On the ides of June, while squinting at a cluster of threatening clouds from his perch on a grassy construction site just outside of Sparta, WI. this small city, Chicago sculptor Tony Tasset is, to use his words, totally freaking out.
“You know those reality shows?” Tasset says, a slightly uneasy smile on his face. “This is that part when the team is up against their deadline, and it looks like they’re never going to finish on time.”
Tasset’s “team” is made up of a half-dozen fiberglass workers at Sparta’s Fast Corp. (Fiberglass Animals Shapes and Trademarks), who have been assigned to construct the artist’s largest piece to date: a giant eyeball aptly named Eye, which, upon completion, will stand three stories tall and stare east from the Loop’s Pritzker Park, at State and Van Buren streets. Tasset was commissioned for the job last fall by the Chicago Loop Alliance, and Fast Corp., with which he had collaborated on prior sculptures (including a 12-foot-high eyeball), took the engineering reins earlier this year.
Love them? Hate them? Want one? Have one? Nobody seems to be neutral about tattoos. But there’s one thing we can all agree on. Tattoos have been around since the beginning of human history, and they aren’t going away anytime soon.
Arts and Music: Skin Art
The word tattoo is derived from the Tahitian word “tatau” which means to mark something. The history of tattoos is as diverse as the people who wear them. The reasons for having a tattoo are just as varied. A tattoo can be a rite of passage, a sign of belonging to a clan or group, a status symbol, a token of bravery, a mark of beauty, uniqueness or self expression.
The usual method of tattooing involved piercing or cutting the skin with a sharp object, rubbing colored pigment into the wounds and letting them heal. There were many variations on this method. Even today’s techniques use the same principle.
Tattooing was widespread among Native American tribes. For example, the Sioux believed that after death the spirit of a warrior mounts a horse and sets forth on its journey to the afterlife. Along the way, the warrior meets an old woman who demands to see his tattoos. If he has none, she turns him back to wander the world as a ghost.
Arts and Music: Skin Art
Tattooing was practiced in many Asian cultures. Elaborate facial tattoos were especially prevalent among the Maoris of New Zealand. Even among modern Maoris, these tattoos are still a source of pride.
Tattooing was brought to Europe in the early 1800s by sailors who’d discovered it in the South Pacific. Over time it became a fad among the aristocracy. Even members of the British royal family sported tattoos. Inevitably, the practice of tattooing spread to America. The first permanent tattoo shop in New York City was set up in 1846. Most of the customers were military servicemen, and the tattoos tended to be patriotic or romantic in nature, especially with the onset of the civil war.
Arts and Music: Skin Art
Getting a tattoo wasn’t for the fainthearted. The needles were attached to a wooden handle. The tattoo artist dipped the needles in ink and moved his hand up and down rhythmically, puncturing the skin two or three times per second. The technique required great dexterity and took years of practice to perfect. Even for the best artists, the process was painfully slow.
After Samuel O’Reilly invented the electric tattoo needle in 1891, tattooing became easier, cheaper and more common. Even women began getting tattoos. A few people had their entire bodies covered with skin art – a guarantee of employment in traveling side shows. In the American West, most tattooing would have been done in the larger cities. A cowboy with a tattoo would probably have either been in the military or in prison, where inmates tattooed each other, often badly.
Arts and Music: Skin Art
In today’s society, tattoos are more popular than at any time in American history. With academically trained artists entering the profession, tattooing can rise to the level of fine art. These two examples were done by Teresa, an artist working in Santa Cruz, CA. She has a degree in art and a growing reputation as a painter. She also happens to be my daughter, and, yes, I have a sample of her early work, a little butterfly on my back. I wear it proudly. For me, it’s a connection to someone I love.
Things are getting steamy on stage in a controversial new play in Berlin featuring mother-son incestual sex, nudity and dirty doctor games!
A number of shocking sex scenes await theatre-goers in Bruce Labruce’s new play ‘The Bad Breast’ at the HAU 2 (Hebbel am Ufer, Haus 2) theatre.
