Cancer Alley

Along with Friedlander, the Cantor Center is showing a selection of Richard Misrach’s Cancer Alley photographs. It’s not the full collection but it’s enough. I only discovered Misrach last year at the Oakland Museum. At that show, looking through the rest of his work, I found that I really liked him.

Misrach’s work isn’t exactly ruin porn but definitely dances around with and touches on some of the what makes ruin porn appealing. What keeps it from being ruin porn is that it’s making a point and capturing more than just the “this is old and looks cool” esthetic. The Cancer Alley photos take this a step further to the point where it’s no longer clear what’s been ruined. There’s a balance between the man-made and the natural—are we ruining nature or is nature reclaiming and adapting to our developments.

The photos are also huge (over 4 feet by 5 feet). Some are prints from 8×10 film, others are prints from digital images. If you look you can see the difference. But it doesn’t really matter much. For almost all the images, I found myself—and noticed the people around me doing the same—constantly leaning in to look at details, stepping back, looking in again at the wall text, stepping back again.

At some point for each image, something would click for everyone and I’d hear that quick intake of breath through pursed lips. Sometimes it would be a detail in the photo while other times it would be the context on the walls which caused the reaction. Whatever the cause was, we would all gesture our museum partner over and point out what we’d noticed and felt. I can’t think of another exhibition which was quite like this in this regard.

The wall text in particular makes a huge difference in understanding the images. As do the Petrochemical America infographics. As impressive as the photos are by themselves, it’s impossible to understand how everything—the ecology of the area and our global consumption of petrochemicals—fits together without this information. The infographics are all well done. Clear in making their point and cleanly referencing the photos in the process. They only add to our understanding of things.

The main understanding being exactly how much petrochemicals are entwined in our lives. It’s tempting to look at these photos as being a red state problem,* but we’re all consuming the results and demanding the cheap prices. We all want cheap clothes, fuel, and food. So we all bear some responsibility.

*That Burtynsky is documenting the same thing in China shows that it’s a worldwide thing.

Despite all this, and as tempting as it is to be depressed by this kind of thing, that’s not the sense I got from the show. If anything, there’s a sense of “is this the world we want to keep living in” rather than, “we’re screwed.” The photos are still beautiful even though they contain so much ugliness. They’re just not showing us pristine idealized nature. This is nature after we’ve messed with it. But nature is still surviving and we can change our habits.

Cray Photographs

This weekend, I went to the Cantor Center to see photos by Misrach and Friedlander. I’m still mentally working through Misrach. Friedlander is easier to just start writing about.

The Cray photographs are an intriguing project. How often does a company hire a notable documentary/street art photographer to make what is essentially a vanity publication?* This could have ended up as a forgettable disaster, instead it turned out to be a good fit for both parties.

*I also can’t help but think of it in terms of the trend toward wedding photojournalism. 

It’s interesting. I’ve never been a huge Friedlander fan. I appreciate his humor and approach to things, I just haven’t ever been truly grabbed by his photos. At the same time, I’m reaching the conclusion that, in many ways, he’s probably the perfect photographer to really see and learn from. His approach to places and people is the kind of thing which makes fantastic advice for any new photographer.

The Cray project was a logical extension of Friedlander’s past street photography and his scenes of people hard at work in factories and data-entry centers. It includes a range of subjects shot in Friedlander’s characteristic style: sober images of shop fronts and empty streets, views of the landscape and underbrush surrounding Chippewa Falls and close-up shots of workers.

—Cantor Center

Especially his approach to people. I found something incredibly honest about how Friedlander photographs people while they’re working. The photos aren’t posed and many of the subjects are intensely focused on the tasks at hand—to the point where they’re making the kinds of faces that no one likes to see in a photo. Yet despite this, the photos don’t come off as grotesque or mean-spirited.

Treading this fine line is tough. It’s much easier to go either for humor or for something posed (or semi-posed). Instead of going for the easy or the obvious, we have something tough and honest. There’s a strong sense about how much work is involved and how much the employees care about the work at hand. This isn’t dehumanizing assembly line work, each Cray is a massive hand-constructed supercomputer. The collected photos of the workers is much more than just a photo album.

In many of the Cray photographs, he focused on the women performing fine-motor tasks such as installing the complex wiring inside a massive supercomputer. Interestingly, Cray founder Seymour Cray selected these women for their dexterity and talent in weaving and other fabric crafts.

—Cantor Center

It’s also notable how many women are in the photos. At first it seems almost like an intentional politically-correct approach to photography. But it quickly becomes apparent that this is not the case. Friedlander’s directness works well here. We’re still not used to women working in high tech yet we’re also super-sensitive to tokenism in propaganda pieces. Friedlander shows us that the women are there because they’re the best people for the job at hand. And it’s obvious that they’re working.

