Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork

Charles LeDray’s show workworkworkworkwork at the Whitney opens with a line of miniature hats hanging high on a white wall, immediately in front of you as you exit the elevators. The hats all seem familiar, ranging from flamboyant to boring, from a cheese hat to a plain summer sun hat, from a three-cornered hat to a D.A.R.E. baseball cap. The piece is titled Village People and serves as an excellent introduction to LeDray’s work. Charles LeDray creates miniatures: tiny suits, dresses, porcelain vases, flip-flops and an orrery. His work is delightful, profound, and very compelling but it took me much thought to figure out why I connect these particular adjectives with his work.

My first thought: I find LeDray’s work fascinating for the same reason I find dollhouse furniture fascinating. But this begs two questions. One: If LeDray’s work is equivalent to dollhouse furniture, then how does it merit a show at the Whitney? And two: What is so compelling about dollhouse furniture? To answer the second question first, the final piece in the show seems most illustrative of why small-scale objects are so fascinating. The piece is titled Men’s Suits. It consists of three miniature store settings, complete with ceiling (hung from the real ceiling), tile floor, racks and clothing. The first setting looks like a backroom; it has ladders, bins, boxes, an ironing board and piles of clothes. The second is pristine: a full suit, shirt and tie adorn a dressmaker’s dummy in one corner and a table with neatly laid out ties graces the other. The final scene has a rack of suits, a rack of casual men’s shirts and a table with folded clothing on it. The scenes are at ground level with the ceilings at chest level; so you have to bend down to see the commercial ceiling (the kind where the tiles pop up). The piece both enlarges and diminishes the viewer. It made me feel superior and protective, looking down on this vulnerable world with tiny buttons on tiny suit coats on a scuffed floor. But it also made me feel vulnerable, because this was my world shown as small, trivial and cute. The scale of this work forces us to view familiar scenes from an outsider’s perspective, because we simply don’t fit.

The second fascinating facet of LeDray’s work is the process. It took me a while to come to this conclusion; I associate process-oriented work with Jackson Pollock or Andy Goldsworthy, but LeDray’s painstaking process is one of the strongest elements of his work. I picture too large thumbs and fingers working on miniscule stitches. I can’t imagine figuring out how to delicately mold porcelain into an elegant vessel as big as the thumb that shapes it. LeDray’s clothing shows the process in the stitches, but his porcelain and carved bone baffle the viewer. Wheat, is the first piece made from human bone that the viewer encounters in the exhibit. As the title implies, it is a carving of one life size (one of a few pieces that are not scaled down) shaft of wheat, about the length of a human arm bone with detail so exquisite, it seems that a real shaft of wheat has been petrified into a marble like substance.

The title of the show workworkworkworkwork (also the title of one of the pieces) suggests the importance of process. The title suggests the unending labor of humanity and the laborious task of making the objects. LeDray adds to this sense of labor/work by informing the viewer of the number of objects in a piece. The piece workworkworkworkwork is made up of “588 objects” and Milk and Honey consists of “2000 vessels.” Many of the pieces include this numeric catalog of the small objects that make up the whole piece.

Finally, to answer why it is worth the Whitney’s time, I feel that LeDray makes each piece more than just a diminution of a larger object (more than dollhouse furniture). He is an artist, not an artisan. Each piece is worth attention. Each piece has a significant meaning, narrative, and quirk that makes it worth my time, and worth the Whitney’s time.

The show includes four porcelain pieces, Milk and Honey, Oasis, Untitled and Throwing Shadows. Each piece consists of rows upon rows of tiny porcelain vessels in either a vertical glass case with shelves, or in the case of Throwing Shadows a low horizontal glass case, both similar to museum display cases. Each piece could be seen simply as a manifestation of the artist’s obsessive-compulsive desire to make thousands of tiny objects, but the pieces serve a much greater meaning, especially in conjunction with their titles. Vessels hold food and water, essentials for human existence, so shelves of thousands of vessels imply a lot of food, and a lot of work. The title Milk and Honey partially describes the milky white of all the vessels in this piece, but also is a metaphor for “plenty” used to describe the Promised Land sought by the Israelites of the Old Testament. Oasis, in which the pieces are glazed with bright colors, also implies a similar abundance of food. These pieces also speak about human history and archeology. Most of the artifacts we have from past civilizations are vessels. The “museum cases” imply a display of the history of humanity and its constant search for sustenance. Throwing Shadows particularly recalls this meaning. While the title refers to the act of “throwing” on a potter’s wheel and to the color of the pieces (black), it also refers to the “shadows” that humans leave behind: their vessels.

Other pieces are less weighty and more witty. Lace/Underwear consists of a framed piece of blue fabric with dainty lace embroidered to it, under which is attached a tine pare of men’s briefs. The contrast is humorous, but upon contemplation we realize that the underwear probably took as long to make and is no less intricate than the lace. LeDray’s work brings into perspective the habits of humanity: the styles of clothing, the things we find pretty and the artifacts we choose to remember.

Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork At the Whitney Museum of American Art (Nov. 2010 - Feb. 2011)

workworkworkworkwork is a retrospective exhibition that brings together numerous bodies of work by New York artist Charles LeDray. Master miniaturist, LeDray, has spent the last two decades creating an arsenal of intricately crafted, everyday objects on a very small scale. The title of the show refers to an earlier project. In 1991, after creating a trove of handmade miniature items like clothing, magazines, books and many other household items, LeDray displayed the work on a Manhattan sidewalk. He presented the items randomly, like someone’s possessions in a sidewalk sale. The work on view at the Whitney Museum also includes hand-stitched clothing, paperback books, and daily objects, as well as wheel-thrown tiny ceramics and meticulously carved human bone sculptures such as buttons or furniture. The feature presentation of the exhibition is the artist’s most recent work, Men’s Suits, (2006-2009), an installation of three vignettes of second hand shops.

