bra ads. Of course we know Rauschenberg was making “Combines” on the East coast, but Conner’s pieces—PORTRAIT OF JAY DEFEO (1958), PORTRAIT OF ALLEN GINSBERG (1960)—are the West coast contemporaries often obscured in art history.

Installation view of Bruce Conner: It’s All True at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016
Photograph by Martin Seck © The Museum of Modern Art

Among the crowd-pleasers are the life-sized “Angels” Conner made with photographer Edmund Shea. The angels are haunted photograms, full-scale traces of a fleeting presence—the artist himself posed against sheets of photosensitive paper. In SOUND OF ONE HAND ANGEL (1974), a palm pressed into the center of a grey torso creates an opaque white shape that looks like a clenched heart. Adding to the darkly romantic effect is the sound of live crickets, playing here as they did when the works were first exhibited in Berkeley, California in the mid-1970s. Conner also appropriated photographs of people bearing the same name as him: “Bruce Conner for Supervisor,” and “Bruce Conner’s Physical Services,” two such images read. Subverting mechanisms for self-promotion, these images are resonant with the practices of artists of our time, including works by Merlin Carpenter and Josh Smith.

Bruce Conner, BREAKAWAY, 1966. 16mm film, 5 minutes, black-and-white, sound
© the artist and courtesy Conner Family Trust

The most mysterious of Conner’s photographs were originally taken for the magazine Search and Destroy during the late 1970s at the San Francisco punk venue Mabuhay Gardens. These are not composed of pastiched elements, nor are they metaphysically leaning—instead, they are documentary snapshots of musicians and rapt punk audiences. Why would Conner make such “straight” pictures? Maybe the answer lies in style: the punks are themselves chaotic clashes of social signifiers, layering military uniforms, thrift store business suits, biker accessories, and schoolgirl skirts in a glorious collage. Conner’s interest in their style bridges Dada and punk—both favor DIY as ethos and je m’en foutisme for attitude. Later, Conner’s collages of the 1990s consist of pasted-in catheters, gauze, pills, and flyers surrounding the punk photographs. The ’90s work is not his best art or his best photography, but it’s smart and prescient; it reminded me of Seth Price’s tight, hyperlinked essays about culture in which images and object are shorthand for styles and their availability for pastiche.

Bruce Conner, FRANKIE FIX, 1977. Collage of photocopies on board
© the artist and courtesy Conner Family Trust and Artists Rights Society, New York

What was photography to Conner? A way to play with the simultaneous presence and absence of the artist in an artwork, a mechanism fix those ephemeral traces taking the pulse of throwaway culture and open them up to appropriation and collage. Conner’s acquisitive appetite for source material suggests that while photography has long generated new images, an equally important role has been to replicate and reuse extant ones. His images and films transform pop culture because of the availability of styles to get picked up and recycled, and propose that art is located in countercultural gestures of rebellion and resistance to the dominant image culture. Anticipating the East Coast appropriation of the late 1970s and giving some much-needed clues to the media-saturated DIS generation of today, Conner’s work, in this show, is more vital than ever.

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

Bruce Conner: It’s All True is on view through October 2, 2016 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition will travel to SFMOMA, October 29, 2016–January 22, 2017, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, February 21–May 22, 2017.

The post Bruce Conner’s Rebellion appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Dispatches: Cairo

On the rooftops of Egypt’s capital, photographers reclaim the urban landscape.

By Ismail Fayed

Cairo Bats, Act 1: The Roof (Downtown), 2015 © Cairo Bats

Setting: A rooftop that looks like a spacecraft. A glowing staircase with orange light. A repository of clutter. A jungle of satellite dishes. Figures appear. Women dressed in black pose within scenes of their own creation.

They are the Cairo Bats, a collective of female artists who gather to create staged photographs. For Act 1: The Roof (2015), their recent project at Cairo’s Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), the Cairo Bats presented a sequence of performative interventions that tackled the multifaceted potential of urban structures.  It’s not the first time that artists working in Cairo chose the city and its landscape as points of departure. Since the early 2000s, with the rise of independent art spaces such as Townhouse Gallery and CIC, the complex relationships that humans have with the city have been a recurring exhibition theme. (Established in 2004, CIC is one of the few independent platforms in Egypt that is entirely dedicated to image-based practices.)

In a city of twenty-two million people, where up to 40 percent of the population live in some kind of informal housing, residents sometimes face no other choice but to move to the rooftops. As a result, the roof has emerged as one of Cairo’s many urban typologies. Driven by the postindependence euphoria of industrialization and centralization, and coupled with a lack of basic housing and parallel urban planning, the city morphed into organic, urban forms ranging from squatter settlements to repurposed rooftops. And, in that parallel urban landscape, we encounter a unique experience of urban life—an experience central to the work of the Cairo Bats.

Cairo Bats, Act 1: The Roof (Zamalek), 2015 © Cairo Bats

In Act 1: The Roof, some of the collective’s images are purely scenographic, using the existing elements of a space to show its many visual possibilities. The intense contrasts between light and shadow, and multiple degrees of darkness, almost reach a baroque chiaroscuro in one work where spotlights are used to pick out the presence of three figures against the dark rooftop. Other images show more complex interventions and appropriations, as in the juxtaposition of satellite dishes with domestic interiors and household objects.

