What better way to look at London than through a puddle? The Kingdom of Rains suits it. As an ex-resident I know this only too well.
Gavin Hammond has come up with a series based on this fiendishly simple idea. It just goes to show that if you just stick to a theme, over time you can put together some nice images.
It strikes me as a great idea for a photo safari. Provided you live in London or maybe Seattle.
Ryan McGinley’s “Fawn (Fuchsia),” 2012.
Not content with having one show opening in New York, Ryan McGinley has two at Team Gallery. One ‘Grids’ features images taken at music festivals all over the world. While the other ’Animals’, continues his interest in pairing critters with nude models. Only this time the emphasis is more on the animals.
“Barn Owl (Pale Gold)”
“Lemur (Lilac)”
As usual there’s something memorable about what he does, which feels like a mix of nature, fashion, portrait and documentary photography. Perhaps it’s the fact that his pictures are so hard to classify that makes them interesting. It’s that whole thing of playing with/mixing genre’s to create something wholly new.
I found an interesting interview with him in the New York Times where he said it takes a look an image and thinks ‘Would this be a good album cover?’ which makes total sense when you look at a lot of what he does, from his series on Morrissey to the ‘Moonmilk’ images of a couple of years ago which I love and include here.
Take a look at these images.
If you’ve never seen them before what do you think is going on? Mug shots maybe or perhaps communist area portraits from some far away Asian country back in the day.
Well they are portraits of prisoners at Tuol Sleng Prison in Cambodia taken just before the people where executed by the Khmer Rouge.
There’s something utterly compelling about them once you know this.
There’s the disturbing nature of how many of the images are so well composed, as if the photographer was more interested in framing than humanity. But then again what else could they do? The chances of saving the condemned must have been nil at this point.
Then there are the looks on the faces. Less a fear than a blank resignation, as if they can’t quite believe what is happening to them. Or believe it only to well and have just given up.
Pictures of young mothers still holding their babies and young boys too young to understand what death means are particularly harrowing.
I saw them many years ago while doing a photo class at ICP in NYC and just came across them today on the very excellent ‘American Suburbia X’ site.
I think they are among the most powerful images I’ve ever seen and a warning to the world of what happens when fanaticism and ideology run wild.
Carlo Mollino was a show off. Not content with being a brilliant architect he was also a highly talented set designer, furniture maker, race car driver and skier. He also very generously took time off from his busy schedule to create these porno Polaroids, which in the mind of many men at least are his highest achievement
Ciao Carlo.
Just what is the point of the modern artist? Such an individual has to compete with a multitude of media, from the Internet to film and appear relevant to our lives. All while using a medium, the art gallery, that seems often to be as much fun as a church.
The Whitney’s Biennial attempts to shake us into viewing things in new ways be it through an animatronic boy or the use of an old magnetic liquid called Ferro fluid invented in the late sixties.
They try live video from Charles Atlas, test patterns courtesy of Lucy Raven and underground films from the late George Kuchar.
They even have an artist, Dawn Kasper, who makes part of the gallery her studio and produces work while we watch.
'This could be something if I let it', Dawn Kasper
And even though it all promotes thought and is obviously trying hard, none of it quite makes it for me.
This is partly because of the sheer scope of what we are trying to take in. Biennials by their very nature tend to be a loosely themed mish-mash of everything. They require us to think about documentary photography one minute and sculpture the next.
Trying to review each individual work is impossible and also a little unfair, as there’s no way we can really get to grips with even a small portion of the work.
Of everything I saw I was most intrigued by the Giselle Vienne’s animatronic boy, who engages in a creepy unsettling dialogue about evil with a hand puppet. Yet even this, while it provoked reaction and drew a crowd, somehow wasn’t quite there yet. After all we belong to a society brought up on amazing technical innovation and seeing something deliberately low-fi and expecting us to be deeply disturbed by it is a big ask.
I’m glad I went and I’ll go next year but the format of the Biennial makes it rather like a big music festival. Loads of acts but only 1 or 2 you actually want to see.
The French Riviera, Givenchy, Hermes and Cartier all come together beautiful to create the wardrobe for the 1958 film ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ which I saw at the film Forum yesterday. Indeed if we’re being catty we might argue David Niven’s wardrobe has dated rather better than his acting style.
Luckily there is a little more to ‘Bonjour Tristesse’, which translates for those like me who don’t know French as Hello sadness, than it’s panache and location.
It’s interesting for the fact that the male figures in this film occupy the position normally taken by female characters, that of the ornamental and narcissistic.
Indeed Raymond played by the ever debonair Niven describes himself as ‘a vain and silly man’
As such he finds himself a pawn in a power struggle between the possessive daughter, Cecile (Jean Seberg) and the controlling wife-to-be, Ann (Deborah Kerr). It’s a game, which in this case, has tragic consequences as Cecile engineers an affair between her father and his ex, which she cruelly allows Ann to witness. Ann responds by committing suicide, an act that devastates the lives of Cecile and her father, making all of lives pleasures empty and meaningless for them.
As an example of the lengths women will go to in their battle for control over the men they desire, it has no filmic equal.
The fact that Cecile’s relationship with her father is also borderline incestuous, make her actions doubly disturbing.
I haven’t read the book by Francoise Sagan on which the film is based but I very much want to having seen this. In fact in the process of writing this I found the opening line to the novel which sums up the mood that pervades the whole film
‘A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness. In the past the idea of sadness always appealed to me, now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I had known boredom, regret, and at times remorse, but never sadness. Today something envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, which isolates me.’