Upon entry into the exhibition the viewer confronts Village People (2003-2006), little hats of all kinds lining the length of the wall, high above eye level. All kinds of hats in miniature are represented such as the sombrero, cowboy, safari, or Indian headdress. These hats obviously refer to the different roles we play in our lives. Our identities become presented through such roles, developed through our professions, interests, or responsibilities.

Not all, but most of LeDray’s works are experiments with men’s clothing. Lining the gallery walls are miniature outfits, suits, and uniforms, tailored to perfection. But this is not a fashion show. Surprisingly, LeDray never had formal training. He learned to sew from his mother as a child. The work he creates is scaled down, perhaps so the objects are not mistaken for commodities, but are subjects for introspection. The clothing we wear is the way in which we present and protects ourselves in the world. These works serve as substitutes for human presence, almost breathing on their own. Clothes that have been through life do not stay pristine. LeDray’s articles of clothing show such signs of life as tatters, stains, holes, missing buttons, and patched denim. Much of the work is quite literal, while other clothes are wittily or humorously abstracted or altered.

The series Men’s Suits (2006-2009), is a presentation of three small-scale scenes of second-hand clothing shops. One scene presents what looks like the back room of a store with hangers, laundry bags, a ladder and piles of clothes in disarray. The second is a public second hand or vintage shop, fully stocked, with coats, jackets, pants, shirts, gloves, belts and more. The third is a specialty section of a men’s shop, featuring an array of tiny ties, each a different pattern, from paisley to plaid. For this project LeDray spent three years painstakingly hand sewing miniature suits, shirts, and accessories, as well as crafting furniture, clothes hangers, laundry bags and shopping carts. The work is astounding in its realism. The miniature adult clothes are small - too small for any real person to wear - but they are not so small to seem like toys. The fabrics are not cheap and flimsy like doll’s clothes. One can tell that the materials have been carefully chosen, cut from real clothes. Small and wonderful, the work is delightful, but not necessarily cute. Blue jeans and jackets look worn, as if real life had been carried out in them. The vignettes are startlingly believable, causing a suspension of disbelief. One wonders about the lives of people who might have worn these clothes or who might choose to purchase them. This sensation is reminiscent of visiting preserved historical places, such as Versailles, Monticello, or the Anne Frank house, as they manage to transport the viewer to the environment and give a realistic sense of the lives that were lived there. This sensation, however, is momentary. The viewer is not completely enveloped, but towers above the scenes. One quickly returns to reality and the vignettes begin to feel like oversized dioramas.

These installations give an eerie perspective into human experience and our everyday lives. First, the scale (about one–third the scale of actual life) evokes the loneliness of knowing how small our lives are in comparison to the immensity of the universe. Second, one cannot help but feel a sense of futility. These coats, gloves, pants and collared shirts are so perfectly made, but no one will ever actually get the pleasure of wearing them. One thinks of the hours spent toiling away - planning, cutting, folding, ironing, and stitching…stitching…stitching. It brings to mind the hours and hours we all spend at work, or school, or on hobbies or projects - the labors of love and necessity. But when a task is complete, then what? It’s done – on to the next thing. One cannot help but sometimes wonder, what is it all for?

Wonder and disbelief are heightened when viewing Charles LeDray’s intricate ceramics. Presented in 6-7 ft. tall multi-tiered vitrines Throwing Shadows and Milk and Honey show thousands of delicate, porcelain vessels. The shapes of the vessels vary greatly and no form is spared. There are amphoras, urns, decanters, carafes, jugs, bowls, etc. One wonders what these tiny containers hold. Are they vessels for the hopes and dreams of the living or little reliquaries for something lost?

Lastly, there are the sculptures, such as an ivory finger bone with a gold wedding band or stacked furniture, carved from human bone. Again these inspire feelings of loss or futility. These types of objects may be the most morbid in his oeuvre, yet they do not fail to fascinate.

Witty and humorous, though often melancholy, the work is a delight. Though we are mortal, the gift of life is for living. Each person finds meaning in their own way, through how they choose to live and spend their time. One must do something to keep busy and Charles LeDray’s hands have not been idle. He has created an entire tiny universe of objects that manages to give grand insight into real human experience.

Matthew Day Jackson at Peter Blum

Brooklyn-based Matthew Day Jackson brings together a versatile group of works in this one-man show. The pieces present a study in of seemingly oppositional influences. Fond of directly referencing well-known artworks of the past, Jackson also recycles much of the imagery and shapes of his own earlier work. More traditional materials such as digital photography, video, steel and wood are combined with repurposed bits of furniture and the shell of a vintage car. Pieces composed of primary or candy colors are juxtaposed with pieces rooted in rich shades of gray, ebony and amber. This palette, in addition to his choice of materials, references traditional Americana as well as anthropological and scientific inquiry.