His photos of the surrounding area are also nice to see. In my mind’s eye,* I have a tendency to think of high-tech companies as existing in Lewis Baltz industrial parkscapes. Chippewa is not like this. The small town setting and natural surroundings don’t seem like a high-tech location. And there’s no agenda with these photos either. No sense of “despite this small town look, supercomputers are being built” or “this way of life is going to change as the future comes here.” It just is what it is and serves as a reminder to not find an agenda or a story where none exists.

The photos of Chippewa are also interesting in that they remind us of Silicon Valley’s roots as well. The traffic gods made sure that I understood this. The road I chose to take to Stanford was closed and my detour took me past PARC and Tesla as I wound through the Palo Alto hills.

Despite our tendency to think of Silicon Valley as industrial parks filled with Arrillaga tilt-ups, there is still a lot of open space here—even in the heart of things.

It’s nice to see these photos in the Bay Area and it’s good to know that they’ll have a permanent home at Stanford. Cray is not a local company* but is still part of our industry. It would be nice if the Cantor Center and the Computer History Museum* can get together and show the photos along with an actual Cray supercomputer.

*Though it did eventually become SGI.

Posthumous

Photography is unique among the arts in that discards are both preserved and often indistinguishable from keepers. The print is the final state, but everything is stored as negatives. This also puts photography in the position where it is possible to have multiple edits of a photographer’s work which end up portraying the photographer in completely different ways.

—My post, Editing and Art

The logical next step will be to take the same approach to an individual photographer’s negatives—for example, re-making The Americans using different frames from those Robert Frank selected.

—My post, Government Documents

New Winogrand show includes 100 never-before-printed photos. I bet no one questions the edit. #VivianMaier washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-pos…

—
nick (@vossbrink) April 19, 2012

I’ve been surprised and pleased by the amount of discussion about the edit of the Winogrand retrospective. I was wholly expecting this to be a blockbuster show which people viewed as important because it’s supposed to be important, not because it’s actually good or interesting. And my chief expectation there was that the unseen photos would be presented as specimens which were good because they were by Winogrand.

I did not expect that a lot of canon photographs would be dropped and that a lot of the unseen images would be from unmarked frames* on contact sheets Winogrand had reviewed during his golden age. I also did not expect that the existing, famous collections would be broken up and not even really referenced in favor of the new edit.

*SFMOMA marked the posthumous prints very clearly. And also called out whether or not Winogrand had marked the frame on the contact sheet.

I was expecting “100+ new photos from a master plus his already-existing masterpieces.” Instead I saw a new, comprehensive edit of the complete body of Winogrand’s black and white street photography.

If you knew the old collections, you would see bits and pieces of them in the new edit. If you were hoping to see the old collections, you would definitely be disappointed with the new edit.

I on the other hand really like the new edit. It’s a single body of work now with various themes—women, couples, private moments, etc.—running through it.

I also love the implication of the new edit. But then I love the idea of re-curating any existing collection. I’ve been a Fred Wilson fanboy for over a decade now.* I really enjoyed Mark Dion’s exhibition at the Oakland Museum two and a half years ago which melded disparate aspects of the museum collections.

*I’m currently reading Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader. I got it for Christmas. I hope to finish by next Christmas. It’s brilliant so far.

And I’ve been very excited by the trend in photography over the past couple years into curation becoming acceptable as a creative act in its own accord. Last year alone brought Looking at the Land, I See Beauty in this Life, and The Last Pictures—three collections which credited the curator instead of the producer of the photos. The year before we had Vivian Maier and Charles Cushman and the discussion about whether or not they were legitimate artists because they hadn’t edited their own work.

What’s uncertain is how much of this is Winogrand and how much is Rubinfien. Are there non-people shots which haven’t been made public? If so it’s easy to see how they’d be held back, since they do not fit the rest of his ouvre. This is a chronic issue when looking at Winogrand’s photos since he did not edit or champion most of his best-known work. Instead it’s been shaped by various curators, first Steichen, then Szarkowski, Papageorge, Friedlander, Harris, Fraenkel, Stack, and now Rubinfein. I don’t think Winogrand was totally unconcerned with editing, but he was so obsessed with shooting that any other task necessarily received less attention. Thus those 6,500 rolls in the closet were deferred indefinitely.

—Blake Andrews

The Winogrand show, by actually taking and reworking the work of an acknowledged master, is the “next step” I’ve been waiting for. We’re entering new territory here. Especially with art and its tendency toward specimen-based collections. Who is the artist now? Is Winogrand somehow less of an artist now? Should Rubinfien have been given more creative credit? Does this new edit replace previous works?

What are the ethics of this?

Erin O’Toole’s essay in the Winogrand catalog suggests that, because Winogrand tended to allow other people to edit his work while he was alive, and because he was a self-admitted non-editor, that this edit is okay. This is a decent point with regard to Winogrand.* He seems to have cared most about shooting and seemed perfectly happy leaving the rest to everyone else.

*Admittedly, the exact same logic could be used to put Ansel Adams photos on food packaging.

D: When you looked at those contact sheets, you noticed that something was going on. I’ve often wondered how a photographer who takes tens of thousands of photographs—and by now it may even be hundreds of thousands of photographs—keeps track of the material. How do you know what you have, and how do you find it?