But the unusual presence of the artists—either in person or in the symbolic gesture of clothing left behind—highlights the absence of women in the urban landscape of Cairo. It’s a radical or even dangerous intervention. The presence of women in public spaces has been one of the most contested social phenomena in Egypt in the past three decades. Since independence in 1952, the increased involvement and visibility of women has been accompanied by a serious backlash from the conservative guardianship of a patriarchal system that dominates the country’s social fabric. The roof, being a liminal space somewhere between private and public, is a critical stage on which to dramatize these tensions, and to consider how and where women should be visible and active.

Cairo Bats, Act 1: The Roof, 2015 © Cairo Bats

The imaginative possibilities of what a rooftop can hold reach further in the group’s images of vegetation. Cairo is not known for its many green spaces, and the dire lack of greenery is part of the ecological makeup of the city’s landscape. With close-up photographs of flowers, shrubs, and leafy greens, the Cairo Bats divert our imagination to the fantastical.

Act 1: The Roof becomes a visual exploration of places fraught with disorder, informality, organic forms, and the marginalized of society. The play on darkness and light, the ambiguous choreography, and the bodies that situate themselves in relationship to the city itself, as well as to its history both past and present, make for an artistic vision that confronts Cairo, investigating possibilities of engagement beyond the limits of chaos.

Ismail Fayed, a writer and editor based in Cairo, is the associate editor of Arab Art in the Twentieth Century: Primary Documents, forthcoming from the Museum of Modern Art in 2017.

To read more, buy Aperture Issue 224, “Sounds,”or subscribe to Aperture  and never miss an issue.

The post Dispatches: Cairo appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

A New Grammar for Blackness

From the “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture, an award-winning poet reflects on the intricate drawings of Toyin Ojih Odutola.

By Claudia Rankine

Toyin Ojih Odutola, I Wish You Would, 2011. Pen ink and acrylic ink on board. © the artist and courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s drawings engage, destroy, highlight, and ultimately privilege a new grammar for blackness. Using black ballpoint, graphite, pastel, and charcoal, Odutola subordinates representation and fact telling to mark making and open-ended image construction. Before a face becomes a face, for example, we take in its shapes, tonality, and lines. Whose particular face we are traveling toward rarely is the point. Whether Prince Charles’s portrait or Odutola’s self-portrait, what matters is not the specific identity of the subject but the cumulative buildup of line that brings weight, complexity, and mobility to her images. It is here—in the line—that Odutola’s genius lives.

In Odutola’s work, the materials and the marks they make become primary. In her hands, portraits hand over their individuality and negate racial specificity. The marks themselves are what become ineffaceable. The dark line and its repetition reimagines terrain—marking and thereby making blackness unfamiliar as it accumulates into flesh to be read as racially significant or not.

Toyin Ojih Odutola, Above all else make it look effortless, 2012. Pen ink, marker, and varnish on paper. © the artist and courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Because Odutola’s own race is indisputable—she was born in Ile-Ife, Nigeria—the question of whether her portraits can be freed from the limited notion that black artists make “black art” seems to be Odutola’s private joke. Blackness, for her, is not only her subject; it is also her question. The space of blackness is itself the subject of her portraits. Historically, in a narrow read, blackness becomes unilaterally a signifier of race. But in Odutola’s work, race is there or it is not there, but its presence is never without our perceptions and projections. Blackness on the level of the line simply fills the terrain of the body with blackness.

Odutola’s portraits explore how to desegregate blackness from a fixed racial position and open it out to all the mythology, missteps, racism, beauty, and life that is held by the term, while still landing it within the free space of bodies. She engages blackness as a field of tonality. Her system of layering tones moves not toward the real but toward an alternative privileging of fluidity within the line. Individuals populate her portraits but remain in conversation with something less knowable than their presumed identity. To settle down her images, to name them, is to render them monolithic.

Toyin Ojih Odutola, My Country Has No Name, 2013. Pen ink and marker on board. © the artist and courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

In all ways Odutola complicates the historical pull, in a white supremacist frame, toward blackness as “simply” a racial demarcation. She renders blackness as topography while offering it life in the form of figures. Her artistic project demands the preeminence of her mark, which, depending on the tool she employs, renders a peripatetic blackness.

A poet, essayist, playwright, and 2016 MacArthur Fellow, Claudia Rankine is the author, most recently, of Citizen: An American Lyric (2014).

Read more from “Vision & Justice” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

The post A New Grammar for Blackness appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Photography is Miraculous

Kaja Silverman revises the history of a deceptive medium.

By Eugenie Shinkle

John Dugdale, Self Portrait with Lilacs for Walt Whitman, 1999. Courtesy Holden Luntz Gallery

Two claims have come to dominate our understanding of photography: the photograph’s link to the past, and its indexical relationship to the external world. Kaja Silverman, professor of contemporary art at the University of Pennsylvania, sets out to challenge these axioms in The Miracle of Analogy (2015), the first in a two-volume history of photography. Unlike much of her of her earlier writing, however, Silverman doesn’t roll out her argument with her usual lucidity—she makes you work for it. She also assumes a fairly good working knowledge of phenomenology.

Julia Margaret Cameron, The Five Foolish Virgins, 1864. Courtesy the Victoria & Albert Museum

Nowhere in the book, for instance, is there a categorical definition of analogy; instead, it’s inferred through a series of historical and contemporary case studies. For many Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, for example, the camera obscura, an enclosed box or room into which images of the outside world were projected through a lens or small aperture, was understood as an analogy for the human eye—a darkened chamber for gathering visual impressions emanated by objects in the world. Early discussions of the camera obscura conceived of the image as something that was received by the subject rather than taken. It was only with the introduction of increasingly precise lenses in the seventeenth century that the camera obscura began to be appreciated as an instrument for capturing and stilling the flow of images rather than a medium for revealing analogies. And alongside this shift from receiving to capturing emerged the corresponding notion that the image did not originate in the world, but in the intentions of the subject who took the photograph.

Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura: The Philadelphia Museum of Art East Entrance in Gallery with a de Chirico Painting, 2005 © the artist and courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York & Zürich

To insist on the photograph as something taken by the subject, Silverman writes, is to think of it as somehow separate from the rest of the world. This implies that the subject taking the photograph is outside of the world looking in, and that the camera is an instrument of control, a tool for mastering the world by creating visual representations. Early experiments in chemical photography were prompted by this imperative to control, to still the stream of moving images that entered the camera obscura. But early photographs, as Silverman shows, were often fluid, unsettled objects. The image that eventually appeared was far from instantaneous: exposures took up to eight hours, and the glass plate or paper negatives had a tendency to carry on developing (or, alternatively, to disappear) even after the fixing process. Because the photograph represented more than one moment in time, it acted as a “trans-temporal” object, evolving “in tandem with the world,” and never reaching what we would now consider to be a finished, permanent state.

William Henry Fox Talbot, Dandelion seeds, ca. 1858. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Similarly, before the positive became the privileged form, positive and negative images were regarded as equally valid depictions of the world. William Henry Fox Talbot, credited with the invention of the calotype process in 1841, understood his first negative images as full-fledged photographs—portraits that worldly forms made of themselves—rather than as templates from which positives could later be produced. Silverman likens this relationship to the philosophical notion of the chiasmus. Proposed by French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the chiasmus describes the thread of shared experience that unites the person seeing and the object seen, that links “the toucher to what is touched, and sign and visibility to touch and tactility.” The essential reversibility and reflexivity that defines the chiasmus is also embodied in the stereograph, an early form of three-dimensional image. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote in 1859, the stereograph’s illusion of three-dimensionality allowed the viewer to “feel” their way around the depths of the image. However, it also permitted the unpleasant sensation that the pictured objects were reaching out into the viewer’s space.

Unknown photographer, Stereoscopic photograph of Parliament Street, looking towards Trafalgar Square, with Whitehall in the foreground, ca. 1850–80. Courtesy the Victoria & Albert Museum

The reflexivity that defines photography is also aligned, Silverman suggests, with the essential reversibility that defines and binds us together as human subjects: the associations, similarities, and resemblances that link the photograph to the world are the same ones that shape our existence. We experience our own visibility through the gaze of others. In spoken language, our sense of shared being with others is expressed through the “reversible and mutually defining” pronouns I and you.

William Henry Fox Talbot, Loch Katrine, 1844. Courtesy the Getty’s Open Content Program

The Miracle of Analogy is more than an alternative history of photography. Silverman makes a number of provocative claims that unsettle not just the perception of photography as a human invention, but our certainty regarding the place of the human subject as master of the visible world. The photograph, Silverman suggests, is “the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us”—a vehicle for disclosing the analogies that bind all of creation together. As such, photography is, and has always been, part of the world—something that we have discovered, not something that we’ve created. Agency, moreover, is not unique to human subjects, it is also innate in the objects in the world that show themselves to vision, and that do so differently to the camera than they do to the human eye.

John Dugdale, Self Reliance, 1998. Cyanotype. Courtesy Holden Luntz Gallery

The industrialization of photography, on the other hand, is aligned with the philosophical drive—originating in the Enlightenment philosophy of René Descartes—to ascribe agency to human subjects alone, to establish the subject as the origin of the visible world and the creator of meaning. If this rupture between subject and world, as Silverman argues, has also come to dominate histories of photography, then The Miracle of Analogy seeks to restore to photography what history has stolen from it: its sense of interconnection with the world, and the camera as a means of experiencing the world rather than simply a tool for documenting it.

Eugenie Shinkle is Reader in Photography at the Westminster School of Media Arts and Design.

The post Photography is Miraculous appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Vision & Justice Online: Mark Bradford’s Pride of Place

The multidisciplinary artist investigates myths of black masculinity through costume, performance, and an iconic basketball jersey.

By Antwaun Sargent

Mark Bradford, Pride of Place, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Mark Bradford’s photographs, like his grid-based abstract paintings, are maps. They always seem to be charting the ways identity spreads across the different territories of the body. In Pride of Place (2009), a series of twenty chromogenic prints, Bradford becomes a cartographer of the body’s failure. The individual photographs show the limitations of the myth that the body is a neat container of race, sex, and gender performance.

Bradford, a very tall, black, gay man, was born in inner city Los Angeles in 1961. For Pride of Place, he transforms himself into an NBA star in drag, fashioning himself in a vintage Los Angeles Lakers jersey on top of a voluminous purple and gold dress. Against a warm, orange backdrop, he engages in a performance, playing up the physical expectations of height, weight, and appearance. In the foreground, the camera catches Bradford’s back as he rolls and falls. Arms failing, it seems as if he has lost his balance trying to be someone he’s not.