One long wall of the gallery hosts a large set of steel shelves filled with an array of different objects, including bones, antique pottery, illuminated x-rays and a neon sign. Rather than a jumbled antique-shop arrangement, the disparate items in Study Collection VI are meticulously placed. Each object is given space to breath, like a museum-style exhibit of historical or scientific items. The choice of objects, however, as well as their placement on shelves, is evocative of a personal collection in someone’s home. Along the tops shelves are skulls, plaster head casts, and the phrase, “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths,” in neon. The row below this contains molds of human organs, a chest x-ray, and ceramic vessels. The remaining shelves repeat this pattern of objects that reference segments of the human body, which transitions from head to chest to abdomen to legs. At each level, an unpredictable set of objects is cleverly positioned so the overall “body” structure is not immediately apparent, but slowly emerges.

One of Jackson’s strengths is his ability to be simultaneously subtle and direct, spare yet fully realized. For example, in the work just discussed, the neon sign element is a slightly altered replica of Bruce Nauman’s 1967 piece. By incorporating it as a minor element in a larger piece, Jackson subtly incorporates an early example of an artist using a non-art medium, which echoes his own use of unconventional materials. Though his objects are clean and somewhat simple, they are substantial and fully occupy their assigned space. This is exemplified by the narrow piece of steel beam on the row of shelves representing the femur, the strongest bone in the human body. By far the object with the least complicated shape, it harmoniously lines up with the objects above and below it, yet asserts itself through meaning. The most modern of materials does not surpass the strength of the most ancient (what appears to be a dinosaur bone is also positioned on this shelf).

An initially playful-looking piece, the construction of Enola Gay belies its true nature. Constructed from scraps of IKEA furniture and ceiling tiles, this oversize piece has the coloration, shape and texture of a child’s foam puzzle. Simple interlocking shapes, some of which pop out, are layered over a yellow and blue sky. The veins supporting the cockpit roof take on the appearance of cartoon dinosaur bones, while the bright red levers and steering columns look like an arcade driving game. In a way, the use of IKEA furniture is representative of pleasure. The brand has posited furniture buying—formerly an expensive chore—as exciting and accessible.

The paradox of the piece is that the “Enola Gay” is the WWII plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The audience placed inside the cockpit, looking out through the front windows. By placing the viewer inside the plane, Jackson creates a disconcerting reality. In the same way the war paraphernalia is often fascinating to children, the viewer is initially delighted by what appears to be a giant toy, but is in fact symbolic of the “loss of innocence” often associated with this first use of nuclear weapons.

A single piece, The Tomb, is installed in BlumArt’s smaller SoHo space. In the center of the gallery, eight massive astronauts mounted atop blocks of wood greet the viewer. The astronauts, with their oversized faceless helmets, resemble green army toys, lending and element of whimsy. Atop their shoulders, however, is a glass coffin containing a body (based on the artist’s own). While this is sobering, the scale of the piece is such that viewers can walk between the figures and under the coffin. Upon entering that space and looking up, one sees that the bottom of the coffin is a mirror. The viewer not only sees themselves, but is also able to see into the coffin. This simultaneously brings to mind funhouse mirrors and traveling “freak” shows where the contents of mysterious cages are visible but partially obscured.

Artwork that invites the viewer to interact in this manner is an invigorating departure from the usual mandate to look from a distance. The material also invites closer inspection. The compressed wood and plastic of the astronauts resembles rock veined with quartz. This incorporation of engaging elements rewards the viewer even if they miss the piece’s direct reference to the Tomb of Philippe Pot, a 15th century French sculpture of monks shouldering the burden of their ruler’s coffin. There is a direct contrast between this old, esteemed work and the new piece’s use of modern materials and figures.

Jackson skirts the boundary between scholarly artistic, historical, or scientific references and accessibility by including elements that encourage viewer engagement. Often, when contemporary art combines disparate elements and references, the result is beyond immediate comprehension. A human skeleton encased in Lucite is abstracted only to the point where curving bone edges are flattened into geometric angles, so the subject remains decipherable, but still gives the viewer a satisfying sense that they have discovered something hidden. Jackson’s work rewards the viewer immediately while also containing layers of more obscure meaning. This balance is rare and difficult to realize without coming across as kitschy or insincere to the more experienced viewer. Jackson achieves an elusive level of deep and significant meaning while avoiding audience alienation.

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum which features the greatest photographic treasures of these three giants of black and white photography. Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand are all American photographers whose work is included in this three person show and is considered some of the most ground breaking, diverse and the best photographic works of the last one hundred years. The show has over 115 photographs that are featured from the collections of these three great artists of the twentieth century. The show features a vast variety of types of photography from silver gelatin prints, gum bicrombate, platinum, palladium, and other alternative black and white processes.

Alfred Stieglitz whose sumptuous black and white images are know the world over for their beauty and supreme aura that they posses. He was considered an advocate for photography during his time and helped to create the foundation for the Metropolitan’s fine art photography collection. He himself donated some of his own works to start the Met’s collection and those works are featured in this show. Stieglitz work with Camera Work journal helped to lay the foundation for modern photography. Some of the works featured are portraits, cityscapes, and Stieglitz well know cloud studies and additionally many of his portraits of Georgia O’Keefe are shown as well.