W: Badly. That’s all I can say. There’ve been times it’s been just impossible to find a negative or whatever. But I’m basically just a one man operation, and so things get messed up. I don’t have a filing system that’s worth very much.

D: But don’t you think that’s important to your work?

W: I’m sure it is, but I can’t do anything about it. It’s hopeless. I’ve given up. You just go through a certain kind of drudgery every time you have to look for something. I’ve got certain things grouped by now, but there’s a drudgery in finding them. There’s always stuff missing.

—Visions and Images:
American Photographers on Photography,
Interviews with photographers
by Barbara Diamonstein

But if he had a track record of wanting tight control over everything? What then? How ethical would such a show be?

We’ve all created something at some time in our lives. We all understand the sense of ownership we have over our creations and the gut-level resistance we have to someone else critiquing, commenting, or changing it. Especially if the change isn’t something which we’ve solicited (let alone agreed with).

Does something change after a person dies? Where are the lines once there’s no one to ask permission?

It’s disappointing to me that so few people rose to the defense of the artists’ intentions, and their spiritual and ethical “ownership” of their work. If someone peed all over your work, I’d come to the defense of you.

—Mike Johnston, The Online Photographer

If you really admire an artist, a writer, a photographer, part of that admiration recognizes the importance of self-determination with regards to their own work. How many creative people had their legacy distorted by the posthumous publication of work they considered substandard, incomplete or not indicative of their style?

—Lewis Bush

I totally understand the point of view that we need to protect and maintain some level of spiritual ownership by the original creators. I even sympathize with it. It feels correct. We should be allowed to set our legacies, right?

But I also think this point of view is crazy and ultimately limiting to everyone. Our collective creative output has to enter the public domain at some point so it can be reevaluated, remixed, and repurposed so that it can be relevant to another generation. Otherwise we end up with the the stale presentation of increasingly-irrelevant “museum pieces” which I was worried about seeing.

If art can’t be allowed to evolve as we evolve, it ends up dieing of neglect in a museum when no one can no longer explain the relevance.

None of the books Winogrand published while alive are still in print, and some like “Women are Beautiful” have prices that ensure they will only be seen by collectors. Even the best Winogrand books, published after his death, are expensive. (The best is “1964,” lowest price on Amazon is $260.)

The ironic aspect of this exhibit is that previously the Garry Winogrand rumor was the collection of 6,600 rolls of film very few had seen. After the publication of Rubinfien’s edit of this unseen work, the Garry Winogrand rumor is now the books he published during his lifetime. Rubinfien’s book, filled with many photographs Winogrand never saw himself, will be one of the best Winogrand books and certainly the most widely seen.

—Wayne Bremser

At the same time, we have to keep track of the different edits. Earlier edits should provide context to the subsequent ones. The last thing I want to see is the “director’s cut” phenomenon where each new edit is only intended to capture additional marketshare and pretends to be the “definitive” edit. They’re not in competition.

This is one area which I feel that the Winogrand exhibition missed a bit. It doesn’t really acknowledge the previous edits and kind of treads into “definitive” territory as a result.

Note

I don’t want to give the impression that the question of re-editing is a photography-only thing. Remixing happens all the time in music world. I’ve already mentioned movies. And in literature, it’s often impossible to discern the relationship between author and editor.

If anything, the way that other media already acknowledge how multiple edits can co-exist together should point the way for the same sort of thing to happen in photography.

Lebbeus Woods

Holy crap. Garry Winogrand may be the marquee attraction at SFMOMA right now, but the Lebbeus Woods show gives him a run for his money. Wow. If Winogrand is a look through our past, Woods is crazy futuristic. Emphasis on the crazy. In the best way.

Woods’s conception of architecture embraces the chaos of the world rather that fighting against it. As a result, his structural concepts appear to be alive and have organic history just like any other organism. War-damaged buildings have scar tissue. San Francisco is reenvisioned with buildings which also have tectonic plates.

This is all wildly impractical and hugely evocative. A Sci-Fi world I would love to see yet also one which scares the bejeezus out of me. Despite its appeal and beauty, I would try and avoid us becoming that world at all costs.*

*Recommended reading, this review from Katya Tylevich which does a much better job at explaining things.

Woods’s drawings are also just fantastic tours de force. They inspire me to pick up a pen and draw while also telling me to not even try, it’s impossible. Whether it’s his pages full of patterns and textures or his simultaneously precise yet sketchy crosshatched renderings, I can’t even come up with the words to adequately describe them.

Seriously. If you’re in the Bay Area, go see this show. It’ll blow your mind.

Winogrand

I was looking forward to SFMoMA’s Garry Winogrand show for a long time. While I’ve been familiar with Winogrand’s more iconic images and the backstory/legend of his shooting and “editing” styles, I hadn’t seen much in-depth work of his nor had I had an opportunity to really examine prints and frames.