Mark Bradford, Pride of Place (detail), 2009. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

“Working within this landscape, for me, a 6’7” black male, is likened to Madonna (the singer, that is) being allowed to give a concert in Vatican City,” Bradford told Christopher Bedford in a catalogue interview for the 2010 exhibition Hard Targets at the Wexner Center for the Arts. “It’s just too good to pass up, and what is too good to pass up is the questioning of my maleness and the black body. So many times in America we think we know the black body, enough to understand and draw formal conclusions about it. I wanted to mix it up a little, to peek under the dress.”

Pride of Place was inspired by Bradford’s 2003 single-channel video performance Practice. For three minutes, Bradford’s moving image can be seen on a basketball court running, dribbling, and clumsily negotiating space and desire. At some point, he shoots—swoosh—nothing but net. The artist’s static and moving body in Pride of Place and Practice gesture toward what success looks like, even in failure.

Mark Bradford, Still from Practice, 2003. Single-channel video, 3 minutes, color, sound. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Antwaun Sargent is a writer based in New York. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Nation.

Mark Bradford will represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2017.

Read more from “Vision & Justice” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

The post Vision & Justice Online: Mark Bradford’s Pride of Place appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Wild Sync: Lucy Raven in Conversation with Drew Sawyer

In advance of the New York debut of her video installation Tales of Love and Fear at the Park Avenue Armory, Lucy Raven spoke with Drew Sawyer about sonic journeys near and far.

Lucy Raven, Tales of Love and Fear, 2015. Stereoscopic photograph, custom-built projection rig, and sound. Installation view, Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. Courtesy the artist

Lucy Raven wanted to get wired. Searching for the networks of power that hold up global communications and commerce, she traveled from a pit
 mine in Nevada to a smelter in China to trace the transformation of raw ore into copper wire, the conduit for transmitting energy. China Town (2009), 
the resulting photographic animation, combines thousands of still images with on-location ambient sounds, locked together by wild sync—sounds 
that correspond to an image, but are not actually synchronized. For Raven, 
a New York–based artist whose practice incorporates photography, video, installation, and performance, the research becomes the work itself. Following China Town, Raven used test patterns for film and sound as both raw material and subject matter, turning the spotlight on standards for picture and audio quality developed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. Her experiments in 3D filmmaking yielded video installations that place stereoscopic photographs within immersive surround-sound environments. Connecting all of these disparate strands is the artist’s continuing exploration into the effects of technology and labor in the production of movies, as well as the poetic relationship between sound and image.

Lucy Raven, Still from China Town, 2009. Photographic animation. Courtesy the artist

Drew Sawyer: Let’s start with your work China Town, which consists of thousands of still photographs and a sound track, and explores the production of copper from a pit in Nevada to a smelter in China. It’s not a typical film. I’m curious about your choice to use still images with a separate sound track rather than working in a more traditional video format.

Lucy Raven: The choice to use stills came first. I’d been working on stop-action animations and exploring ideas of work and exhaustion. When I had the initial ideas that led to China Town, I was still thinking about those questions. I had a residency with the Center for Land Use Interpretation at their site in Wendover, Utah, in the middle of the Great Basin. I became interested in a copper mine called Bingham Pit, where Robert Smithson had proposed, but never completed, a reclamation project.

Lucy Raven, Still from China Town, 2009. Photographic animation. Courtesy the artist

The other impetus comes from Paul Valéry, who suggested that just as we receive water and gas and electricity into the home from far off with a very minimal effort, one day we’ll be receiving images and sounds into the home, appearing and disappearing with barely a signal of the hand, hardly more than a sign. Now that Valéry’s idea has become commonplace, and wireless technology has made images and sounds coming into the home ubiquitous, the part of his construction that I found more abstract was how water, gas, and, in this case, electricity get into the home.

So I had an idea from the beginning that the images and sounds would “appear and disappear” using some form of animation. As I began to work on the edit, with my editor Mike Olenick, it started to become clear that the sound would need to be continuous alongside the disjunctive imagery. It becomes a means of orientation. Each recording was made at the same location where I took the images.

Sawyer: How did you go about recording? Obviously, when you were going to these different locations, you were taking the still photographs. Were you simultaneously recording sound?

Raven: I couldn’t do both at the same time, because my camera
 made an audible shutter sound, so I had to switch between the two modes. Luckily, most every process I recorded in the film happens twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, so even though it sometimes required revisiting a site I hadn’t intended to return to, I was able to rerecord when necessary. I became very interested in experimenting with wild sync, which is when the sound corresponds to the image, but is not actually synchronized.

Lucy Raven, RP31, 2012. 35mm film. Installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Sawyer: Which is why your term animation makes so much sense, because in a way the sound is animating the images. That film makes me think of this idea of the “disassembled movie,” which Allan Sekula used to describe his piece Aerospace Folktales, from 1973. The work consisted of
 142 photographs installed in a gallery like a filmstrip, and then four audio tracks played separately. This idea of the disassembled movie also relates to your work in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, RP47, and projects you’ve done at the Hammer Museum, like RP31, using test patterns, as well as purely audio works that are related, like 29Hz. What led you in the direction of looking into cinema?

Raven: Working on China Town prompted a number of questions having to do with the relationship between still and moving images, and, more basically, how movies are made today.

The works you’re referring to started with an interest in motion capture that I saw as related to—in some ways the inverse of—how I’d shot China Town. I had a research residency at the Hammer, and I visited one of the motion capture studios used for big Hollywood films. The day I showed up, everyone had just found out that a huge amount of the work they were doing would be outsourced to India, specifically the backdrops and landscapes for the figures developed through motion capture. They would also be sending over films shot in 2D to be converted into 3D through a very elaborate process that involves the digital creation of a synthetic second-eye view for every frame in the film. I found myself confronted with what seemed like a twenty-first-century version of China Town. Here, though, the raw materials being exported from the American West to overseas were images—literally raw files, one for every frame of film. In the case of 3D conversion, what was being outsourced was actually the lab or 
to produce the illusion of spatial depth.