One of the works featured is a gelatin silver Print entitled, Georgia O’Keefe–Hand and Wheel 1933. The rich black and white photograph simply features Georgia O’Keefe’s hand caressing a car wheel. O’Keefe’s hand is delicately splayed across the rich black rubber and metal of the wheel well of the car creating an interesting contrast between the femininity of the O’Keefe’s human hand and the masculine in organic lines of the car wheel. Here Stieglitz’s contrast of the delicate nature of the female figure with that of the masculine hard lines of car shows the difference between nature and man-made objects–the organic and in organic. This contrast is further shown buy the emphasis Stieglitz puts in the richness of the tones of black and white in the image. You can see how he sought to show a wide range of value and tone in the image because a vast array of most dense blacks, warmest grays, and brightest whites are featured giving the image a glow off of the page further enhancing the difference and beauty of the organic and geometric qualities of his subject matter. Because of this attention to detail to the tones of the imagery the viewer is able to see the differences in the subject matter of the still life. The ranges of values in the image enhance the subject matter. The masculine parts of the car wheel are rich black tones while the O’Keefe’s hand is delicate tones of grey with subtle shade variations. Even the way Stieglitz framed the photo shows the contrast of the dichotomy of the subject matter. Here Stieglitz shows how a simple framed still life can speak volumes when properly cropped, framed, and printed with the right range of tones and values one can enhance the subject matter and speak more of the underlining meaning of the work.

Dancing Trees–1921-1922, a palladium print features the sumptuous imagery of a trees twisted branches that appear to be dancing. The warm tones of black in this photography enhance the mood and romanticism of the imagery. Because the imagery is in such warm shades of black one is automatically put into a romantic dance with the imagery. The tones and shades of black and white enhance the curvature of the trees spine and cause the viewers eye to dance around the page. Stieglitz was considered a pioneer of photography during his time and perfected the art of printing in these various black and white processes. This perfection is seen in this work. Here again Stieglitz gets a wide variety of tones and shades making the imagery glow off of the page causing the viewer to believe that they are literally seeing reality reproduced right in front of their eyes. Stieglitz is know for doing this with his imagery and this is shown over and over again through out the winding rooms of imagery featured in this show.

Music No. 1–1922 is platinum print of a rich moody landscape that has a small white A-framed house in its foreground. Again here Stieglitz sets the mood of the imagery with his luxurious rich tones that enhance the feeling of the imagery creating an emotive reaction where one is transported to a surreal escape into the mind of Stieglitz. You feel as if you are seeing the world as he did winding through as you navigate the rooms of his body of work. You transported into another time back to when photography was new and misunderstood. It is through this journey that you see that Alfred Stieglitz was trying to elevate the world of the capture image into that of the fine art to show the world the beauty, craftsmanship, and creativity it takes to create a striking image.

As one is taking the journey through the life’s work of the father of modern photography, with each image you are taken deeper and deeper into the rich world of Alfred Stieglitz and the romanticism of his metaphors and masterful printing. Whether featuring his lover, Georgia O’Keefe or a landscape as one glides through the photographic memories of Mr. Stieglitz one cannot help but find the beauty he sought to capture in his lifetime and how he nurtured photography in to the fine art form that it is today. You can see from the show that Stieglitz was a pioneer and the mentor of Edward Steichen and Paul Strand. Even though the show features all three artist’s work. The work of Stieglitz comes to the forefront because he is the father of modern photography. You can see his influence in every photographers work today including that of the Steichen and Strand whose work is featured in the galleries beside his.

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum

John Baldessari’s Pure Beauty, currently on view at the MET, chronicles Baldessari’s work over the last 5 decades. Paintings, photographs, video, and collage enliven the space with a sense of humor that is exhausted by the end of this retrospective. Through his clever awareness of artistic production Baldessari charms audiences by laughing at himself (and all artist’s taking themselves too seriously.) More arresting that the humor in his work is the tendency to map geographic and psychological landscapes. In many of Baldessari’s pieces dating from the late 1960’s and continuing on through the 1970’s a documentation of space, time, and consciousness occurs on the page that invites the viewer to go on a journey. These journeys are both simple and complex, and always more intruiging than better known one liners like Tips For Artists who want to Sell (1966).

In Ghetto Boundary Project (1969) Baldessari marked the boundaries of a San Diego ghetto with silver stickers as defined by the local planning commission. This work delineates the perimeter of the low-income area but does no other investigation into the lives of the people fenced into the statistic. Making the ghetto border tangible in a space where class difference is already felt seems initially irresponsible though it sharpens the awareness of legality of poverty. The people in this community are mapped into a boundary by the state planning commission and turned into a dangerous demographic. Baldessari’s ability to call attention to this through his artistry emphasizes the ability of the artist to unabashedly call attention to social and economic dilemmas. Ghetto Boundary Project’s simple execution clearly demarcates and lives up to Baldessari’s own proverbs “Bad ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution” in that it relies solely on concept.

Another work that explores real space is Aligning Balls,(1972) a series of photographs that record the location of a floating red balloon through the sky. The small photographs arranged horizontally on the wall, connected by a thin pencil line, are whimsical enough to capture attention and hold that grasp through the arbitrary mapping of the red balloon. Aligning Balls is a striking piece because self awareness and aesthetic success. Again Baldessari speaks to the process of art making through the composition of each photograph, the red balloon placed randomly in the picture’s frame. The balloon, quickly moving through the air, had to be captured with agility – without time to plan the composition or any other formal techniques. Though the majority of these photos pictorialize a simple blue sky, two have palm trees peeking into the frame: involving California, a state that Baldessari lived and worked for much of his life.

Goodbye to Boats (Sailing In) (1972-73) navigates both a psychological and physical distance. This series documents Baldessari replicating the emotional act of his father waving goodbye to his mother on a voyage to Europe. Baldessari’s anonymous repetitive salute obliterates the sadness and anxiety usually felt when bidding a loved one farewell. While Goodbye to Boats is heavily imbued with memory and the erasure of memory it remains a carefully composed,formally successful group. There is little variation from photograph to photograph but enough to keep viewers looking closely and comparing each photo to its neighbor. The photographs serve as a marker of time between his parents parting and his reenactment; and the time between when the first photograph and the last were taken, time that has dulled the intensity of a once potent emotion. The inability to see Baldessari’s face heightens the anonymity of the sequence making empathy easy to achieve. Baldessari also alludes to the affect of physical distance: with the artist’s back to us we look with him onto the sea and experience the familiar awe of the ocean and the long journey one must take to cross it.