From a mom-and-son couple enjoying a passionate ‘69′ embrace with their heads between each other’s legs to a woman flashing her breasts and private parts – such scenes may fascinate, surprise and repulse viewers, but is it even art?
The mother-on-son action in 'The Bad Breast' is certainly wild, but is it art?
Either way, the piece by the Canadian author, playwright and film-maker (46) certainly caught the audience off-guard with its bizarre doctor sex games when it premiered on December 10.
The story revolves around a mother who has developed an incestual relationship with her son after breast-feeding him for ten years, leading her to start seeing a psychoanalyst specializing in the female breast.
But why the need for all the pornographic scenes?
A spokesman for the theatre told BILD that Labruce comes from a film background and as an artist he often grapples with the theme of pornography.
The ‘B.Z.’ newspaper described him as “the King of homo-pornos”. He has even made a film about sex within Germany’s notorious Baader-Meinhof terrorist group which was screened at the Berlinale Film Festival.
“I am primarily an entertainer who wants to show another view of feminine sexuality. The play isn’t really pornographic, it is a farce, a satire,” Labruce told ‘B.Z.’
An actor buries his face in his colleague's nether regions - just one of the spectacles the play has to offer.
Feminine hysteria is also a theme touched on in the piece by Canadian playwright and filmmaker Bruce Labruce.
An actress during dress rehearsals on December 9.
The mother-on-son action in 'The Bad Breast' is certainly wild, but is it art?
By day it’s a haven for art lovers, but by night it’s a swingers’ club!
An orgy of half naked women in leather awaits visitors to one Vienna museum, at last when the sun goes down.
And some were shocked by the exhibits in the apparently-normal museum. There’s a mirrored area, a gynecologist’s chair and a sado-masochism room!
Two women kiss on a gynaecologist’s chair.
IS IT A MUSEUM OR A NIGHTCLUB?
Visitors to Vienna’s Secession Museum are confronted by the unusual exhibit in the evenings. The lights go out in the exhibition areas and the place turns into a cesspool of lust.
There is group sex in the middle of the museum with painted women in leather. Some have more on, others wear high heels and G-strings.
One couple amuse each other in one corner, while a girl is kissed in a gynaecologist’s chair on the opposite side if the room.
‘The Association of Sociable Revellers’ moved in on February 20 – and they display sex in a very special way.
It is allegedly a cultural project from artist Christoph Büchel.
The Swiss has set up a swinger’s club for €90,000 in the same museum which displays the famous piece of art ‘Beethoven Frieze’ by Gustav Klimt.
It is supported with a cultural donation of over €10,000 from the Swiss public foundation Pro Helvetia.
Although the swingers’ club room is only open to adults during the day, politicians are up in arms.
Councilor Ursula Stenzel, who gave the project her blessing, is now less pleased: “I signed the approval only under massive protest. It was always spoken of as an art project with a nightclub, but never as a swingers’ club.
“That is monstrous.”
She described the project as a misuse of taxpayer’s money, as it has apparently been subsided by the state.
Gabi Högler, one of the club’s managers, doesn’t understand the complaints: “We want to give as many people as possible the opportunity to overcome their inhibitions and we want to offer the possibility for them to simply watch a swinger’s club for themselves.”
Orgy in the mirror room.
Anything and everything is allowed...
...public sex in the middle of the museum
A performance on the stage of the swingers' club by artist Christoph Büchel, directly next to 'Beethoven Frieze’, the most famous art work from Gustav Klimt.
Sexual 'art': Two guests enjoy the show.
When it's not getting so hot the guests can enjoy the atmosphere and have something to drink.
This visitor has dressed for the occasion.
The Secession Museum is the centre of the Viennese Art Nouveau movement.
London-based artist Nick Gentry works with rather unusual mediums – discarded floppy disks and old eight track cassettes. Using these simple outdated and unwanted materials; the artist manages to create stunning portraits.
