Waste Not, Want Not

This, that, and the other led to the an online encounter with my new fav-o-rite photographer, Chris Jordan.

My discovery coincided with the announcement of the winner of the Prix Pictet, a new global prize celebrating the work of both professional and amateur photographers. Awarded last week in Paris, the Prix Pictet is the first competition of its type to focus on the global issue of sustainability—this year in particular, on water. The winner of 100,000 Swiss francs ($86,000) is the Canadian photographer Benoit Aquim whose photos of the desertification of China are truly disturbing.





Strange other-worldly landscape reflecting the dryness of spirit at the core of China...

But this entry is about Chris Jordan, an American photographer whose series of photos of post-Katrina waste were also entered into the competition. He was on the short list along with 16 others, but there was only one prize. He calls his series, Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster and his artist's statement reads like an indictment.

There is evidence to suggest that Katrina was not an entirely natural event like an earthquake or tsunami. The 2005 hurricane season’s extraordinary severity can be linked to global warming, which America contributes to in disproportionate measure through our extravagant consumer and industrial practices.



Never before have the cumulative effects of our consumerism become so powerfully focused into a visible form, like the sun’s rays narrowed through a magnifying glass. Almost 300,000 Americans lost everything they owned in the Katrina disaster. The question in my mind is whether we are all responsible in some degree. The hurricane’s damage has been further amplified by other human causes, including failures of preparedness and response on many levels; existing poverty conditions; levee problems that were mired in political maneuverings; poor environmental and wetlands practices that left some areas more vulnerable; and the conspicuous absence of federal resources that were already being used in the Bush Administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Isn't this an incredibly sad, poignant photo? Like someone strung up.

Waste

Waste has been his main theme and he finds it everywhere.


Mixed Recycling, Seattle.

In 2003 he started taking pictures around shipyards and waste stations drawn in by the scale and strange beauty of the collected detritus of our voracious consumer society. "The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful." What he says is true. The piles of sorted waste—cell phones, bottles, canisters, cars—make puzzling viewing.


Circuit Boards, Atlanta.

The series, 2003-2005, is called Intolerable Beauty.

"Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits."

And so his work becomes a cause, a moral undertaking; his photos a revelation. What we toss comes back to haunt us—on the gulf stream, on the tide. There's no getting away from the vast emptiness we try to fill—admonished by our president even to buy more, drill more, manufacture more. It is painful to see, astonishing, and certainly intolerable.


E Waste, New Orleans

But here's what's hopeful: the waste, our waste (own it!), is sorted, organized, contained. That's partly what is astonishing—and charming, in a twisted way— in these pictures, the arrangements are aesthetic. And isn't creating order out of chaos the first step towards knowing what to do with it? I'm going to believe in the reality of these pictures, the excess, and in the possibility of reduction as well as transformation—and I don't mean turning trash into art. I'm going to continue to believe in the power of art to reveal and to make connections. Buy first, pay later. It's time. It is very obviously time to pay up.


Crushed Cars, Tacoma.

Chris Jordan didn't win the prize, but he takes the cake.


Container Yard #1, Seattle

Heartland/Wasteland

The Dutch have been thinking about the Midwest. The US Midwest. In collaboration with the Smart Museum of the University of Chicago, the Van Abbemuseum (in Eindhoven, Netherlands) has created an introduction to the art of "an unknown part of a well-known country." Heartland features works by artists and institutions of the region either side of the Mississippi River.



I love the idea of tapping into what's happening in the middle—for there surely must be art happening in places between the coasts—but isn't it interesting that from the get-go we're seeing from the outside in? I mean, only an outsider would consider the length of the Mississippi a region to itself. An American looking at the map instinctively knows Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, that's the South. Culture doesn't really follow the river, but the flow of history.



The midwest map of the US Census Bureau shows the demarcation lines fall more horizontally: the heartland is wide. The South is the nether land, and it ain't Dutch.

Am I quibbiling? Just a little. It seems good though to remember the framework a story is told through. Let's not forget the impact the Dutch had in helping define the mercantile character of this country.