Mobilizing more traditional forms of mapping, Baldessari does not neglect the landscape of the mind as this motif emerges. In Word Chain: Faucet (1975) and Word Chain: Sunglasses (1975) Baldessari plays a game of free association with his colleagues. Free association is a technique used in psychoanalysis that allows the associater to navigate their own mindscape without restrictions. This journey might begin with a memory or a prompt, and in Baldessari’s case a word. Word Chain: Faucet traces the thought pattern of the individual in a circular form, connecting each thought with arrows. Next to this web is a page of similar size mapping out the same ideas through illustrated pictures and photographs. Though these images do not make logical sense they become a pictorial collage of the assciator’s mind. Through this work Baldessari moves closer to the removal of his own hand in the creation of his work.

More akin to what he is known for, Baldessari’s A Sentence of Thirteen Parts (With Twelve Alternate Verbs) Ending in Fable (1977) Uses humor to negate the artificiality of TV emotion. In this foldout accordion book television stills are paired with words like “fearful” or “sad” mocking the Hollywood ruse on human emotion. These words map and distinguish the changing emotions of these modern day fables by allowing the viewer to participate in a story that eventually reveals its own falsehood. By allowing participation Baldessari becomes removed from the path any given person may take and so accomplishes what projects like Ghetto Boundary Project do: existing as more than an ornament in the real world.

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty

Pure Beauty, at the Met, is John Baldessari’s first major exhibition in the last 20 years in the United States. The exhibition is a large retrospective of Baldessari’s conceptual work over the last five decades. It surveys the artist’s career, starting with his humorous how-to paintings in the late 1960’s and takes us through many years of Baldessari’s photographic, mixed media, and video work.

Baldessari taught art from the beginning of his art career. Born in National City, California, he stayed close to home as he taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA and the University of California at Los Angeles. Baldessari’s collection of how-to books on painting and photography that he gathered while teaching influenced a lot of his early paintings that mockingly share the lessons of how to be an artist and how to sell art.

Baldessari’s painting Art Lesson, 1964, spells out the rules of painting by using illustrations and text common to the lessons found in a how-to painting book. Another satirical lesson is found in his painting, Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell, 1966–1968. This painting uses colors that could be found on a page straight out of a book. It is a large painting with plain black font on a creamy background. As an artist who was working against conventional formulas, Baldessari ironically spelled out three bullet points that would lead an artist to success in the commercial art world. The first tip states, “Generally speaking, paintings with light colors sell more quickly than paintings with dark colors”. This idea is absurd for a conceptual artist to consider, but the work reminds the artist to be aware of commercial influences in his or her own work. Finding it hard to sell his own work early on, Baldessari clearly didn’t follow these tips as a conceptual artist throughout his career. This work, though with little color used, is one of his many works in the exhibition that examines the purpose of color within a larger idea. Using text has been a significant tool in Baldessari’s career as a way to bring traditional photography and painting into the realm of art making. By means of pure commentary, using text, Baldessari brings contemporary ideas to stagnant art practices and commercialism.

Throughout Baldessari’s career, he combined photography with painting and text to create complex images and unpredictable narratives. He used images from popular culture as well as his personal life and created meaning by arranging these images into larger combined images. Most of these photographs are black and white and use solid colors in ways that abstract a few of the figures and objects that are important to the whole piece.

In his painting, Floating: Color, 1972, Baldessari explores the meaning of color by throwing colored paper out his window and capturing it on film. In this work, there are six photographs in a sequence in which the artist is throwing the paper one sheet at a time from the second floor of his house. Baldessari treats the paper in the photographs as abstract pieces of color rather than objects that are being tossed. Focusing on the action of throwing each color of the spectrum, the artist creates a new way for color to be used in photography. Here, color is interchangeable with movement or an object and can be captured on film as such. Within the context of photography, this work is innovating beyond explorations of light and space. It’s a combination of performance and photography to present color as more than just a hue. Color is the performance and the idea that takes these photographs into the conceptual. With the presence of the artist in the photographs, actively creating in front of us, the viewer is witness to the artist’s intentions in the content of the image as well as in the final result of the 6 photographs placed together on a wall. This clarity of intention is found throughout the exhibition by the artist’s use of text and other performances in photography and film.

A later photography work that also uses color abstractly is Baldessari’s Heel, 1986. In this work, Baldessari combined several black and white cinematic stills to make one larger composition. There are several images of feet that surround this work, including a ballerina’s pointing foot, cowboy boots, and feet in bandages. In the center is an image of a crowd with a curving red line painted over a few of the people in the crowd indicating a path that connects them all. A solid yellow dot covers the face of a man being poked by the ballerina’s foot, and a solid blue dot hides an object that an ecstatic woman is holding. Green fills another black and white image. There are a couple photographs of dogs in this composition, which correspond to the title, Heel. By composing several images into one work, Baldessari creates relationships between animal and human behaviors, and the viewer starts to wonder about both the dog’s and the human’s desire to follow. By using cinematic imagery, Baldessari is compiling examples of the personalities in popular media that are being followed and the customs that are being obeyed. By using bright colorful shapes over the black and white images, Baldessari brings the world of design into the work, which has its own customs and rules that are followed. While Baldessari hints at design with these shapes, he doesn’t exactly follow the rules by placing them to his own liking instead of where they will best fit the composition.