Spotlight by Nick Gentry
“Over the years billions upon billions of disks and tapes have been manufactured and today they are widely regarded as junk. This makes them an affordable thing to make art with,” explains the artist of his work. “Reusing objects that would ordinarily have been sent to landfill makes a comment on the throwaway culture of today. Maybe this work can encourage people to think more creatively about the objects that are deemed to be obsolete or useless.”
Self Portrait 02 by Nick Gentry
Each portrait involves several steps to achieve the unfinished, almost industrial feel of the art. Gentry starts with preliminary sketches and then creates a grid of the images, with each component divided into disk-shaped sections.
Sonata by Nick Gentry
“Spray paint is applied to the disks using a stencil to preserve the label and metal slider. Preserving the labels is key, as the handwriting and scribbling are integral to the personality and history of each piece,” Gentry explains. “Elements of people’s lives are stored on the disks and although that data can never be accessed again I like to preserve some of that for viewing.”
After the disks are placed in tonally appropriate areas, almost like pixels, to create a collage, Gentry sketches the outline of the head and the features in pencil, with oil paint to finish the details.
Infinite Echoes by Nick Gentry
“This process is quite selective as only certain features are finished completely. I like to leave a lot unfinished as it allows the viewer to see the layers, showing how the work has been created,” he explains. “What brings the work to life is that blend of the nostalgic and familiar, together with the freshness of a new form of expression.”
Tape Installations by Rebecca Ward: These installations are site-specific works that are dependent upon the space they occupy. Utilizing the existing lines, and angles, each piece created is informed by the individual site and its unique linear placement. These installations are inherently architectural. And here is the rest of the interesting work – gallery.
Tape as Art Medium
Tape as Art Medium (image credit: behance)
Tape as Art Medium
Tape as Art Medium
Tape as Art Medium
Tape Sculptures by Mark Jenkins: These street installations are created using box sealing tape by American artist Mark Jenkins. Most widely known for the street installations, his work has been featured in various publications.
Tape as Art Medium
Tape as Art Medium (image credit: simonswork)
Packing Tape Art: This is the artwork of Mark Khaisman, artist based in Philadelphia who creates artwork from brown packing tape. ‘I work on the light easel, applying translucent brown packing tape on clear Plexiglas panels, the layers built up to create degrees of opacity.’
Tape as Art Medium
Tape as Art Medium
Tape as Art Medium
1700 Squirrels: This is a drawing of 1700 squirrels created by one person working from 8am to 10pm for fourteen days in a row. It was done using ¼ inch flatback tape and he tried to draw each of these squirrels in their own unique poses.
Duct Tape Art: Artist Joe Girandola created these amazing duct tape art by keeping minute details in mind. Though Joe is classically trained as a stone carver in Italy, but he has veered away from the media, concentrating on three-dimensional drawings and paintings using a variety of materials. And one of his medium of choice is Duct Tape. His drawings using various colors of tape reflects ingenuity and creativity.
Environmental art can take many forms. One of the most striking is when an artist takes a mass-produced material that is usually discarded after one use and makes it into something enduring and entirely new. That’s exactly what Ohio artist Mark Langan does with cardboard: he transforms this interesting but often-overlooked material into works of art so unique and impressive that it’s hard to believe their origins.
Langan’s goal is to encourage people to look at materials in a new way. He believes that corrugated cardboard has interesting characteristics which are usually ignored; by bringing those characteristics to the forefront, he’s encouraging us all to rethink our perceptions of what’s useful and what’s not. While most of us would recycle (or simply throw away) old cardboard boxes, this art shows us what could be done with them instead.
Using nothing more than corrugated cardboard, a hobby knife and non-toxic glue, Langan creates three-dimensional pictures that are detailed and full of life. His work ranges from corporate logo pieces to recreations of famous works of art. Each piece can take up to 100 hours to complete, and when finished they are truly striking.
Langan’s work has been featured at environment-themed events and in the boardrooms of major companies. He makes no claims to being the most environmentally-friendly artist out there; in fact, he denies having much impact on the waste stream at all. But he says, simply, that his art is “something rather than nothing.” Which is to say that he’s made something beautiful where before there was only a plain brown box.
