Thursday, April 16, 2009

From postcards to digital photography

An argument can be made that there is a direct aesthetic and philosophical connection between the early 20th century postcards collected and appreciated by photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), which are now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and digital photography today.

The postcards (above left  of Santa Fe station, and below, a birdseye view of Lincoln, NE) which Evans liked because they presented scenes of America in a direct and artless quality, are similar in manner and intention to pictures people take every second, at this point, when they travel throughout the world.

First, let's discuss the postcards. During his life, Evans collected about 9,000 postcards, which the photographer meticulously organized into different genres, such as factories, automobiles, street scenes or New York venues. Evans also wrote articles about his postcards in 1948 and 1964 for Fortune Magazine, where he worked as an editor, and even lectured at Yale about them in 1965, before he took a faculty position there.

The Metropolitan exhibition, called "Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard," offers about 700 of his postcards, organized around his themes and, on the entry wall, for the monumentality in their smallness and similarity. The exhibition also shows how in 1936 he transformed several of his New Deal photographs, by cropping them, into the postcard format. (Above right is one of those images.) The results ultimately led to his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 and his fame. In 1994, the Met acquired the Evans archive, which contain the postcards, negatives, prints, diaries and other personal effects.

The show’s curator, Jeff Rosenheim, is suggesting by the exhibition that the straightforward nature and anonymous quality of the postcards influenced Evans as a photographer. Evans started collecting the postcards before he actually became a photographer. He valued the postcards’ non-sentimental and documentary nature, which eventually became the essence of Evans’ photographic works. He never aimed to copy the images, per se. There is only one example of Evans reproducing a postcard scene.

To manufacture the postcards in Evans’ collection, which date from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1920s, itinerant photographs would shoot main streets, railroad stations, interesting buildings, hotels, seashores, new technologies, mountains and tourist attractions throughout the United States. From the negatives, printing presses in Germany and in Detroit would print inexpensive postcards, which local towns or merchants would purchase so visiting members of the public would buy them and send the images with cute little notes to family and friends back home when they traveled.

Today, people do exactly the same thing with their digital photographs of the places they visit as people in the past did with postcards. We email a photo or create slide shows so friends and family can watch the pictures on their own computer, with text captions or even voice-overs describing the images. The obvious difference between the postcards and digital photography is that today we can literally put ourselves in the picture. We control the means of expression.

But the democratization of photography started with those postcards and Evan’s co-option of them, one could argue. Evans’ appreciated the postcard form, which informed his vision of photography, that of photographers of his generation and that of all successive photographers and artists. Once Evans made accessible the “beauty” in the ordinary, such an aesthetic became apparent to us all.

What is amazing to me when I scan Flickr or other photosharing sites on the web, is how many digital photographs of staggering beauty and power so-called “average” people are taking. Some are panoramas of nature, while others are snapshots unveiling the character of an urban side street covered with graffiti, or a hotel, or a beach. Even the unusual is captured: such as an airplane landing on water in the Hudson River.

The Metropolitan show of Evans’ postcards, which runs until May 25, provides a historical context for the evolution of photography. What photography will look like in the next hundred years is anybody’s guess. But given the proliferation of social networking, collaboration among people --as in 4 a.m. project and the public-curated show of photography at the Brooklyn Museum --may play a role in photoimagery, at least in the near term. I suspect in the future we will still like buildings, seascapes and escapes from it all. Who knows, though?

(Images courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the copyright for them. Left, Unknown Artist, Santa Fe Station and Yards, San Bernardino, Calif., ca. 1910 Postcard, Photomechanical reproduction, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, 1994 (1994.264.1.2); Right, Walker Evans (American, 1903– 1975) [Detail of Penny Picture Display, Savannah], 1936, Postcard format gelatin silver print, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991 (1991.1076))

Friday, April 3, 2009

19th century artists in the Middle East

When the Dahesh Museum closed its doors at 56th Street and Madison Avenue in September 2007, I was disappointed. Its collection of 3000 works of academic art from the 19th and early 20th centuries always was a sobering counterpoint to Impressionism, Modernism and abstraction in painting. The museum itself also was enjoyable with its diverse exhibitions, great gift store and a cafe that overlooked Madison Avenue.