I’m quite pleased to report that despite my high expectations, the show doesn’t disappoint. At all. This isn’t a “greatest hits”* or a “collect them all”** type of retrospective. Instead, this is one of the rare gems which ends up being as much about the artist as it is about the art.*** It’s all over the place—in a good way—as it winds its way through decades of work and decades of working through things via art.

*One which only shows the extreme highlights and none of context.

**One which attempts to show everything in a “this is important because someone important made it” kind of way.

***Closest comparison I can come up with is SFMoMA’s Diane Arbus show which did a similar job at presenting both the art and the artist.

Winogrand, in a way which perhaps is more familiar to us now, interacted with the world via his camera. That shooting appears to have been more interesting than editing means there was something important in just seeing the world through his viewfinder. Looking at the photos on display, I get a sense for him working out personal issues (girls, couples, etc.) as well as how his mindset reflected (or bucked) the general national mood.

It’s this second aspect which I found to be especially interesting. There is something about Winogrand’s photos which, while not being overtly political, has its finger on the pulse of things. I can’t help but look at the photos as historical documents which reveal the prevailing mood of the country.

His early work in particular shows an extremely subtle, nuanced look at the pre-civil-rights-movement black and white experience. There is a consistent quiet power* in how he documented the different stations which blacks and whites held in New York. He’s able to intuitively capture how people interacted, or didn’t interact, to the point where I’m not sure if he’s even seeing the race thing and just treating all humans as equals.

*And I thought Goldblatt was quiet and subtle.

So much is there to see and he’s unflinching in capturing it. I love his photo of the black men crossing the street (taken from inside the car) because of the number of layers of observation it shows. He saw a human scene. He also records that he’s in his car when he sees it. And he suggests that this is not a neighborhood he would be comfortable walking in. But he still takes the photo and comes up with something that isn’t just about the people he took the photo of.

His photo of JFK in 1960 requires you to notice that Kennedy is surrounded by blacks. I don’t get the impression that this was a photo-op for JFK yet at the same time, this image says a lot about what JFK meant in 1960 and hints at a lot of what was to come in the next four years.

And it explains why so many people, including Winogrand, became so disenchanted with politics over those four years (and after).

That Winogrand’s “best” work comes from the 1960s and early 1970s is not a surprise either. Those years were interesting times to be on the street.* Especially in the cities. Lots of optimism and activism. Lots of generational changes. But as the boomers aged and big victories in civil rights were won,** America’s priorities changed again and Winogrand’s work reflects that.

*What other year besides 1968 could have a museum exhibition dedicated just to things that happened in that year? And that show even felt a little thin.

**Not claiming that the work is finished, just that the biggest victories were won.

Since he stays in the city (mostly) it’s no surprise that his work gets bleaker and bleaker. The city in the 60s was the center of life and industry. In the late 1970s and early 1980s? Everyone who could have left did so and cities were now bleak, dangerous, distrusting places. Winogrand didn’t “lose his way” here, it’s just that his way went through exceedingly unpleasant territory.

If Winogrand were just interesting from a historical perspective, I would have enjoyed the show.* But there’s much much more to it. As a photography nut, what he does with the camera is also extremely exciting.

*At least half of the people in the gallery around me were pointing out and discussing cars, clothing, history, signs, etc. This show is very interesting from a non-art, non-photography point of view.

In particular, Winogrand’s timing is amazing. Especially with facial expressions. I don’t know how he does it. I wish I knew how he does it. They’re often not nice expressions. But they feel true and honest and seem like the kind of thing which, while the subject of the photograph will probably hate, people who know the subject will love.

The expressions he gets in his subjects are the kind of expressions I try to find when I shoot my family.* I don’t want posed smiles or fake expressions. I want the honest moments which I see all the time in my mind but can rarely capture on film.** I want the expressions and gestures which remind me of how someone lives, not just how they pose for photos.

*Not surprisingly, my wife loves it when I point the camera at her.

**Is the digital equivalent to “on film,” “in JPG”? 

Winogrand’s photos for me mark the dividing line between street portraits and street photography.* He’s not creeping on people and hiding the fact that he’s taking photos. But he’s not posing or explicitly working with anyone either. This is an interesting dance which has me wondering whether other people see Winogrand’s images the same way.

*This is Kip Praslowicz’s category 4 of street photography typologies.

I’ve been explicitly wondering for a while about the Women are Beautiful images. I’ve always liked a lot of them. I particularly love the image of the woman in the La Guardia lounge. I also know that, while I like them as art, they also embody the male gaze and I like them for this reason too. I rationalize this by thinking that what makes the women beautiful is that Winogrand’s caught a lot of inner beauty, grace, and power and isn’t just focusing on “pretty.” At the same time, yeah. I know that what I like is probably what caught Winogrand’s eye too.

Which makes me wonder whether women find these images to be creepy. My wife says no. For her, there was something about the shooting distance (not too close to be aggressive and not too far to be stalkery) as well as the fact that, despite capturing “private” moments, the subjects are in control (more mature women rather than teenagers) of how they present themselves publicly. But I’m still curious about other opinions here.