Lucy Raven, Curtains, 2014. Anaglyph video installation, 5.1 sound, 50 minutes (loop). Courtesy the artist

I began trying to understand how 3D film works, and how it has developed technologically since its quite early invention. I found myself looking at 3D calibration charts, used to align dual 35mm projectors for 3D projection. The images were beautiful—the first ones I saw were clearly photographed 
from handmade paper maquettes that read “See with Left Eye” and “See with Right Eye.” I searched out more of these charts, and soon realized that there were charts used to calibrate and test most every type and gauge of film projector. This then led me to their sonic equivalent—test tones meant to play in an empty theater before showtime to calibrate the theater’s sound.

While I was researching and beginning production on the works having to do with Hollywood’s outsourcing of its images—the pieces that later became Curtains (2014) and then Tales of Love and Fear (2015)—I became interested in these charts as logging a history of the standardization of perception that was developed for optimal viewing and listening standards, yet born of economic, cultural, and technological conditions as much
 as for some notion of pristine image or sound.

Lucy Raven, 29Hz, 2012. Randomized audio samples from optical and magnetic
film sound track test material. Courtesy the artist

Sawyer: So 29Hz is the audio for test sounds.

Raven: Yes. I used twenty-nine different test tones in the work, 
and Hz is the abbreviation for hertz, which is the unit of frequency for sound. The RP in the filmic work titles is borrowed from the most common test pattern for 35mm film, RP40, where RP stands for recommended practices. In RP47, I included forty-seven different test patterns, and in RP31 there are thirty-one.

Sawyer: Does RP31 also have a sound track?

Raven: For RP31, you hear the sound of the 35mm projector that
is running constantly, in tandem with a film looper, in the room. The presence and the sound of the projector is an important part of the installation. For RP47, I asked two genius friends, Jesse Stiles and Rob Ray, to design a software program for the work that would also enable me to add more images and sounds as I continued to find and archive them. The pairing of images and sounds in that piece is randomized, and the image stays up for as long as the duration of the sound file.

Sawyer: But they wouldn’t be related otherwise.

Raven: No, they are two different types of tests—one for sound, one for images.

Sawyer: So those projects led to Curtains, and then Tales of Love and Fear the following year, which both involve 3D images and surround sound.

Lucy Raven, Curtains, 2014. Anaglyph video installation, 5.1 sound, 50 minutes (loop). Courtesy the artist

Raven: Curtains consists of ten different scenes, each of which animates a stereoscopic photograph that I took in one of ten different post production facilities around the globe—from cities in Asia with very low labor costs to some of the most expensive cities in the world, such as London and Vancouver, where local governments offer studios massive tax breaks and incentives—that convert Hollywood films from 2D to 3D. In the piece, the stereoscopic image is split into left- and right-eye images using old-school anaglyph red-cyan separations. The two images come together from offscreen, briefly converge, then diverge again, passing through some strange intermediate zones of overlap that the eyes struggle, nearly involuntarily, to resolve. I recorded the sound in much the same way I approached it in China Town. The sound for each section is based on field recordings from each facility. They’re all office spaces, but the subtle differences between them register substantial differences in location, culture, and activity.

Lucy Raven, Tales of Love and Fear, 2015. Courtesy the artist

Tales of Love and Fear is a piece I worked on through a residency at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute up
in Troy, New York. The idea was to make a cinema for a stereoscopic photograph. In collaboration with EMPAC’s amazing production team, we built a rig that enables 360-degree rotation of two projectors over the forty-minute duration of the work. The rig acts as both 3D film projection apparatus and as a kinetic sculpture performing the architecture of 
the space.

Lucy Raven, Tales of Love and Fear, 2015. Courtesy the artist

DS: How are the image and sound related?

Raven: The image comes from a stereo photograph I took of bas-relief carvings at a site in India. One of the first sounds you
hear in the piece is from a field recording I’d made while
 seeing a Bollywood horror film with a few friends. One of them, an actress, was translating to me in real time from Hindi to English—the film’s sound was pulpy and totally overblown.

So my friend is doing different voices while whispering the translations, people are screaming, and we’re eating popcorn and laughing. Paul Corley, a composer and sound engineer, worked with me to shape a score, a sonic journey from the Mumbai movie theater, into the film itself, and out the other side into a very different, nearly meditative drone state.

Lucy Raven, Fatal Act, 2016. Promotional image. Courtesy Thirteen Black Cats

Sawyer: Your most recent project, Fatal Act, involves, in part, the history of one sound in particular.

Raven: Yes, sound is an important aspect of Fatal Act, a new moving-image work I’m currently at work on with my research and production collective Thirteen Black Cats. The eventual film centers on the difficulty of imaging and recording the atomic. One scene includes the description of a CBS sound engineer tasked with providing sound for a nuclear-bomb test detonation in Frenchman Flat, Nevada, in 1951. Camera crews had been invited to film the explosion for television broadcast, but to escape fallout, they were necessarily positioned too far away to record sound. Given three turntables, twenty minutes, and the CBS sound library, the engineer improvised, using the slowed-down roar of an African waterfall to make the now iconic sound of an atomic chemical fireball.