But hey, speaking of the story, one of the projects presented fits right in on the trip down the mighty Mississippi. Miss Rockaway Armada is an ongoing collaborative art project involving handmade rafts and boats carrying artists and performers from Minneapolis to New Orleans.



Floating down the Mississippi River on a boat we built from trash.



It's sort of Black Rock City on water, bringing utopian wackiness to the staid residents of the midwest. Sort of like feeding the masses... The missionary aspect of the project disturbs me a little, but the boats are so wonderful. And everybody seems to be having a right good time.



On the other end of the spectrum, Heartlands introduced me to the work of Scott Hocking— incredible photos of the decay of Detroit and beautiful installations, a ziggurat of bricks in an abandoned factory, a midden of rusty trash. This is melancholic work, dealing with cultural and material detritus, echoing the scale and weight of Anselm Keifer.





Also new to me is Dutch-American video artist Julika Rudelius. Her staged short films have people from various socio-economic strata talking, musing on values and mores. This still is from Forever, 16 minutes, a 2 track film of upscale women talking about happiness. Priceless. In other films, ordinary people talk about wealth (and poverty), race, relationship—all the essential things.



Deb Sokolow, an artist from Chicago, likewise does wry portrayals of people and their wiley ways. She portrays them in drawings with narrative text, drawings that are sometimes installations lining the walls (or drawn on the walls) of a space. The reader follows the story around the room, labyrinth-like, sometimes following a dotted line down one way or another. In Eindhoven, her installation, Dear Trusted Associate, is nearly 50 feet long. She says, "Generally speaking, the piece involves a story about the CIA, petroleum, an email spammer from Nigeria, and the Chicago 'organization'."



Jaimie Warren, from Kansas City, is a young photographer of the docu-everything-especially-the-mundane-and-personal variety. I'm not complaining. There's just so many parties you can go to, that's all. But still, there is a necessary and valuable place for her kind of documentation of the everyday, especially the everyday of a place I may not ever go to but where people live and breed and vote.

So I go all the (virtual) way to the Netherlands to get a glimpse of the mid-lands. And this is one of the things I see there.




Miss Rockaway Armada pics courtesy of their blog. Many more pictures on their Flicker album.

At the de Young

Dropping in at the de Young to see prints by Martin Puryear...

I came across an early assemblage by Mark di Suvero. So here's another of his works to add to the list.



Oh my. The room seemed barely wide enough for this piece, I couldn't back up far enough to get the whole thing in the picture. It's a baby sculpture compared to his later works, but still big—a conglomerate of tree trunk, phone pole, 2x4, and tire. The space certainly couldn't contain the energetics of this unwieldy, yet strangely balanced almost anthropomorphic work. It needs far more space around it and nothing—no Sam Francis nor Diebenkorn—on the walls. And yet, despite the cramped quarters, or maybe even because of them, the parts seemed especially heavy and the the magic of the work even more mysterious. How does it hold up? I mean the tree trunk is massive.

One of the parts I loved best was the 2x4 joined to the telephone pole with steel plate and rivets.



About those rivets...

What is so stark about the piece is that there is all of the work that happened with riveting—that was a special way of joining steel before welding was invented. People built beautiful things then that mostly ended up in the scrap pile. Riveting was a way of handling the hot iron, the rivets themselves, and I find the pieces beautiful because of that. Those forms are part of an industrial landscape that had been dismissed.

He's talking about another work, Yes! For Lady Day, which is all steel, but the rivets are the same.

Di Suvero elsewhere talks about wood joints.

...I started using the wood that they tore out of these hundred-year-old buildings and they made giant fires out of them down on Water Street. I could see the skyscrapers dancing through the fire. I used the wood because I knew how to join it together. All of those structures in the first show I did in less than six months, and then my back got broken because I was doing a job that paid the rent. The real part of the work is the joinery, which is invisible, and a lot of that hasn’t survived because they’ve been taken apart and put together too often, and they weren’t made for that. Since then I’ve developed a more complicated kind of joinery, which allows for many parts coming together and yet looks very simple. But part of the beauty of learning and loving the technique is that you make something very difficult look easy, like Bach. (Laughs)

.