I also love how he situates his work on the streets. Literally. So many of his images include street signs. It’s not enough that he’s capturing all kinds of activity on the streets, he’s also recording where he took them. Yes, he was incredibly poor about cataloging his contact sheets. It seems instead like he’s taking notes on the film itself.

The street signs are especially fantastic when they give iconic locations. Hollywood and Vine.* 42nd Street. Etc. These are places which exist in myth. Yet they’re also real. The images are great. The signs are the icing on the cake.

*I really liked this photo. So many things going on in the frame. Shadows and light. The women. The wheelchair. The full bus bench. The Hollywood Walk of Fame. And then that sign saying Vine St. Perfection.

Which brings us to the Winogrand cant. I used to think that it involved using something else as the vertical in the frame. And while there’s some of that, what I saw suggested that he actually used the tilt in a way similar to how I often shoot tilted. It’s not a cheap trick to make things seem more dynamic. Instead, I think that he’s focusing on his subject while rotating his  camera slightly to zoom just enough to place get everything else he wants in the frame.

The last thing he’s paying attention to is the horizon. Instead it’s all about what makes it ins, and what gets cropped out, of his frame.

This is a great reminder to all internet photographers out there. Stop reading internet rules and just shoot shoot shoot, only caring about what’s in the frame.

Beyond the history aspects and photography aspects of this show, I’m also extremely intrigued by the concept of posthumous editing of an artist’s work. But that’s a blogpost for another day. I’m trying to keep this one on topic for what I saw in the exhibition since there’s a lot to see and appreciate.

The show is well worth seeing. And probably worth seeing multiple times. You’re damn right I bought the catalog.

Also at SFMoMA

Wandering around the rest of the museum after taking in DeFeo and Johns.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9 is a lot of fun. It’s always a good thing when the museum is interactive and people get into it. For my part, it’s completely appropriate that I’d walk in and immediately get KNBR without even trying. And it’s probably good that no sporting event was playing at the time otherwise I may not have left. I’d be curious what happens in there on Super Bowl Sunday. I certainly hope there’s a good party.

The Logan Collection. This was interesting. Part of me liked seeing these and part of me is starting to become somewhat tired of individual collections which seem to be more along the lines of collecting “big names” rather than telling me anything about the art or really showing me anything new. That said, I can confirm that I’m a Rauschenberg fanboy. Especially his prints. I also really liked Fred Tomaselli’s Field Guides. I still don’t get Guston.* And I still can’t stand Koons though I’ve reached the point where he just makes me shake my head and laugh (admittedly, that may be his point).

*The one artist whose work I keep coming back to and keep failing to even understand why anyone thinks it’s worthwhile.

Paul Klee’s Circus. This was fun. I always enjoy the little Klee room. It was one of the few things I liked back when the second floor was kind of a bore* and I’m glad it’s still there. His color is always a treat. Pairing his line drawings with a Calder sculpture was inspired. It’s just a shame there aren’t more Calder wire sculptures available.

*Pre Anniversary Show, the second floor never changed, or at least, never felt like it changed. Most of it consisted of “common cards” from famous artists. The Rothko was still a highlight but the only other memorable piece was Michael and Bubbles. And yeah, my feelings about the museum were like my current feelings about the De Young.

I was very pleased to discover Ken Light’s work. As I’ve been spending more and more time in the valley, I find myself starting to  think about photo projects there. I don’t have any specific projects other than documenting Lita’s neighborhood before it disappears. But it’s impossible to drive through and spend time with the people there and not see the possibilities. Ken Light’s work shows a lot of the things I’ve noticed.

I also too a quick walk through South Africa in Apartheid and After. The exhibition is good enough and powerful enough to warrant a second look. But I also wanted to look at the photo Ernest Cole took of the black nanny with a white baby. When I was thinking about the exhibition last time, I kept thinking of that one image and comparing it to the Robert Frank image of the same subject matter. They make an interesting pair and I’d like to see them together, without context, to see where people think they’re from. And what kind of person the identify as the  photographer.

Jasper Johns

Nicely-paired with Jay DeFeo, SFMoMA’s Jasper Johns show is also worth checking out. Especially if you’re a type/print nerd like I am. At least half of the show consists of lithographs. Some are in multiple colors, others in black-only. Most of them are numbers.

I’m such a sucker for this kind of thing.

I enjoy them graphically. I enjoy them as objects. I enjoy them for how they make me think about and see numerals.* I enjoy the tidbits of process information** about how he used a single stone for an entire series.

*Similar to Walker Evans’s interest in letterforms except that Johns creating the letterforms in addition to presenting them. A signpainter indeed.

**I wish there were more process information since I daresay no one really knows what a lithograph is anymore.

It’s lovely to see multiple series of prints displayed so they play off each other.* Some of the series use the same stone for both the color and black-only images. It’s extremely interesting to see how the same stone produces such different results. It’s also fun to think of the black and white prints as being a hint at what the stones look like pre-ink. There are hints of process here but, like with DeFeo, it’s still all product.