As the exhibition proceeds from Baldessari’s earlier paintings with text, to his photos with text and color, to his later works that were full of found images, Baldessari’s work remains strongly conceptual. The exhibition includes a full range of Baldessari’s work that questions the role and education of the artist, the use of color as a design and photographic tool, and the effect that images in the media have on us. Throughout his career, Baldessari brings a sense a humor to his works that the viewer can take away from the exhibition while digesting the artist’s more serious critical insights.

Paul Thek at the Whitney

Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective, is the artist’s first U.S. retrospective at the Whitney Museum. It is an effort to bring the underappreciated frontrunner of contemporary art into our country’s awareness. The show, which runs from October 21 until January 9, showcases the many mediums in which Thek worked. Paul Thek (1933-1988) was a sculptor, a painter and an installation artist and the all-encompassing show displays his “meat” pieces, his environments, and drawings.

Brooklyn-born Thek was a force when he entered the New York art scene, creating graphically gory objects that resembled body parts with wax, called “Technological Reliquaries.” These pieces were inspired by a trip to the Capuchin catacombs in Sicily with photographer Peter Hujar in which over 8,000 corpses lined the walls in glass caskets. Bodies, meat and bone, became a way for Thek to communicate his issues with the artworld at large. On seeing the corpses, said Thek, “I felt strangely relieved and free. It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers.”

Casts of his own body, amputated arms and legs, are futuristic, ahead of their time. Casts also present as embellished, painted, and imagined bisections. They appear wet and grotesque under clinical Plexiglas, a direct ancestor to Damien Hirst’s installations. These are specimens of life, a thing so rare in 1960s geometric obsession. This was a call to bring attention back to the body and the handmade, as opposed to the silkscreened, distant pop of Andy Warhol and clean, sterilized coldness of Minimalism. His most famous piece in the series, “The Tomb”, is a wax replica of the artist, dead, and is now only available in photographs. His fake death piece, also called “Death of a Hippie” was a possible symbol of the end of the 1960s idealism. The waning of personality was evident and Thek sought to bring about some life albeit through death and transience. In a letter to a friend, Thek wrote of “The Tomb”, "I really don't want to have to do that piece AGAIN! Oh God no! Imagine having to bury yourself over and over." But thankfully, Thek’s work is well documented. A slideshow of his work in the studio by Hujar is a striking complement to the Whitney show, a lovingly detailed look into Thek’s mode of working.

Thek moved to Europe and his installation work was well-received. He used ephemera and garbage to construct environments, never meant to last. It is for that reason that his show has been a bit of a disappointment to Thek’s followers; that his more famous pieces are not present and the ones that are seem a bit cold and contrived. He never intended his pieces to be fodder for museums at least initially. When organizing the Whitney exhibit, curators respectfully opted to re-create Thek’s ideas without attempting to replicate his originals. In fact, Thek’s original exhibitions were to be viewed by candlelight, which the museum could not accommodate. His materials were temporary so the work that is still intact is the only art curators were able to put in the show. He had a change of heart later in life and began to create a more permanent series, mundane objects cast in bronze. These pieces in the show were easy to overlook given the bizarre and fascinating nature of the other work. One installation piece present is titled “Fishman in Excelsis” in which his likeness is pinned under a table which is, in turn, hanging from the ceiling. Many showgoers paused and stared up at this effigy of Thek, so lonely hanging in the air. Like the other installations, death permeates every object, a farewell to the familiar. Another sculpture has Thek’s corpse lying in the supine position, covered in fish. The correlation to Jesus is implicit. Religion plays an interesting role in Thek’s work. A closeted but known homosexual, he had complicated but deep feelings about the Catholic Church. In Europe, it is said, he would visit monasteries between dalliances with men. He went to study with the Carthusians in Vermont but reportedly his health was so bad, he was rejected because they couldn’t care for him. He died three months later.

After returning to the U.S. after nine years, Thek’s reputation was all but forgotten. He suffered from depression and had to turn to other types of general labor to supplement his lifestyle such as janitorial work and bagging groceries. Rage pervaded him, possibly due to drugs or the state of his health, and his anger seemed to have ruined any possible chance of a reemergence. His famous friends such as Susan Sontag and Peter Hujar no longer supported him or his art and he sabotaged his opportunities and other relationships.

He lived a short life, dying of AIDS-related complications at 54 years old. This retrospective is titled “The Diver.” In his sketches and paintings, Thek uses a solitary body to illustrate the very nature of being alive: alone and free in the vast expanse of whatever world we choose to occupy. This show demonstrates Thek’s message of life that although he might be dead (or just pretending to be), the world goes on without us. The artworld turned its back on or lost its memory of Paul Thek when he returned to the states, but his impression is omni-present in the contemporary world. His work is more resonant today than it could ever have been in his time even if the show fell a little short for some. Society turns to artists to show them their culture and Thek may have been too graphic, too visceral for the decades in which he was creating work. He may have been too grim. But he was cataloging his life and his own experience while other artists were escaping the realities of life through Minimalism and perhaps, some might say, safety. Being shunned by your own is another level of hell but New York has given Thek another chance to be accepted.

MOMA 'New Photography 2010'

­ On view at the MOMA is 'New Photography 2010,' an annual series combining work by Alex Prager, Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry and Amanda Ross-Ho.