Well, this work does not look simple to me. How the parts balance is very strange—like a hidden power is streaming in the steel—an animal power, brute strength. I think of the Hulk. I'm waiting for the parts to be flung through the air.



What I love about di Suvero is his engagement with the materials and tools—the craftsmanship of working with iron, steel, wood. And he is hands-on, especially with his early works like this one at the de Young. You can imagine him constructing the base and then hoisting the wood, cranking it up by hand even.

You know, if you stop being explorative, you may as well stop making art altogether. I had to change from working in wood, where you need your body to work through, to steel where there is equipment. By moving into that, the constructive part of my work became much more dominate. I ended up learning how to run a crane, and buying one with a grant that the National Humanities for the Arts gave me. Manuel [Neri] bought a church, I bought a dead crane, and learned how to fix cranes. But then you change, you change once you have a different set of tools, and the tools really determine how far you can go.

How far, how big, how grand. Yes.

Another unexpected sighting at the de Young was a sculpture by Bruce Conner which I wrote about in my remembrance of him in July. Encased in a pristine vitrine is Snore, his homage to the dump truck made of wood boards and cloth remnants wrapped in nylons and hung with testicular bags of cotton stuffing. It was great to see it in the flesh, as it were. It is fleshy. Fleshy and soft, and how like all things fleshy and soft (except for art encased in museum glass cases) eventually ending up on the dump heap. Not melancholic, nor morbid, I think Connor was truly honoring the ending-up of things. So there it is, the end-up, an icon in the church of art. How right. Just so.





And then, after all, there were the etchings by Martin Puryear.





I look at Puryear's sculptural forms—dark shapes or these see-through vessels—and I think of Richard Serra's massive slab prints. I'm not sure why, but sculptural ideas seem to translate more readily into prints than painting or drawing. Perhaps it is the machine intermediary. These prints are sculptures on paper.

These two, Untitled, State I, State II are 35 x 28 inches large. Not only do they resemble alchemical vessels, but the act of producing them is alchemical. Besides the chemicals and tar, there are the calculated steps to the procedure leading to stages of transformation, states of being. Spare and mysterious, they are forms which point to something else unnamed, hermetic yet resonant. Really beautiful.


First quote from interview with Jan Garden Castro inSculpture Magazine.
Other quotes from interview with John Yau of the Brooklyn Rail.
Puryear pics courtesy of Barbara Krakow Gallery.

Postscript Opie

In April I wrote a piece that included some ruminations about Catherine Opie's new portraits of football players showing at Regen Projects, LA. I wasn't completely enthralled by them, felt something missing.

Recently I read this bit of explanation in a NY Times review by Hilarie M. Sheets of Opie's mid-career survey taking place now at the Guggenheim Museum.

Another current project is photographing high-school football players around the country. Rather than snapping the perfect catch or play, she chooses moments in between the action on the field, capturing the American cultural landscape from a different angle. “I’m very empathic to the construction of masculinity within our culture and how we build these identities up,” Ms. Opie said. She pointed out that [her son] Oliver’s father, Mr. Hill, had been the 6-foot-4-inch teenage gay boy with the football coach father. The political and personal are inextricably linked for Ms. Opie.

“At first I had the little boy who wanted to wear the pink tutu and dress up,” she said. “Because he’s not in a traditional household with a football coach dad, he was never ashamed. Now I have a 6-year-old who only wants to play Pokémon and kill aliens on the Xbox.”

She hasn’t decided which she likes better. “He’s now very aware of the social structure of masculinity,” she said. “He’s trying it on and seeing what it feels like.”

I still feel the football series is weak, distant, but I applaud the effort to capture the build-up, like clay on an armature, of the "social structure of masculinity." It is an elusive thing, to catch its effect on consciousness—an imprint on flesh, as it were, the buckling on of body armor: knee pads, face guards, or lipstick on little girls. Perhaps because personal social construct is hard to define, let alone pin down, it demands intimacy. And, I suppose, persistence. It won't be long, Oliver will be in High School.


Photo of Oliver in tutu courtesy of Regen Projects.

Women of a Certain Age

Lest we forget.