The artist hopes that his art will inspire others to ask what they can do to help the recycling movement. This impressive corrugated art isn’t going to save the world, of course. But if it helps a few people to see that they can help make a dent in the waste stream with simple actions, then Langan’s goal will be fulfilled.
During the century that followed Jacques Louis David’s death, three forces struggled for position in French art; classicism, romanticism, and realism. But their initial struggle took place in the art of David. His heroic style, suppressing passion beneath a hard chilly surface, made him the artistic dictator of Europe. Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Bonaparte were united in admiration of David. He emerges from most biographies as one of the least sympathetic personalities in the history of art, an impression not mitigated, for most people, by his painting, which they find as hard and chilling as the man.Such judgment is somewhat superficial, as there is endless fascination under a layer of iciness.
David. Napoleon at the St. Bernard Pass
David may have been the first painter to be considered a legitimate war criminal.He was active in numerous agencies during the reign of terror and was president of the Jacobin club. He developed and refined visual art in the service of state terror and propaganda. However, it was David’s considerable gifts of image and emotionality that gave him credibility with the new revolutionary government, and allowed him to expand his gifts to one of the highest forms of artistic propaganda in the era. It was with David that success in combining art and politics became exceptional, enhanced by his own fanatical devotion and radical implication to the Revolution. While other artists of the time were painting more traditional subjects, landscapes, and the like, David made sure that he did not ignore the substantial politicality of the era.
However, the fact remains that he voted for the execution of Louis XVI and historians have identified more than three hundred victims for whom David signed execution orders.The writings of Marquis de Condorcet, and his drafting of a constitution had eloquently expressed the concept of liberty, but he did not foresee a surfeit of freedom leading to new forms of tyranny and oligarchical rule that lay ahead. Condorcet’s ”Esquisse” embodied the age of enlightenment and rationalism and visioned a just society based on scientific knowledge. David sided with the more reactionary and extreme Montagnards. Yet, by the end of his life in exile in Belgium, David,the former ardent believer completed paintings of a haunting beauty and powerful expression of psychology and emotion; a melting of the glacial sheen. His narrative, both artistic and personal, has many facets.
The age itself, however, must be looked upon as a product of the Enlightenment, in which more and more of both the intellectual and common classes were debating the manner by which people should exist within the world system itself. The Frenchman Rousseau proclaimed that “everything depended fundamentally on politics,” yet failed to consider that before political paradigms could exists, the phenomenology within the social and artistic life of the country must take primacy.
David. Oath of Horatii. 1784. 3m high by 4m wide. One of the last official commissions of the ancien regime and a revolutionary departure in style.
roco
Though tradition has made him the archetype of the classicist who reduced antiquity to a kind of sterile purity, David is really only a pseudo-classicist whose variation of the formula was dominated by a combination of staggering realism and true romanticism. In his most frigid paintings and obsessive sensuality lies just beneath the surface. His nudes are at once adaptations of the idealized bodies of antique sculpture, carefully analyzed anatomical studies, and declarations of the allure of human nakedness that on occasion can amount to a revelation of concupiscence.
David may have been a lustful man beneath his aesthetic puritanism, but he never thought of his idealized forms as a transmutation of sensual experience, as the original forms were with the Greeks. Only in an occasional portrait of a member of his family or a very close friend does he allow himself even a confession of tenderness. But, his portraits are brilliant renderings of surface that become by second nature revelations of the personality of the sitter.
David’s immaculate surface, the often enamel like finish of his paintings, conceals preliminary stages that were as fresh and sensitive as the best rococo painting that he abominated. David’s last painting, of Mars and Venus, a love scene painted by an old man, is closer in spirit to his first master, Boucher, than to the rationalism into which he forced himself. One portrait of Napoleon on horseback, ”Napoleon Crossing the St. Bernard Pass” is so full of wind and storm, with flying draperies and a rearing, wild eyed steed, that it has become accepted among scholars as a proto-romantic conception.
David. The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons. The painting was exhibited in 1789,after the fall of the Bastille, and the message that it imparted was not lost on its viewers.