When I heard in December 2008 that Dahesh and Syracuse University Art Galleries entered into a two-year agreement to organize several exhibitions in the university's Manhattan and upstate gallery spaces I was happy Dahesh's collection would still be available in the New York metropolitan area. Syracuse, which houses the Annie Walters Arents Collection of 19th century academic paintings, and Dahesh have collections that complement each other.

Their first venture, "In Pursuit of the Exotic: Artists Abroad in 19th Century Egypt and the Holy Land" is now showing at the Palitz Gallery in Lubin Hall, at 11 East 61st Street, owned by Syracuse University. The show runs from March 24, 2009 until April 30, 2009.
Going to academic art exhibitions requires a little work on the part of this viewer because many of the artists are not familiar to me. As I am not a scholar of art history, I know more about the famous late 19th and early 20th century artists, named Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Picasso and their colleagues, who rebelled against the academy.

But because the Palitz Gallery is small, the 27 works in the current exhibition are manageable, even if the names of the artists don't slip off my tongue. But isn't the whole point of going to see art to learn more about art?

In this case, the focus of the show was to highlight how a group of 19th century artists traveled to the Middle East to obtain accurate, first-hand views of these exotic locales. Rather than devise romanticized notions of the region from their imaginations or book descriptions, as had been done throughout the history of art by artists to depict Bible and Judeo-Christian themes, these artists painted from life. Some, such as David Roberts, wore local clothing to not be conspicous as they painted or sketched. Others even chose to eventually settle in the region.

Academic training in the 18th century taught artists to paint from life, in plein air, or on site, the exhibition notes say. Artists had accompanied Napolean when he invaded Egypt in 1798, which was the basis of the Dahesh's last exhibition, "Napolean on the Nile." But the artists in this current show, from the latter part of the 19th century, explored the region in much greater depth, traveling throughout Israel, Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Algeria. A map of Roberts' extensive travel is in the show.

When they returned to Europe, besides being purveyors of art from sites of great historical significance and their people, the artists obtained a cachet value as cultural adventurers. Artists, such as Roberts and Robert Hay, could sell multiple color prints of their works because of the newly invented lithographic printing process. They created both a supply and demand for what was then called Orientalist art. Photography, also recently invented, enabled images to be reproduced.

The paintings and prints in the exhibition capture the heat, light, dust in the desert, people, culture, commerce, history, religion and architecture of the Middle East. Marketplaces, from boat-based reed sales along the Nile to pottery and food stands in the cities and outskirts, are represented, as are holy sites and temples throughout the region.
Most of the art in the show is "apolitical" the exhibition notes say, except for one epic painting by Gustave Bauernfeind, "Jaffa, Recruiting Turkish Soldiers" in Palestine, 1888, (left), depicting the modern Ottoman Empire. Recruiting is a "euphemism for forced abduction into military service," the notes say.

"Along the Nile at Gyzeh", above left, by Charles Theodore Frere, (1814-1888) also was made without reflecting French colonial ambitions, the painting note says. But Frere eventually accompanied Empress Eugenie of France to the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal, which provided a commercial route from the Mediterranean to Egypt, and painted a "suite of watercolors at her command."

The painting, even if drawn from nature, offers a romantic view of the stillness of the Nile at daybreak with the pyramids in the background and in the foreground palm trees and cattle as witnesses to both the sunrise and the architecture. Humans, even though they built the pyramids, are absent from the image. The time depicted in the painting could be that of the ancient Eygpt or the 19th century.

That timelessness in this painting and in many others in the exhibition, has a tendency to mask the reality of the existing politics of the time. Doing so, they offer entertainment value for idealizing these Orientalist themes, then and now. For me, though, additional study of the artists, their choice of specific subject matter, their patrons and the time in which they worked is necessary. Thankfully, the Dahesh and Syracuse University Art Galleries now have an opportunity to continue to explore these academic works in their artistic and historical context.

(Images courtesy of the Dahesh Museum.)

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Transforming stuff into art

 A week ago, if I looked at what is on my desk, I would see a computer monitor, a keyboard, a plastic water bottle, a scotch tape dispenser, a cup filled with pens, a small Buddha, a stapler and a land-line telephone. I didn't imagine these objects outside of what they are and what they are supposed to do.