Reading a review by Richard Kalina in the September Art in America, I come across this passage:

In 1946 an unnamed male critic (not Greenberg or Rosenberg) reviewing Louise Nevelson's first major exhibition writes, "We learned that the artist was a woman, in time to check our enthusiasm. Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among the moderns." And Lee Krasner speaking of Hans Hoffman, the leading teacher of his day, said, "I can remember very clearly his criticism one day when he came in and said about (my) painting, 'this is so good you would not believe it was done by a woman.'"

Ouch.

Nevelson also studied with Hoffman, in the early 30s, when his school was in Munich and before he emigrated to NY. She's known to have said, "I wouldn't marry God if he asked me." Krasner married Pollock which might have been like acquiescing to marrying god, a god, and see where that got her. She lived and worked 30 years after him, yet is mostly remembered as his wife.



Jackson Pollock with Lee Krasner in the background, in 1955.



This is a mid-career Krasner, Thaw, post-Pollock, 1957.



Nevelson in signature fur in a portrait by Cecil Beaton.

Nevelson had a good self-image. "I always thought, bluntly, that I was a glamorous, goddamn exciting woman," she said. "I wanted to have a ball on earth." And she did.



Nevelson postage stamps.

Knocked Out

Most women aren't so lucky and get knocked around—still, into this century—by the prevailing misogyny. It must be bred in the bone, so deeply it is rooted. Only a few lucky ones escape deprecation by self or others. Age by age, it's the same old story.

In AiA there's also a piece on May Wilson who, in 1966, at the age of 61, moved to NYC to become an artist (like you do). Her husband trading her in for younger women was the kick in the pants she needed to launch herself onto the NY scene. She held salons at the Chelsea Hotel, hung out at the Factory, made art. Like Nevelson, she assembled, only her works were much more Pop: spray-painted platform-shoes with baby-doll heads, Pop. She also made collage. When her husband was cheating on her, she took to cutting up Playboy centerfolds. She made them into snowflakes or "doillies" as she called them. Pasted together, image overlay image. Must have been therapeutic.



This is one of a series of collages she made inserting her clowning mug shot into unlikely places. I suppose she was being a good sport about her old face. That's what they say, anyway, she was a card.

Invisible







These three are by Charlotte Niel. She's saying something different than Wilson with these bits of model beauty superimposed upon her own body. Something about illusion, maintaining it, playing with it, and questioning what's real. At what age do we start doing drag? Female impersonators. Gender impressionists.

These are part of a traveling exhibition of photos, self-portraits by women of a certain age—50 to 65—the Invisible Age, the title of the show. Curated by Jan Potts and Beth Kientzle who, in their statement, explain,

The timing is not precise. Women at around age 50 notice that something has changed. It happens slowly, almost imperceptibly. Heads no longer turn as we walk down the street, older or younger women are served first, the boss calls on others in meetings, few models in magazines or actresses in movies represent women our age. We have reached the invisible age. It lasts a decade or more, and around age 65, it changes again—we’ve moved into another stage of life where the fruits of our longevity are valued, and society can see us again.

The show, seen in Washington DC and Newton NJ, is now at Rayko Photo Center, SF. Most of the works explore the experience of being invisible or marginal and so are vague, obscure, remote. It is rather painful, this sinking from view—or as the subtitle of this photo suggests, Crawling Out.


Perseverance: Crawling Out, by Mary Ramain.

And then some are strikingly defiant in the face of all odds.



Amazon by Niki Berg.

Odds are, we're all going to die, men, women, animals alike. In the meantime though, to be seen is the thing, in our own light and worth. The blatant dismissal of women in the 30s (40s, 50s, 60s...) is an unspoken assumption today. The false premise still plagues us. I want to root it out. In myself and in the culture.

Question assumptions. Defy categorizations. Expand limitations. Good slogans. Add to the list. To Do.


Nevelson quotes from Louise Nevelson Foundation.
Pollock photo courtesy of Smithsonian Institute Archives of American Art.
Beaton photo courtesy of New York Times.
Wilson work on ArtNet.

Koons King

If you haven't seen this article, in today's NYTimes, you must! Jeff Koons in the palace of the Sun King! How fitting!


Perfect!


Divinely inspired, I'm sure!