David began his career as a protege of the state under Louis XVI, continued it as a powerful figure in the Revolutionary government, went on from there to become the grand old man of French painting as a favorite of Napoleon’s, and in the process redirected the course of French art at just the time when Paris was emerging as the art center of Europe. Something of a political chameleon, he holds a record for adaptive longevity under hazardous circumstances.
In 1774, David won the Prix de Rome, after failing for a number of years and being highly embittered by the process. In 1772, at the low point of his life, David attempted suicide by means appropriate to a painter who was to establish a new stoic style. He locked himself in his room and resolved to starve to death. When he did not appear for several days, his fellow students broke in and rescued him.In Rome, He began immediately by puzzling and disappointing his sponsors back in Paris by sending works that rejected the airiness and freshness of the rococo style, a first declaration of independence from the society that had rejected David for so long.
It was classical Rome that most fascinated him. His rejection of rococo artifice inspired him to a vision of heroic grandeur. This was not the opulent Rome of the Empire but Republican Rome with its severe moral code and its masculinity in utter contrast to the frills and laces of the regime in France. Even the classical revival that was underway at home, with the style now called Louis XVI, could be more appropriately called Marie Antoinette, since it was a style of extreme delicacy in which classical motifs were adapted to the ideals of the boudoir and the drawing room.
David, Oath of the Tennis Court.1789. David's painting was never completed. A wildly romanticized drawing with Robespierre, not known to be demonstrative,striking a dramatic attitude with two hands on his breast as if he had two hearts beating for liberty.
When David returned to Paris, he had not yet achieved the style of heroic severity that was to set him in opposition to the Academy’s standards. His classicism was closely relatable to that of Poussin, an Academy god, and David also proved himself a supreme draftsman in the Academy’s tradition of the studio nude. There was as yet no indication that the Academy was nurturing a murderous rebel. In his personal life, David was also following the normal course proper for an ambitious young man, by marrying, in 1782, Marguerite Charlotte Pecoul, the daughter of a wealthy contractor. By 1784 David was well set. He had a rich wife and a brilliant success in the Salon with a picture called ”Andromarche by the Body of Hector”, which brough him election to the Academy.
Comte d’Angiviller commissioned David for a painting that would raise the artist from the position of successful artist to that of sensational innovator. D’Angiviller wanted a painting of the Oath of the Horatii, based on a sketch David had done while watching a performance of Corneille’s Horace. As David developed the idea however, he worked out a composition that was not taken from any of the play’s tableaux. Helped by his father-in-law providing money, David returned to Rome to work on the painting, not as an aging student, but as an established painter. He returned as the leader of a revolution in painting and was also declared a prophet of a revolution in government.
”The Oath of the Horatii” fulfilled David’s classical ideal. The elements of the picture had been stripped down to the minimum; the brush was kept under rigid control and there was not a flourish, not a squiggle of paint to mar the icy impersonality of its execution. The drawing was hard as stone. All fluidity, all spontaneity, all feminine elegance, had given way to a determined philosophical masculinity. The grieving women, who see their sons or husbands perhaps going to their deaths, are given a secondary place, subjugated to the tableau of father and sons dedicated to the honor of country.
It was the style of the painting that created the sensation. In comparison with the sweet graces of the current fashion it was as revolutionary as cubism would be in the twentieth century. The Oath of the Horatii was exhibited in the Salon of 1785, and was interpreted not as a mere retelling of Corneille’s theme but as an allegorical comment on the turmoil that was building up to revolution. It was time, the picture seemed to say, that France save herself from the degeneracy of the old regime by returning to the ideals of firm republicanism, no matter what sacrifices might be entailed. The picture had been given an unfavorable position in the Salon, no doubt because it challenged the accepted style of the Academy, but the furor was so great that it was rehung as the center of the show.
The Revolution finally broke in 1789, as David was working on another exhibition picture illustrating a classical subject. Again, David was credited with Revolutionary sentiments in disguise, this time making Brutus the symbol of all Frenchmen who will make any personal sacrifice to protect French liberty. The particular targets were supposed to be the emigres who had fled France in the crisis, with as much of their property as possible.