But now I can conjure up a whole new life for these things. Maybe, I can cut up the clear bottle into small trapezoids, punch two holes in them and string them like fish scales on an aqua-colored fishing line to make a necklace. When the multicolored pens run out of ink, perhaps I can slice them into small tile-like squares and create a mosaic.

Frankly, I am not about to become a home-crafter. Maybe when I retire. But after going to "Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary" exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design , in which artists transform known objects into art, I couldn't stop myself from doing the thought experiment. Although the show opened September 27 and is closing April 19, I never made it the 10 blocks from my home to Columbus Circle to go before. I have no idea why. But, boy, I am glad I finally did, to the show and to the new museum, the opening of which coincided with the show's opening. (The museum itself is for another posting.)

Each piece in the two-floor MAD exhibition makes visible the process of creativity and stretches the imagination. The artists take objects--foil from liquor bottles, gun triggers, guns, white plastic spoons, black rubber combs, shopping bags, dog tags, tires, plastic eyeglasses, spools of thread, clothing labels, LPs, phone books, quarters, jigsaw puzzle pieces, old wood, rusty steel, buttons, safety pins--and turn them into images, sculpture, jewelry, furniture, light fixtures, you name it.

But the joy of creation is not the main inspiration for the works, made by 54 artists from throughout the world. War, politics, environmental concerns, identity and value, are some themes the art addresses. Do-Ho Suh's "Metal Jacket" , for example, appears to be a suit of armor comprised of American dog tags. The "Hope Throne" is constructed from "discarded, buried, and rusted weapons used during the brutal civil war that gripped my country, Mozambique, from 1975 to 1992," says artist Gonçalo Mabunda on MAD's website.

The press material says the "focus of the exhibition is neither on sustainability nor recycling," but points out that the "works can be catalysts for thought about these issues." A pyramid by Jill Townsley, above right, constructed from 9,273 plastic spoons and 3,091 red rubber bands seems to suggest a certain wastefulness in disposable utensil use. With time, a wall video shows, the rubber bands snap and the pyramid falls apart. Plastic spoons may be convenient for our lifestyle, but the pyramid scheme eventually self destructs.

"Textile Worker" by Teresa Agnew, above, composed of labels from clothing, thread and backing, brings attention to laborers in global markets. When I first saw the piece, I was blown away by the ingenuity of the use of the labels to create the image. But then I concentrated on its content, thinking about the difference in culture between the sari-clad woman making the clothing and the ultimate consumer wearing the labeled, designer clothes. I also thought about the hardships of textile workers compared to the lifestyle of the garment's purchaser. In the image, though, the seamstress, is concentrating and dedicated to her work, implying that her labor should be respected, not pitied. But given the downfall of the world economy, and reductions in consumer spending leading to job losses internationally, I now wonder what may have happened to such jobs.

Another example of sheer genius in using a disposable item to make art is the portrait of "Madam C. J. Walker", by Sonya Clark. The artist took plastic pocket black combs, removed their teeth in some places and kept them in others, to weave together a black and white pixelated plastic tapestry of the first African-American woman to become a millionaire. Madam Walker made her fortune by developing hair products for black women.

Clark says on the museums website: "The comb takes on more significance than its obvious reference to Madam Walker’s business since it carries with it complex layers of associative meaning: The black plastic combs evoke a legacy of hair culture, race politics, and antiquated notions of good hair and bad hair…. Combs are tools in as much as they order the fibers that we grow… when a comb has missing teeth, there is evidence of a struggle."

The exhibition offers many amazing pieces of repurposed art: Liquor labels, tapestry. Safety pins, a necklace. Old spectacles, a chandelier. A pile of auction catalogues, a sculpture of the Buddha's head. Quarters are welded together to make a chaise lounge. Scrap steel and wood, beautiful furniture. Spools of thread=Mona Lisa.

Artists in the past have taken castoffs or overlooked items and turned them into art. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp dubbed a urinal "Fountain" and submitted it for showing at the Society of Independent Artists exhibition. In 1942, Pablo Picasso took a bicycle seat and handlebars and it became a bull's head.

But "Second Lives" shows artists from our time using the materials of today to invent an art that speaks to us now and going forward into the future. Go before it closes. Or at least visit the website. You will never think of your stuff in the same way again.
(Images courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.)