He says that the placement of his white marble rococo Self-Portrait in the same room as portraits of Louis XIV and Louis XVI was not a gesture of arrogance, “It didn’t have to do with my own ego, but it did have to do with the playfulness and a contemporary monumentality." Absolutely. Koons thinks big and in the Realm of Possibilities just like the sumptuous, over-blown halls and gardens, operas and costumes of King Louis. Koons' works are inflated, larger-than-life, and manufactured to perfection with a mirror sheen just like... the comparisons are endless.

What is it to have the world in your hands? This artist says Anything is Possible, and it is. Monumental. Glorious. Grand!


Article by Elaine Sciolino and photos by Ed Alcock.

Hoch und Baltz

Rena Bransten Gallery, SF is showing recent photos by Matthias Hoch. They are beautiful and cold.
An essay by curator Aimée Reed points out a tension in his pictures—a tension between an ideal and a lack—a lack of humanity.



Hoch's new photographs (and video) concern Almere. Almere is a designed town in the Netherlands, a model modern village established in the late 70s with the express mission of providing housing and employment relief for Amsterdam under a plan that emphasized ethical design with a stress on functionality and equality. The end result of such factors is that the streets are easy to clean and the buildings look much like the architects designed them, even twenty years later.



What I noted in my first look at the work is the beautiful composition of his images. These are documents of buildings and interiors but not as straight documentary for they are highly composed shots that focus on pattern and often create an agreeable abstract display. The photos place a stress on design over content.



This, for instance, is a children's playground with faux rock and turf.

In the very act of composition, Hoch manages to echo the subject he is focused on. There is nothing overtly disagreeable about his images—the buildings are portrayed as beautiful or fanciful as they are. The cold light is the cold light of day. There is no movement here—no life, but there is design, and color, and it is pleasing.



This image, Almere #7 recalls the videos he also made of Almere. The first is a series of drive-by shots of these cool, clean-lined buildings. The smooth tracking and even light on mid-range shots of orange doors, lime green trash containers, then copper siding and windows, extends his aesthetic into a longer view. The experience is of stillness and finish—an exploration of buildings at their best, early morning perhaps, when no one is around. Who hasn't taken travel photos of piazzas just after dawn, before crowds, to get the best of the place?

I use that word on purpose. For the building is a container of place; liveliness makes a place a Place (to go to, be in, to be seen). Evidently the piazzas, town squares of this newly built city center are mostly empty. New shops, new bars, the cinema even, all in cool new buildings, don't have the draw that the old city streets of Amsterdam which is where the locals go. Almere is a model town, which is to say modeled on a real town, but it hasn't found it's center yet. People who live and work here, they go out of town.



This image from 2002 could be quite depressing had it been framed differently. But that is Hoch's approach: to present the thing, however banal or troublesome (such as faux grass in a children's park) in such a way as to be compositionally beautiful.


Or arresting, as is this simple shot of blue wall and gray floor.

This show reminded me of one I'd seen this summer in Santa Monica, Lewis Baltz: Sites of Technology at Gallery Luisotti.
Lewis Baltz, after working many years in black and white turned to color. Known for incredible work of the desert landscape, in the late 80s, he explored the strange landscape of institutes of high technology.



This is Cray Supercomputer, CERN, Geneva...



and this Unoccupied Office, Mitsubishi, Vitre (FR), both from 1989-91.

Baltz is working with a very different aesthetic intent than Hoch, though in a sense they are both concerned with the same subject, the human/inhuman environment. In Geneva, for instance, instead of pulling in close to the supercomputer, taking a shot of the blue and yellow, at the corner for instance, Blatz steps back from the scene and allows in the consoles to the side, the empty chair and blank walls. There's no mistaking the strange inhumanity of the place, nor the vacuousness of the unoccupied office space.

It is a painful place, this empty space which is a place people occupy, daily. Baltz's photos convey pathos and this emotional content is what is missing in Hoch's work—yet his are beautiful. It's an interesting dilemma. I am delighted by beauty and moved by feeling. Not either, but both. Cakes and Ale.


Hoch's photos courtesy of Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam and Dogenhaus Galerie, Leipzig.