Self Portrait.1794.Under house arrest after the Fall of Robespierre:''On the moral plane, we can read the painter's character in his own rendition: willful, reserved, passionate, and agitated. We need only to look at him to understand why he threw himself into the Revolution with such fervor; above all, we understand--and this may be the most interesting psychological aspect of the work--how David was simultaneously a portraitist and a history painter. His scrutinizing gaze flashes with both acumen and eagerness. He had the gift of seeing more intensely than other people; he has an inquisitive air about him. He tried to make his rendering more forceful--his fingers tightly clasped around the brush and palette are an involuntary admission. Finally, an almost fierce passion can be seen in his gaze, the passion to penetrate reality, to discover its meaning and purpose. The portraitist wanted to grasp the core of human nature, the history painter wanted to give it an ideal form.''
Early in the Revolution David supported Robespierre and the Jacobins and for the next five years he was not only ”the” artist of the Revolution, but a political figure as well. In 1792, he was elected a deputy in the convention and a member of the art commission, which made him the virtual art dictator of France. Drastic reforms were made.David abolished the Academy, along with all the secondary organizations that had trained craftsmen throughout the provinces. Whatever else the Academy had done, it had always preserved the technical traditions inherited from the old masters, and this mass abolition was a blow that affected French art from that time on. Similar to the Russian reforms after their revolution, the function of art would be to glorify the new ideals of the state and to record its triumphs, and the state would purchase these patriotic pictures from open competitions.
This new Commune of the Arts reigned for not quite two months. It took only that long for it to fall under the same accusations of favoritism and dictatorship that had been leveled against the Academy. It was replaced by a smaller replica of itself which in 1795 gave way to the Letters and Fine Arts division of the Institute of France which became simply the old Royal Academy with a new name. He was a busy man. In addition to his administrative functions he was in charge of commemorative monuments as well as popular celebrations and state funerals, which could be elaborate affairs involving, according to some of David’s plans, virtually the entire population of Paris. And meanwhile he was still the state painter. There were plenty of martyrs and something had to be done about them. David’s possible masterpiece, ”Marat Assasinated” commemorated the colleague’s murder in 1793 by Charlotte Corday.
David, Marat Assassinated
”Marat is dying: his eyelids droop, his head weighs heavily on his shoulder, his right arm slides to the ground. His body, as painted by David, is that of a healthy man, still young. The scene inevitably calls to mind a rendering of the “Descent from the Cross.” The face is marked by suffering, but is also gentle and suffused by a growing peacefulness as the pangs of death loosen their grip. David has surrounded Marat with a number of details borrowed from his subject’s world, including the knife and Charlotte Corday’s petition, attempting to suggest through these objects both the victim’s simplicity and grandeur, and the perfidy of the assassin. The petition (”My great unhappiness gives me a right to your kindness”), the assignat Marat was preparing for some poor unfortunate (”you will give this assignat to that mother of five children whose husband died in the defense of his country”), the makeshift writing-table and the mended sheet are the means by which David discreetly bears witness to his admiration and indignation.The face, the body, and the objects are suffused with a clear light, which is softer as it falls on the victim’s features and harsher as it illuminates the assassin’s petition. David leaves the rest of his model in shadow. In this sober and subtle interplay of elements can be seen, in perfect harmony with the drawing, the blend of compassion and outrage David felt at the sight of the victim.
After Robespierre’s fall, the painting was returned to David and was rescued from obscurity only after his death. Misunderstood by the Romantics, who saw in it only a cold classicism, it was restored to a place of honor by Baudelaire, who wrote in 1846: “The drama is here, vivid in its pitiful horror. This painting is David’s masterpiece and one of the great curiosities of modern art because, by a strange feat, it has nothing trivial or vile. What is most surprising in this very unusual visual poem is that it was painted very quickly. When one thinks of the beauty of the lines, this quickness is bewildering. This is food for the strong, the triumph of spiritualism. This painting is as cruel as nature but it has the fragrance of ideals. Where is the ugliness that hallowed Death erased so quickly with the tip of his wing? Now Marat can challenge Apollo. He has been kissed by the loving lips of Death and he rests in the peace of his metamorphosis. This work contains something both poignant and tender; a soul is flying in the cold air of this room, on these cold walls, aropund this cold funerary tub.”