To read more, buy Aperture Issue 224, “Sounds,”or subscribe to Aperture  and never miss an issue.

Drew Sawyer is William J. and Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography at the Columbus Museum of Art, where he organized the exhibition Lucy Raven: Low Relief, on view April 29–November 27, 2016.

Lucy Raven’s Tales of Love and Fear is presented at the Park Avenue Armory on September 29–30, 2016.

The post Wild Sync: Lucy Raven in Conversation with Drew Sawyer appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Jason Fulford Can’t Be Contained

Jason Fulford, Contains: 3 Books, 2016. Courtesy The Soon Institute

When encountering Jason Fulford’s work, just remember, “If you came here to have fun, you will. If not, you won’t.” His photographs and, in particular, his photobooks, are enigmatic, ambiguous, and profound. By embracing these qualities, he has expanded the possibilities for his practice and for the photographic medium. A photographer, publisher, and designer, Fulford has also previously appended his print work and exhibitions with interventions and events.

His new publication, Contains: 3 Books (forthcoming from The Soon Institute in October), offers another opportunity to be open-minded. For the extensively researched book, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulford traveled to fifteen countries. Within the publication are three funny, strange, and stimulating volumes—I Am Napoleon, Mild Moderate Severe Profound, and &&—in no particular order. Contains: 3 Books will fascinate and delight, but it won’t answer all of your questions. —Ashley McNelis

 

 

Jason Fulford, Time to Re-Order, 2016. Courtesy the artist

Jason Fulford: I’m glad we’re in Gowanus because after this I need to do some silk-screening two blocks from here.

Ashley McNelis: What are you printing?

Fulford: It’s for a little show down in Philadelphia. I’m making a postcard rack, like the ones you see in a tourist store. It’ll be filled with cards that you can take that say “TIME TO RE-ORDER.”

McNelis: Oh, I like that! Where in Philadelphia?

Fulford: At Crane Art’s Icebox Project Space. Christopher Gianunzio is curating a photography section with pieces by Lucas Blalock, Carmen Winant, Whitney Hubbs, and others, along with several other local curators in one big space.

McNelis. It sounds like a good excuse to take a trip to Philly! Let’s start by talking about literature. The first time I went through Contains: 3 Books, I almost paid more attention to the text than the images. You’ve published several books of your work, designed covers for fiction books, and you’re a big reader. Can you speak to the connection between the image and the word in your work?

Fulford: It’s played out in a lot of different ways over the years, and also in each of these three books. In I Am Napoleon, the texts are excerpts from books I was reading at the time, sequenced into a narrative. The pictures and the words play off each other in an associative way. In &&, the only text is on the cover and in the colophon. It’s a book of single images, so I put a full white spread in between each picture so you wouldn’t naturally think of it as a sequence. Mild Moderate Severe Profound has a caption for each picture, and they are all true stories.

In that book, the captions work in a traditional way, to directly explain the images. I’ve never done that before except in magazine assignments. The texts have a literal connection that adds meaning to the images. For example, take the first picture of the floor tiles in Mild Moderate Severe Profound. It might not have much significance to you, except for maybe it’s graphic quality. But when you find out that William Burroughs stayed in that room when he wrote Naked Lunch (1959), then it means something more. In my book Hotel Oracle (2014), one of main themes is the idea that you can add meaning to places or to objects through storytelling. In this group of three books, I see Mild Moderate Severe Profound as one of the grounding elements. It gives you a clue to what the whole project is about.

Jason Fulford, spread from Mild Moderate Severe Profound, Contains: 3 Books, 2016. Courtesy The Soon Institute

McNelis: Where did you find the inspiration to pair photographs and texts in this manner?

Fulford: One book that may have played a role, subconsciously, is A Forgotten Kingdom by Mike Nelson—the British artist who creates big, realistic-looking installations—for his show at the ICA in London in 2001. He reproduced a dozen or so chapters and excerpts from different books where there was some connection to the theme, and sequenced them to form a new book. It was published on cheap, yellow paper so it felt like a pulp paperback.

When designing a book, I go back and forth between a macro view and a micro view. In Mild Moderate Severe Profound, each spread is an independent unit with text and image, but there is also an overall arc to the book. One big influence in terms of that structure is a book from the nineties by German artist Ute Behrend called Girls, Some Boys and Other Cookies (1996).

McNelis: What else were you reading?

Fulford: I’ve been working on a series of upcoming workshops and re-reading old texts from college like Entropy and Art (1971) by Rudolf Arnheim. I got the same headache I did the first time I read it! It’s so worth it in the end though. He explains two different interpretations of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. One focuses on the idea of maximum disorder, and the other on equilibrium—that a closed system reaches equilibrium when no other action can happen without an outside force. When I didn’t know if my book The Mushroom Collector (2010) was finished, my friend Stuart said, “You’ll know when it’s ready because it will come to a place where it can’t possibly be anything other than what it is.” It’s the point in editing where everything, like the macro/micro view, locks into place.

Jason Fulford, image from Mild Moderate Severe Profound, Contains: 3 Books, 2016. Courtesy The Soon Institute

McNelis: I definitely perceived both the individual and overarching elements in the books. I remember you mentioning Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, ambiguity, mysterious places, and open metaphors. Do you internalize what you find in literature and develop those ideas in your work?