Gloss and bright colors pervade the space as do an assortment of subjects, methods and mediums. The exhibit's wide range of subject material includes red-lipsticked women drinking tall boys, a bowl of moldy peaches, and a manipulated 1984 Drew Barrymore movie poster. Strangely enough the variance of subject does not detract from the show but allows for the stimulation of questions surrounding the purpose and methods of photography.

One of Ethridge's photos, which really isn't his photo, is a pixellated runway shot of a model in a traditional Chanel suit taken directly from the New York Times website. Another photo is a scarf transposed with another image of a plate taken directly from Bed, Bath and Beyond's website. These two photos raise the question of authorship as well as what recontextualizing an image does to its meaning.

Lassry's photos are very pretty and colorful, and they all seem to have a lighthearted element. He has photos of shitake mushrooms and green peppers, fresh beets in front of rectangular mirrors and pretty nail polishes placed atop little green pedestals. Some images are layered with patterns or blurred, but all are framed in their dominating hue. This ends up composing a rainbow succession of frames along the wall.

The presence of cinema and fashion photography in Alex Prager's portion of the exhibit is clear. Her photos depict highly made up women in wigs and retro-style clothing. A film showing a red-headed woman in a teal dress frantically running around an apartment building, eventually jumping out of it, gives her work the melodrama the photos beg to convey.

Amanda Ross-Ho's work lacks the hyperbolic color scream of the other artists but instead has a more personal approach. Ross-Ho brings her artistic process into the show by incorporating items from her studio into her pieces. 'Expose for the Shadows, Develop for the Highlights' is a wooden board displaying, among several objects, a triangular drawing instrument, a page from a photography textbook and photos taken by her parents.

Overall, I'd say It's easy to get lost in the eye candy-- the shine, vivacity of colors and variance of subject matter, but the assortment of subject material is worth noting due to the question it raises. In an annual exhibit dedicated to the year's thought and development in photography, the question should be asked: What is the modern photo's subject and what are its limitations?

New Photography 2010

Photographs from the real world, studio manipulated images and appropriated pictures from pop culture, cinema and fashion, embody the work of this exhibition, New Photography, presented annually at MoMA. Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager and Amanda Ross-Ho are the four contemporary photographers highlighted in the 2010 exhibition. Collectively, the thirty-six works on view blur the distinctions between images of all classifications, creating an exhibition in which imagery is intended to move fluidly between editorial photography, film and fine art.

Working in the most editorial way of the four artists, Roe Ethridge creates new images from those already in print. Comme des Garçons Scarf with Glass Plate, 2010, borrows an image of the high-fashion, checked scarf and juxtaposes it with a banal photo of a white dinner plate laid digitally on top. Similarly, unrelated pictures such as a New York Times photo of a model, taken at Chanel’s 2009 runway show, are hung next to a blown-up image of a pumpkin sticker.

Elad Lassry’s work is heavily centered on generic things with no relationship to one another—bottles of nail polish, baguettes, ceramic figures, bell peppers and hats. You also find portraits of the artist’s friends along with a picture of celebrity Goldie Hawn in Laminated Structure (For Her and Him), 2009. These unrelated images are housed similarly however, within brightly colored frames, drawing attention to the vivid hues seen in all of Lassry’s photographs on view.

Alex Prager’s work, influenced strongly by fashion photography and cinema, features women in wigs, considerable amounts of makeup and vintage clothing. The work highlights the exaggerated emotion seen in films such as The Red Shoes from 1948, contrasting with the emotionless images presented by Ethridge and Lassry.

Amanda Ross-Ho’s work is the most distinct of the exhibition. Her images are presented, in many cases, without traditional frames but rather attached to Sheetrock and wood structures. The artist incorporates images taken by her photographer parents alongside found pages from photography textbooks confronting the duality of the craft of photography with its commercial side.

While the technical aspects of the four artists’ work are quite exceptional and seductive in their super-glossy finishes and vibrant hues, the disjointed subjects that permeate throughout the images never seem to be reconciled. It appears to be the artists’ intentions to prompt the viewer to recontextualize the images that we are confronted with everyday in their new mode of presentation, however advertising images seem to still remain as such and film stills appear unfazed by the new context in which they are viewed.

Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen - September 2010 - March 2011 at the Museum of Modern Art

Upon entry to Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen, it seems like just a kitschy and fun design exhibition. It is essentially a design exhibition, but the presentation goes beyond mere form, space, and utility. It encompasses the kitchen on every level, from its uses and physical elements to its meanings and roles within society.

The impetus for this show was the museum’s newly acquired Frankfurt Kitchen, designed in the mid-1920s by Grete Schütte-Lihotzky. Her design was based on contemporary theories about efficiency, hygiene, and workflow. At the turn of the 20th century the western world became preoccupied with progress and technology. Many new materials and innovations were being developed, including those for the domestic arena. Within this environment, society took on the new kitchen with enthusiasm. Visitors to the exhibit see this celebrated in a variety of interesting dishes, containers, utensils, furniture, and appliances. Virgilio Forchiassin’s Mobile Kitchen Unit, an all-in-one, fold-up kitchen, is particularly intriguing.