A TESTAMENT TO PROGRESS >> Austrian photographer Ernst Haas remarked that the “limitations of photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.” “Onward,” the annual juried exhibition currently on view at Project Basho, is evidence that the limitations suggested by Haas are expanding rapidly as more and more artists find themselves drawn to the camera.
David Lambert, 1/27/08 4:39 pm
Dedicated to providing exposure to new and emerging photographers without current gallery affiliation, the third run of “Onward” is a testament to the progress made in widening the medium’s scope in recent decades and a continued affirmation of the importance of its more traditional aesthetic qualities for artistic production and expression.
Rafael Soldi, Bajo Tu Manto
In large part, the show is a small portal into emerging American photography, and it displays much promise. For a town like Philadelphia, whose artistic identity of late is strongly tied to photography, the show is a great resource: The local art community can look critically at a small sampling of emerging photographic practice from around the country. Plus, “Onward” suggests who — and what — is inspiring new photographers today, and I like what I see: sophisticated, up-to-date photographic vocabulary, high standards of technical execution, and (with a few exceptions) professional presentation.
This year’s juror for “Onward” is Debbie Fleming Caffery, a documentary photographer whose evocative black-and-white images have captured the culture of her native Louisiana, as well as Portugal and Mexico, with a unique and carefully located artistic vision. Caffery is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, and her work resides in the collections of many well-known institutions, including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Judging by the variety of work in the show, she was a very good choice — the judicious balancing act of her selections illustrates a respect for the diversity of photography as it is practiced today. This year’s call produced 1,666 entries by 418 artists, and the selection process yielded 73 works by 40 artists, with all but one hailing from the United States (one entry was from Dubai).
If there is one noticeable consistency in the selections this year, it’s that they all appear very reserved; there is nothing in the show that might qualify as “transgressive” or “radical” in portrayal or conceptual message. Whether this is the result of the submissions themselves or the choices of the juror, an introspective and restrained presence pervades much of the work in the show.
Inka Resch, Anonymous Specs 1744
One of the strengths of the exhibition is the choice to include two or more works of each selected artist, even at the expense of less overall exposure for those who entered work this year. Being able to absorb more than one work by each artist provides a sense that there is a real “group” on view, as opposed to a sweeping display of single works that can often end up lessening the impact of the exhibition’s artistic voices.
Curating an open-call show is no easy feat, especially when a juror’s selections are negotiated into an existing and finite space, and this task was left to the staff at Project Basho. Overall they have done excellent work; the work flows well, with only one or two pieces placed awkwardly at a particular location because of a need for them to read well from a certain distance or because of issues of scale.
Aside from a small cluster of works at the entrance to the darkroom/project space, the work is arranged within two distinct areas: the long hallway and the open back room that houses most of the larger works in the exhibition. Interestingly, the effect of moving through the space at Project Basho is akin to traveling through two distinct modes of photographic practice — what might be described as image “takers” and image “makers” (to use the title of a recent book by Anne Celine Jaeger).
Lou Outlaw, Jubilation! (As Obama takes Oath of Office)
The images in the hallway focus largely on the capture of the visible through photographic “seeing,” and almost all are in black-and-white. They range from documentary-style images, such as Lou Outlaw’s moving shot of a woman’s emotional response at President Obama’s inauguration, portraits that play with the language of light, focus, framing and depth of field and the “decisive moment,” to images that locate photographic artistry in the quotidian world of urban and rural life. Almost all of these artists seem to share an interest in preserving the merits of photography’s traditional aesthetics, and by the standards one expects from new and emerging photography they do it well. (An unintended, but serendipitous, effect is that you pass by trays of darkroom chemicals before entering the hallway, the olfactory trace lingering as you move down the passage).