Fulford: Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon were really early influences on me. Books, conversations, films, art, and music all feed into your subconscious. Those ideas affect what and how you see. That’s the best thing about art, I think. If you and I went out and made pictures on this block, we would make very different pictures because we would be looking at different things.

There’s a quote by Goethe that was supposedly found in Edward Hopper’s wallet when he died that I love: “The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, molded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.” Think of every person as a filter taking in similar stimuli and then working it through their own life experience before putting it back out there.

McNelis: This would be a good place to transition into talking about ambiguity. You’ve read William Empson, who wrote that ambiguous language makes poetry more interesting. Do you think that that concept of ambiguity can be applied to photography?

Fulford: Yes, and it’s one of my favorite things about photography. When you embrace the fact that pictures are inherently ambiguous, the possibilities open up in terms of using images as language.

I was just down in Atlanta for a week with my mom. I brought a copy of Contains: 3 Books to show her. She admitted that she always wants to be spoon-fed, which is the opposite of anything I usually try and do. We had a good time talking about it. We love each other a lot, but we can be very different.

John Cowper Powys, The Inmates, 2016. Courtesy The Soon Institute

McNelis: That tends to happen with family. The prefatory note in I Am Napoleon—“I think that any book or picture or composition of any sort, once out into the world, so to say, produces a different effect on each person who seriously tries to follow it. I certainly do not think that the author of it has any monopoly in its interpretation”—was a perfectly apt way to begin the project and introduce how you want the reader to approach it.

Fulford: It was written by John Cowper Powys in a book called The Inmates (1952). He was a (literally) crazy British writer and mystic that Tod Papageorge recommended to me. He moved to the United States and made a living by impersonating famous writers from history and touring to give lectures as them. He then married a New Yorker and moved upstate to a small town that reminded him of the countryside in England where he grew up. He wrote some of his most famous novels from there. I had an idea with Aaron Schuman, who actually lives in the area where Cowper Powys was from in England, that I would take pictures in upstate New York and he would shoot in England, then we would mix them together and make a book. Somehow it never panned out but we still like to talk about it.

The Inmates had a beautiful green cover with the title written in black in sign painter’s casual font. I bought it for the cover, and later found out that it’s worth reading. It takes place in an insane asylum in England. In the preface he talks about how he’d read a lot of books about insanity and that none of them seemed to acknowledge the humor and the humanity in these places. The story is funny and deep.

McNelis: How did you approach organizing such a large topic?

Fulford: I read a lot of both fiction and non-fiction related to madness over three years and made many notes in the margins. At the same time, I was shooting pictures as I traveled, letting the reading guide my eye. I tried organizing the results in different ways. At one point I literally categorized the pictures as disorders and phobias, and it felt too contrived. A friend gave me a box of psychological tests that are given to children. It contains a lot of little differently sized, spiral-bound books. One is a small book of drawings where there’s one thing wrong in each that you have to identify, like a hand where one finger doesn’t have a nail. At first I wanted to make book that felt like these tests, but it ended up feeling too serious. I wanted my book to feel more open and playful. I hope the reader gets some pleasure from it, rather than feeling like they’ve been lectured to.

Jason Fulford, image from I am Napoleon, Contains: 3 Books, 2016. Courtesy The Soon Institute

McNelis: How do you hope that the viewer will view or interpret Contains: 3 Books?

Fulford: I’m wary of directing the reader too much, especially since a topic like the one these books deals with comes with a lot of preconceptions. I mean we all have some connection to it whether it’s mild or moderate or severe or profound. I ended up focusing on a middle range, somewhere between mild and profound; it’s a range in which there’s a humanity, an imperfection that is potentially valuable. One thing people may think about while reading the books is the subjectivity of the term “madness”—how it changes depending on each person’s culture or peer group. I always say that I don’t want people to think about me when they read these books. You’re going to think about yourself anyway, but I actually want you to think about yourself.

McNelis: It must be challenging to produce a work that’s so open-ended.

Fulford: I’m really comfortable with unanswered questions. I think you have to be game for that to enjoy any of these books. I saw a sign once at a spot where normal laws of gravity don’t apply; strange things like optical illusions happen in areas like that. The sign at the entrance to the spot said, “If you came here to have fun, you will. If not, you won’t.” You have to be open to playing the game to get anything out of it. Otherwise it’s only frustration or cynicism, depending on your personality.

McNelis: I’d be curious to hear more about your photobook practice. I’ve always thought it was very distinct, particularly because of the events and happenings you do for their launches. Do you know the Rosalind Krauss essay, “Sculpture in the Expanding Field,” from 1979? In it, she questions sculpture and discusses its new elasticity. Photography, like sculpture in the mid-twentieth century, has expanded to become a very transitional and fluid medium. Photographs and photobooks can be anything now. The nature of having events—like what you did with The Mushroom Collector and Hotel Oracle—actively sends these objects and ideas out into the world.

Fulford: Those events came about almost by chance, the way one thing leads to the next. It started in collaboration with my editor, Lorenzo de Rita. We wanted to release my books to the world, but we didn’t want to just have normal book parties. We wanted to pick up on ideas in the books, and communicate them in a different way. The events are an excuse for me to use different tools, and they’re fun. I’m also a graphic designer, and I like to build things. The events run parallel to the books and work almost like appendixes. We’ll be planning some for Contains: 3 Books in the fall and winter.

 

Jason Fulford, cover of &&, 2016. Courtesy The Soon Institute

McNelis: I can’t wait! Lorenzo’s collective, The Soon Institute, sounds like an incredibly flexible and ambiguous practice. I can’t imagine some of his projects in physical form.