*Versioning confirms that all the series are kept together rather than reassembled later from individual pieces.

I also couldn’t help but think about the commercial possibilities. So many different numeral prints. I’m surprised no one’s created a clock using them.

Johns’s numbers pieces include more than just lithographs though. His number sculptures and paintings hint at letterpress printing or show the handpainted nature of the images. These are also graphically strong and continue the interplay between the process and the product. Are the drawings studies for the sculptures or prints? Are they inspired by those? Does it matter? It’s all fun.

Looking at Johns’s work, I found myself just liking him as a designer. He’s so visually strong with how type and letterforms work with color and other elements. The way he continues to alternate between color and black and white versions of the same pieces is also impressive and reminds me of the experience of looking at color separations at a print shop* and thinking about printed pieces in various black and white channels where you can see compositional elements in ways that you don’t see when all the color is present.

*I spent a half-dozen years running pre-press as a day job and graphic design at night. I still think in color separations when I deal with processing my photography.

Of course, you can’t write about a Jasper Johns show without mentioning flags. There were a few on display. I have nothing to add here* except two observations. The first is that I noticed that the Johns flags all have 48 stars despite many of them being created after Alaska and Hawai‘i achieved statehood. This interests me. Is the 6×8 layout just graphically better?** Was it more iconic at the time since 50 stars was a new thing and 48 was the World War 2 identity? Or did Johns just keep using the same flag despite the US flag changing while he was exploring the subject.

*Read more about the Jasper Johns Flags at MoMA.

**Entirely possible

The second is his negative flag. There was no information in the museum about it being a negative* and it was only once I started looking at it that I began to realize what it was doing. Too easy to glance and think “flag” if it’s a positive. Even if the flag versus painting question is interesting.  The negative flag makes you stop and look. And if you look too long all you see for the next 5 minutes is a red white and blue flag no matter where you look.

*Why?

The negative flag ends up printing a positive flag in your brain. A nice trick. And one which makes this print-nut smile.

Also on view

I liked the prints and print-related material best. But there are many other pieces on display. Johns’s sculptures of lightbulbs, bread, etc. are fun. As is his self portrait and the story behind the dancing spot of light.

His newer work is also interesting. It’s still graphically strong but, while it references and incorporates elements of his older work, is very much a different thing. I’m not sure I like them but it’s good to see how all the pieces fit together.

Jay DeFeo

For a few years now, SFMoMA has been trending toward presenting locally-important work as being also nationally (or internationally) important.* SFMoMA’s Jay DeFeo exhibition is another great step in this direction. DeFeo is an important local artist who is woefully under-appreciated. Yes, The Rose is famous, but it overshadows the rest of her work and she’s anything but a one-trick pony.

*Sort of touched on in previous posts.

As I wandered through the exhibition, I found myself coming back to two main thoughts. One was how much of her work took standard art studio classroom prompts—in particular, design prompts—and ran with them far beyond what any student could do. The other was recognizing elements which appealed to me in other artists’ work and seeing how DeFeo used and combined all of them together—oftentimes decades before the other artists went down those paths to begin with.

DeFeo’s work is all over the place. In the best way possible. She plays different media off each other—photos of paintings, paintings of sculpture, collages of photos, old works repurposed into new ones, etc.—to the point where distinguishing between what’s process and what’s product is impossible. It’s all process. And it’s all product. More than any other artist I can think of, the medium rarely matters—and when it does, it’s only because it’s being pushed to its breaking point. I have a hard time calling her paintings paintings, her drawings drawings, or her photographs photographs. They’re all just part of her explorations.

Each of her explorations feels like it has the single-minded clarity of the project prompts I remember from my design classes.* Those projects were simple and intended to guide students into learning how to use specific tools or play with specific concepts.** DeFeo’s work has the same sense of fleshing out her toolkit but she takes things to a completely different level. Her oil paintings push the medium to the point where they feel more like oil sculptures. Her drawings of various textured items and her exploration into those textures transcends just reproducing what they look like.

*Cranbrook-inspired. Though I saw similar prompts in Ruth Asawa’s Black Mountain College student work.

**Using color, evoke an emotion. Provoke the natural properties of a material beyond its standard use. Draw a natural form larger than life with explicit attention to the texture. Using a simple shape and no color, create delight, anger, and fear. Place three forms on a plane. Etc. Etc.

At the same time, I see in her explorations things which remind me of other artists. Again, this is in the best way possible. What I liked about the other artists work are the same things that I recognize DeFeo’s work.

While I was being reminded of other artists, I was also reminding myself that DeFeo’s work often came first. I’m not making any influence claims, I’m just appreciating finding new depth to certain concepts I’ve enjoyed. And it’s very nice to see work which is as relevant today as it was then. There’s always a danger for retrospectives like these to be time capsules of what was once cutting edge. This is not such a retrospective.