Whenever I see any color film from the 70’s I’m always amazed at the richness and quality of it. Jeff Devine’s 70’S surf portraits are no exception. I’m not sure if this is Kodachrome or just color film he’s using but whatever it is the results are outstanding. Admittedly it’s hard to go wrong when you’re backdrop is the coast of Hawaii or California but still there’s something crisp, clean and inviting about these surf scenes that makes a non-surfer like me want to reach for a board.
On reflection I think what makes the color in these shots cool is that it doesn’t mimic reality, it heightens it in someway. Modern digital processes and film seem obsessed with the idea of making it look ‘real’ and at the same time through use of Photoshop ‘pristine’, thereby taking the guts and the art out of the picture.
For more cool surfing shots check out his site at http://www.jeffdivinesurf.com/
I picked up Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment’ absent-mindedly while in McNally Jackson in Soho. At first it seemed an unlikely choice. A book about a Neapolitan woman living in Turin who is told by her husband that he is leaving her for another woman.
This news is devastating enough for any person but for the heroine of Ferrante’s novel it is cataclysmic and sends her into a spiral of hatred fear and self-loathing.
What’s makes the book so fascinating is its coruscating honesty and passion. Ferrante doesn’t put a positive gloss on her heroine’s collapse. Olga attacks her husband in the street; she is spiteful to neighbors, her old friends, even her children. She seems at times almost overcame with bitterness or too distracted to actually function in the real world. At one point her daughter stabs her in the leg with a pair of scissors but she is too out of it to realize until she sees the gaping wound.
There is something monstrous about her, as if the love she felt for her husband has been eviscerated and replaced by pure hatred. She is poisoning herself with her feelings and seems to be powerless to stop it. Perhaps her most terrifying fear is that she becomes like the’ poverella’, a woman she remembers from her Neapolitan childhood. The ‘poverella’ was so-called because she suffered the terrible fate of having her husband leave her for another woman. Eventually she becomes a sad and dejected object of pity and takes her own life. She haunts Olga, metaphorically and literally (at one stage she starts hallucinating the woman in her apartment)
Yet as the novel progresses we come to see that all this emotion is not self-destructive but cathartic. It’s almost as if she has an illness and her anger is the fever that needs to work itself out of her body for her to be cured.
Indeed this idea physically manifests it self in a scene near the end of the book when the family dog is poisoned and her son suffers a severe virus.
The dog dies, the son recovers and from this point so does Olga. For once the love she felt for her husband has vanished, the hate can leave too and she can move on with her life.
In the end the novel is upbeat. The ending sees her find not just herself but love in the form of her neighbor, a musician.
It’s one of those happy endings that is totally justified by the previous action. After all Olga has won. She has beaten her demons and those of a sexist society by facing them like a mighty warrior. It’s noticeable how fearless and combative she is during much of the novel, almost as if she were a mythical Homerian hero defeating magical creatures.
I can imagine this would be a very popular choice with any woman who’ve been through a traumatic break up but as man I still found it to be a compelling, if sobering, read.
‘A Bigger Picture’ is a slight, if interesting look, at the painter David Hockney. It focuses on his return to his native Yorkshire to paint a series of landscapes that form part of the recent exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy.
I had wanted to see this show when I was over in London but tickets were sold out which goes to show the immense popularity of this art world titan.
The landscapes in this latest series are influenced by Chinese scrolls, which unlike western art, try to see a scene from no fixed point of view. Hockney points out the Chinese idea is more like the way we truly see; with our eye constantly moving across the landscape, scanning it .The unrolling of the scroll kind of mimics this action.
Indeed to continue the oriental theme, Hockney repeats a Chinese dictum which states to create great art you need “an eye, a hand an and a heart”, before adding ‘Two out of three wont do’. As the film continues we see this not just a neat quote about his own work but also a not so subtle attack at rivals like Damien Hirst.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole film is when the film maker Bruno Wollhiem, almost mischievously shows Hockney’s latest work to Hirst, the great pretender to Hockney’s greatest living artist throne.
Almost the first words out of Hirst’s mouth are ‘well I wouldn’t want to own one’ before begrudgingly admitting that they ‘work.’ He naturally notices the presence of death in the work (not surprising for an artist obsessed with the subject) but describes the images as ‘annoyingly dark’.
It’s a great example of the ego of the artist when confronted with another talented practitioner. Not that Hockney is a man lacking in a healthy self-regard.
He has a go at Hirst by creating a poster to advertise his own work entitled ‘A Bigger Sensation’, a sly dig at the Sensation exhibition from the late nineties that Hirst took part in.
It all seems very stage-managed; as if both artists like two boxers mouthing off before a fight, know that such a showdown only adds to their own reputations
It’s Ali versus Frazier all over again …but with paintbrushes.
Doug Rickard is someone who has shamefully escaped my attention. A recent visit to the ICP website hipped me to this interesting new photographer.
His series ‘New American Picture’ is particularly impressive. It features areas of America with high levels of unemployment. These desolate, hopeless-looking places are found remotely by Rickard, using Google street view.
The artist then composes images based on the Google technology on his computer screen and photographs them.
You might ask why doesn’t he just go there and take a picture? To which I’d reply that would only produce another series of images detailing with poverty in America in a manner we’ve seen many times before.
This method puts an interesting twist on traditional street photography, while not shirking the responsibility to bare witness.
It also draws our attention to the lack of privacy in our lives. In the modern world it would seem there’s always someone watching you. However, be comforted by the fact that if it’s Doug Rickard, at least you’ll get a cool image out of it.