Fulford: Ambiguity defines his life. I love working with him, in part because he always makes sure that everything stays very open until the last possible moment. He’s a bit of a procrastinator, and that’s part of the deal. It’s a good way to make books.

McNelis: Definitely. In addition to working with Lorenzo, you’ve done work with author, illustrator, and designer Tamara Shopsin, and published books with author and illustrator Leanne Shapton through J&L Books. Have you always been open to collaboration?

Fulford: I’ve been lucky to have found great collaborators—where we each bring something that complements the other. When that happens, the final product is always so much better than anything I could have done by myself. And I respect good editors. They each have their own way. Lorenzo, for example, never says, “no.” Instead he just gently suggests—puts ideas into your mind that eat at you until you make a revision. But Tamara will say, “NO,” a lot, and that’s also useful sometimes.

The Photographer’s Playbook (2014) was a big collaboration—not only with Greg Halpern and the staff at Aperture, but with all 307 contributors. Everybody brought totally different things to it. Like a dictionary, it’s a book you can read over the rest of your life. I also love the feeling of kinship that arose from the fact that we all care about photography even though we come at it from our different points of view.

McNelis: Can you talk about your editing process?

Fulford: These days I scan my negatives and edit in InDesign. But I used to work with two sets of contact prints which allowed chance to play a big role. I was just reading about the Jean Arp collages where he would drop cut paper onto paper and glue them down. Or how William Burroughs wrote on multiple sheets of paper and then rearranged them. I work in a similar way, using chance combinations to find unintentional connections between pictures.

McNelis: I read somewhere that you like jazz, which made me think of your sequencing as composing and the individual elements in terms of polyphony and harmony. It’s as though each diptych is a stanza within the whole arrangement.

Fulford: Around the time I made my book Raising Frogs for $$$ (2006), I was listening to and reading a lot about polyphony—from Bach to György Ligeti to African drums—with a little Gestalt theory mixed in. Those ideas transfer well to book design and photo sequencing.

I’ve also been re-reading Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes, who both liked to talk in big circles. It’s a fun ride but you often end up in the same place you started. I relate that to a larger philosophy on life where, maybe it’s a cliché idea, but it’s more about the process than the final goal.

Jason Fulford, image from I am Napoleon, Contains: 3 Books, 2016. Courtesy The Soon Institute

McNelis: Whenever I read theory, I’m never looking for just one answer. It’s more of a lens through which to look at everything. There’s too much to contain.

Fulford: Agreed. I grew up with religion, so for me, theory is like church on Sunday—the abstract day where things are talked about as pure ideals, whereas the rest of the week is messy.

McNelis: Speaking of the abstract versus the concrete, one of my favorite images in the book featured the bizarre legends of the Brno Wheel and Dragon.

Fulford: The Brno City Hall entrance is truly surreal. When I was in Brno, there also happened to be a traveling exhibition in town on the topic of Surrealism in graphic design, put together by Rick Poyner. That was the perfect town to have that show.

McNelis: The Czech Republic is kind of surreal. There’s a lot of great art, too. Do you like Fluxus?

Fulford: Yes, though I’ve only learned about it piecemeal. There’s a great library of artist’s books in Chicago called the John Flaxman Library, part of the Art Institute. I spent some time there last year and was able to see a lot of incredible Fluxus originals.

Jason Fulford, image from Mild Moderate Severe Profound, Contains: 3 Books, 2016. Courtesy The Soon Institute

McNelis: They really loved their happenings. Can you talk about the events you’re planning for the book?

Fulford: I think it’s going to be somehow related to the word “Contains.” The website we made for the book has that word as its structure, with a list of contents to the right of it. I think we’ll keep adding to the list of contents as we plan events. The first one, in New York City on September 16, is actually three simultaneous events—“Contains: 3 Events”—all in the Lower East Side. Each one will have a sort of performance that happens in a loop, so you can go see them all.

The overarching idea is that the book contains the three books, but it also contains other things, like three years of traveling, a Guggenheim fellowship, research, etc. There’s that famous Walt Whitman quote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” I like it as a reminder to appreciate that you can have multiple views at the same time. Though I’m not sure I would like to have multiple personalities. Did you see the obituary in The New York Times recently for the woman who inspired the 1957 film The Three Faces of Eve? That was an extreme case; there are milder versions of multiple personality disorder that can be inspiring. I think of Martin Kippenberger as having extremes of punk and respectability.

McNelis: How did you come to publish Martin Kippenberger’s biography by his sister?

Fulford: I was a fan of his work, mostly from books. I hadn’t seen much of it in real life. Leanne (the L of the imprint J&L) was in Germany having dinner with her editor and Susanne Kippenberger. At dinner, Leanne sent me a text that Susanne was looking for an English language publisher for the biography of her brother, Martin Kippenberger! I just wrote back, “Let’s do it!” It was happenstance.

McNelis: The publishing company and your practice work very well together. I look forward to seeing what else you publish!

Fulford: Well, on the topic of books, I’m really excited about my next, next book. But I have to try to hold off until I get Contains: 3 Books out into the world!

Ashley McNelis is a writer, curator, and art historian based in New York.

Jason Fulford’s book launch for Contains: 3 Books takes place as three simultaneous happenings on the Lower East Side on Friday, September 16, 2016.

The post Jason Fulford Can’t Be Contained appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.