Chief among the explorations is the way DeFeo uses lines. The museum texts mention Seurat but the way she uses lines to build up forms, shapes, and edges reminds me more of Richard Serra’s or Il Lee’s drawings. Especially Il Lee’s. The biggest distinction between the two is that Lee’s work results in forms which have mass but not much structure while DeFeo’s forms have structure but little mass. Instead of the outside edges and the relationship between forms being the most important features, DeFeo’s built up lines tend to converge inside the form and suggest an internal order to the piece. I like both approaches and it was great fun to see more stuff like this.

Unlike Lee or Serra, DeFeo’s line explorations go beyond just one medium. You can see the explorations in paint, graphite, you name it. That she changes media so often really shows how much can be done with the simple technique.

I also saw a lot of similarities with Mark Bradford. DeFeo’s large canvases have the same sense of layers upon layers, highly tactile, highly textured compositions which are called “paintings” but really aren’t. Both artists appear to spend their time layering, masking, and erasing as they work through their compositions. DeFeo’s Incision even appears to use embedded strings which have been removed in a similar fashion to what Bradford did decades later. They also evoke a sense of history and experience but where Bradford’s works feel urban, DeFeo’s are almost spiritual.

These works form the centerpiece of the exhibition. Which is wholly appropriate both in terms of being the works which are most famous as well as the ones which cost her the most. They aren’t just referencing her life, they were her life. Seeing all of them together really brings this home. The works are huge and impressive yet at the same time look amazingly fragile and vulnerable. You can see the amount of energy which they required of her and, unlike Bradford with his power sander, you can’t quite work out how she stuck with it to create these enormous oil paint sculptures.

It’s no wonder that her later, small-canvas paintings make the same transition of forcing painting to be seen as a three-dimensional object rather than a two-dimensionsal surface through much less physically costly method of extending the painting around the edges of the canvas. I really like the self-containment and sense of solid-object which those pieces have. But they also feel like they were made by someone working smarter, not harder.

It wasn’t just newer artists who DeFeo reminded me of though. I also saw a lot of Weston in her explorations of texture. Given how much I treat Weston as still cutting-edge, this is a great thing. The ability to see forms and texture the way Weston did is rare. DeFeo’s drawings of her environment show a similar uncanny ability to see things for the forms and textures they contain rather than what they are.

The way DeFeo uses her environment is also inspiring for any aspiring artists who sit around moaning the fact that there’s nothing to interesting “around here” instead of going out and making art.* Anything around her is fair game. Old art pieces are torn up and repurposed. Everything is photographed. Her dental bridge is inspires a number of pieces. As does her dog’s** cast. And her camera tripod, her mugs (broken or whole), her fan, her swim goggles, etc. Inspiration is everywhere.

*Most applicable to photographers.

**The fantastically-named R.Mutt.

In particular, I really love her drawings of objects where, in addition to the textures, she’s exploring the character of the objects in her environment. They look, superficially, like product renderings or mechanical drafts, but instead of representing what the product looks like, they give it personality. Pixar would be proud.

Her jewelry is similarly observant. I really like it. Many of the pieces echo her explorations of lines only in 3D. Others consist of metal or beadwork which is evocative of watchsprings or circuitboards.* Most though present a small (stone, wood, bone, pearl, plastic, whatever) bead, not as a pure pendant or setting but instead both presented and enveloped in wire where the bead is simultaneously the focal point and the underlying structure of the piece. There’s a sense that the beads are found objects being presented for observation the same way everything else around DeFeo is being observed.

*Steampunk before steampunk. Cyberpunk before cyberpunk.

All in all, a very good show for anyone looking for inspiration to make art. Despite the highlights of the show being huge, no-way-can-I-do-that types of pieces, the process and curiosity on view is an extremely inspiring and appropriate lesson for any aspiring artist:

Art is around you, waiting to be seen. Go see it.

Best of 2012

My top-ten list of best/favorite exhibitions I saw this year. These are shows which got me thinking and which I recommended, without reservation, to anyone (and everyone) I knew.

10. Looking at the Land

Looking at the Land by Flak Photo shows suburbia all grown up. The suburbia I know. The photos feel right to me. Also, this is the best example of our new world which recognizes curation as a creative act. The promise of more of these online exhibitions is very exciting.

9. The 1968 Exhibit

The 1968 Exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California reminded me of how far we’ve come and provided me with context and information which helped me understand my parents’ generation better. This was a very ambitions show which came very close to achieving everything it set out to do.

8. Rineke Dijkstra

Rineke Dijkstra at SFMOMA was a textbook example of a show which was more than the sum of its parts. And how art isn’t always supposed to be nice to look at. This was art which is hard to look at, but worth seeing. Very powerful. Very raw. Very true.

7. South Africa in Apartheid and After

South Africa in Apartheid and After at SFMOMA was beautifully timed to open right after election day. This show was a gentle, but powerful, reminder of how what looks respectable and desirable can mask enormous injustice. And how mistreating a population of workers to achieve that society leaves long-lasting wounds.