Alongside the components of design, this exhibition also presents works from practically every other artistic medium. Films from the 1930s-1980s show happy families in black and white reveling in the kitchen's domesticity. Photographers Bruce Davidson, Lucas Samaras and Philip Lorca DiCorcia, take portraits of people in kitchens while Cindy Sherman stages herself in a kitchen, playing cinematic female roles in Untitled Film Stills. William Eggleston’s color photographs present banal, yet compelling views of the insides of a freezer and an oven. Irving Penn’s Frozen Food, textural and vibrant, also has a prosaic effect. A Daniel Spoeri sculpture juts out. Looming above eye level is a chair supporting a plank of wood called Kichka’s Breakfast I. One cannot help but smile at Tom Wesselman’s pop collage, Untitled Still Life #30 or David Shrigley’s To Make Meringue You Must Beat the Egg Whites Until They Look Like This.

The selections mentioned here are only a fraction of the many art forms used to trace the functional and societal roles the kitchen has employed since the early 20th century. Design, photographs, video, sculpture, advertisements, posters, and packaging, illustrate the kitchen’s form and utility as well as the deeper issues regarding the domestic role of women, family life, and consumerism. The mood of the display ranges from mundane to profound with a fair bit of humor mixed in. Overall, it is a delight and if you have the chance to see it, its well worth the trip.

Usable Pasts: Mequitta Ahuja, Lauren Kelly and Valerie Piraino, Artists-in-Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2009–2010

In Usable Pasts, —a phrase borrowed from early twentieth-century literary critic, Van Wyck Brooks, to charge American writers and artists with the task of creating an American self-consciousness replete with its own national aesthetics— three artists excavate presumed pasts in varied ways before re-contextualizing their findings within their own present. The resulting works (all from 2010) are neither nostalgic nor sentimental, but fraught with these references to days past, establish a sense of both a shared history and an individual self-reflection.

Mequitta Ahuja’s Dream Sequence series is comprised of sparkling, lacquered self-portraits of the artist as a mythical figure carrying serpents, birds’ nests and meteorites. Ahuja terms these portraits as auto-mythography, employing shimmering, modern-day materials discordant with the figural forms reminiscent of those found in ancient art. In depicting herself within this fantastical dream atmosphere, Ahuja carves out a niche somewhere between the past and the present in a composite of fictionalized cave art and contemporary self-portrait.

Lauren Kelley builds elaborate sets in which dolls haltingly enact fictitious episodes in 1970s era African-American culture. The stop-motion, animated “flashbacks” depict inner monologues of nonchalant near-death experiences (Upside), and overheard dialogues of muted, latent discrimination (Prototypical Oppression/Obsession). Drawing from the more distant past, Wild Seed portrays dinosaurs moving in staccato across a garden while a calm, soothing male voice melodically recites phrases in French. The English subtitles provided by the artist do not correspond to the articulated French words. The text, “my lush horizon was rotting,” in conjunction with the simultaneously spoken, “et il fait rouge dans mon coeur” indicates a discrepancy that inconspicuously presents the potential for inaccuracies in a verbal history.

Valerie Piraino uses photographs from her family’s archive to compose minimal arrangements with a historical sensibility. In With Pen in Hand, un-filled wooden picture frames are arranged on a wall, while sideways projections of photographed street scenes, landscapes, and homecomings flash over and between the empty brown rectangles. The rotated images, instead of neatly filling the bordered space of the mounted frames, canvas across the array of cadres, and hauntingly span the wall without regard to any perimeters, highlighting the distortion and inaccuracy of memory and its inability to be orderly and compartmentalized.

Tinged with snippets of years gone by, the works in Usable Pasts appropriate fleeting, fictional memories that convincingly serve to simultaneously accentuate both a shared and singular past, invoking collective remembrances of separately experienced, but visually similar, events.

The Farmers and The Helicopters at MoMA's Project Gallery

In MoMA’s Project Gallery, a three channel video by artist Dinh Q. Le explores the Vietnamese War through the affect of the helicopter. The video room is connected to another room which houses a life size helicopter built by Le Van Danh and Tran Quoc Hai, a self taught mechanic. This extension of the show gives the viewer insight to the complexities of the machine. The video begins by panning over forests and rice fields and then unfolds into a collage of Vietnamese voices and the sounds of helicopters flying through the air from clips of Western films. With the three screens ever changing, the anxiety of the helicopter is present, as are the stories of those who have suffered from them, and those who have transformed the helicopter from a vehicle of destruction to one of innovation and progress.

The Vietnamese War, known as the American War in Vietnam, is one regarded with more stigma than perhaps any other in American history. Le’s video demonstrates the disturbances of the war while humanizing its victims, and still feels emotive enough to belong in an art museum. The three channels change frequently, so that the viewer must turn their heads to read the subtitles on the bottom of the speaker’s screen. The strength of this piece is in the contrasting emotions caused by the feeling of watching an action thriller, and watching an actual war.

The generational difference between speakers affords the viewer a more clear vision of how the war, and the machinery used in it has affected Vietnam holistically. Two older women and three men speak about how the helicopter has affected them, some in war time, some on the farm. One of the most powerful moments of the video was when one of the elderly women said “They listen to our stories like they were fairy tales,” after listening to her fearful story while the sound of helicopter propellers blare in the background of her foreign voice, her comment seems sad and ironic.

What carries this video from start to finish is the transformation of the helicopters as objects of fear, and destruction, to ones that are familiar and helpful. This trajectory is traveled through the voices of the older women, the militant men, and of the younger generation’s curiosity and use of this tool to help with farming. The helicopter remains an object of wonder throughout, but is able to change as Vietnam tries to communicate to the world that they are a capable nation. Dinh Q. Le combines clips of helicopters from Western film and interviews of Vietnamese people who have experienced the helicopter in different venues to create a fifteen minute long trip into the eyes of a Vietnamese civilian affected by the technologies of the western world.