6. Walker Evans

Walker Evans at the Cantor Arts Center showed all of Evans’s work and not just his FSA depression-era photos. It was great to see and a nice reminder of how talented Evans was. As a design major, Evans’s consistent search for the functional in his photography excites me. As a photographer, his crisp composition and eye still stand out.

5. Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford at SFMOMA was a bit of a surprise for me. I didn’t know what to expect and was very please to find fantastic work which revealed new things no matter how close or far away I stood. Individually they’re all great. Together, they’re even better. So many layers of history and personal reinvention in them.

4. Monuments of Printing 2

Monuments of Printing at the Stanford University Library showed all kinds of rare/fine books. Catnip to this typography nut. A Kelmscott Chaucer? A Doves Bible? Excuse me while I geek out.

3. Less and More:
The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams at SFMOMA meanwhile was catnip for this design nut. While his products are starting to lose relevance, Rams’s design principles have not. It’s always great to see the actual objects when talking about good design.

2. Richard Misrach:
Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath, 1991

Richard Misrach at the Oakland Museum of California presented photos which are powerful, beautiful, and personal. Ruin porn without being voyeuristic. That it was local images presented locally means everyone in the exhibition was probably affected somehow too.

1. Mexicanismo

Mexicanismo at the San José Museum of Art was my favorite of the year by far. Cool and obvious while also being smart and subtle. Extremely insider-friendly while also being accessible and descriptive of the culture to outsiders. I only wish there had been a catalog available so I could show it to other people.

Other notable artwork this year

Dora García’s Instant Narrative in SFMOMA’s Descriptive Acts exhibition was probably my favorite single piece I saw. I also gained a newfound appreciation for ceramic art through David Gilhooly’s work in San José’s Renegade Humor show and SFMOMA’s acquisition of Robert Arneson’s Portrait of George.

I See Beauty in this Life

Since I was in San Francisco for the preview of South Africa in Apartheid and After, I figured I’d wander over to the California Historical Society to check out their current exhibition I See Beauty in this Life: A Photographer Looks at 100 Years of Rural California.

Lisa M. Hamilton’s Real Rural project has been interesting me for a while since it highlights the vast portions of California most of us drive through on the way to someplace else. Her landscapes story in particular directly references, in many cases, the landscape as seen by car* when driving through the state. But her portraits and stories about people and their ways of life are also welcome reminders that California is not just technology, movies, and beautiful scenery.

*With my multiple repeat viewings of Cars, I respond very strongly to this kind of thing right now. Hamilton’s photos are especially interesting when compared to Sarah Windels’s. Hamilton is not a car’s-eye view but captures the way I imagine possible photo-opportunities to look like when I’m driving.

We tend to take advantage of California’s natural resources without really thinking about where they come from or realizing exactly how much of the state, and its history, is tied up in natural resources. Yes, most of us know the history, but we still don’t make the connections. And if all you see of California are the Bay Area and LA, then you’re really missing most of the state.

There are many ways to define what is “rural.” For the purpose of her work and this exhibition, Hamilton has used the term to describe “places where the culture and the economy are defined by the direct use of natural resources.”

That I visit family in the Central Valley multiple times a year and have taken an annual vacation to California Gold Country since I was an infant means I burn a lot of my vacation days in rural California and spend a lot of time in areas where the culture, history, and economy are all defined by the use of natural resources. It’s interesting that Hamilton doesn’t explicitly say history in her statement since much of the culture of rural California is tied up in the history of the place even if the resources are no longer being used.

Sadly, the archive images on display don’t quite match up with Hamilton’s photos or her goals. This isn’t really her fault though. The historical photos are almost all formal/public photos of harvests, award-winning livestock, or fair displays. They could be from anywhere in the state. While it’s nice that they suggest that anywhere in California can be rural and provide a nice continuity of how California has always been rural, by being restricted to formal photography we lose some of the specific character of each region and industry.

Formal photographs also become about specific events rather than a continuous way of life. The county fair is definitely part of the culture of the place, but it’s not the only part and isn’t everyday life either.

The photos I want to see more of are the environmental ones. Not “pretty” environmental nature shots but pictures which show what things were like in California and tell stories about how people lived  and what the rural landscape was like. There are some photos of people at work—ranchers, miners, etc.—which hint at this story. There are also photos of resource usage—in particular, the fantastic cyanotype panorama of the San Gabriel Aqueduct—but not enough to really get at the land-use questions involved here.

Or water-use questions. Of all the resources involved, water usage is the most important and most interesting.* That Hamilton recognized how water-usage photos were relevant to the exhibition confirms that she knows what she’s doing and suggests that the limitations may indeed have been in the source documents.

*John Wesley Powell recognized the importance of water and watersheds in the 19th century yet we’re still fighting water-use battles today.

I also found myself wanting to see more of the big business vs labor issues which mark rural history. There is some labor stuff. And some small ranchers vs industrial farms. But not much.

Still, despite my complaints, I enjoyed this show. It’s nice to see a government documents type project be actually exhibited and it’s always good to be reminded of this state’s rural heritage. I just want to see more variety in the archive images.