Viktoria Sorochinski, Untitled 14 from “Land of No Return”
Entering the back room is largely a move from “taking” to “making,” and you can feel the shift not only in the emergence of bold color but also in the diversity of easily recognizable contemporary photographic trends. Deadpan portraits, digitally manipulated landscapes, extreme close-ups and tableaux-style work are clustered together on all four walls. A number of notable standouts in the show exhibit artistic maturity and a sense of resolution between inspiration, intention and product. David Lambert’s vistas come to life from a beautiful marriage of miniature landscapes fabricated from hobby materials and an adroit use of lighting, and he succeeds in conjuring up believable, yet fantastic, realities through photographic transformation. Alison Slein’s juxtapositions of carnivalesque silhouettes against sunsets and sunrises are richly colorful, yet spooky, experiences of crepuscular dreams; her process plays with tensions between dimensions and vision in photography. Portraits by Katrina D’Autremont and Viktoria Sorochinski force compelling formal and subjective relationships between the ages, poses and gazes of their sitters. The subtle visions of the overlooked moments of life by Jennifer Wilkey and Gwen Johnson hold up very well, even next to their more active neighbors in the room, and transport the viewer vicariously into their individual and contemplative lives and worlds.
A portion of the work at Basho suggests photographic pastiche. Names such as Andreas Gursky, Anna Gaskell, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Gregory Crewdson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sally Mann, Jessica Todd Harper, Imogen Cunningham, etc., all easily leap to mind before a number of the works in the show. But that itself isn’t all bad in the context of an exhibition like “Onward” (and they are good names). In fact, it is inspiring to observe emerging artists conceptualizing photographic ideas and attempting to break new visual ground with both the most up-to-date and time-tested of sources. As emerging photography, it is expected that a number of inclusions might evidence an ongoing intense engagement and dialogue with existing photographic examples as part of a process of finding artistic self-definition. All of these examples in the show are, nevertheless, already on very solid artistic ground.
Finding a niche where a hitherto unseen photographic “look” or a clever strategy of negotiation yields provocative and unexpected results has been a common practice within photography in recent decades, and it has led to the commercial success of many photographers. Perhaps we will see more and more emerging photographers look to individualized modes of production and imagery within the range of recent practice as a point of departure, rather than feel the anxiety and pressures of marching to the beat of “new and different.” If so, there may be a growing need to revise and reconsider how we judge artistic identity and merit with regard to the aesthetics of photography as we move forward from the new, wide base of contemporary practice.
Jennifer Wilkey, Day 47
In general, we are just now starting to confront the effects of artistic production that has been reared in a fully conceived postmodern program. This place of no supposed styles, no schools (unless self-defined), and no particular way art is supposed to look — what Arthur Danto refers to as “aesthetic entropy” (and he is receiving significant heat for his idea of Post-Historical art in recent issues of The New Yorker) — may suggest a new developmental pattern based on photographic “older siblings.” Looking to postmodern photographers’ individual artistic characteristics in order to focus one’s approach toward self-definition within an open and under-defined artistic culture makes sense as a strategy and might become more common.
If thought of this way, it certainly explains the visible presence of such strong specific influences in a good deal of the imagery in “Onward.” This portion of work in the show holds up well despite its referential qualities, and it also exhibits something else present in much of the work in the back room: a noticeable balance of form and concept. That’s a good sign for photography’s future, and perhaps the scales are tipping back a bit from a heavy-handed conceptual base now that high-quality printing and cameras are becoming more accessible to the larger community of emerging photographers (possibly due in part to innovative photography centers around the country like Project Basho and PPAC in Philadelphia).
Sarah Marie Land, Lilley
One of the laudable aspects of Project Basho’s annual exhibition is that it reveals a churning engine of creativity at work outside of commercial art galleries and other institutional venues, and functions as a single, small piece of evidence that there is a bottleneck between a surplus of artistic production and the very narrow and selective world of those able to gain commercial representation.
Juried shows like these offer exposure to hard-working and creative individuals with talent and potential, while also providing an opportunity to evaluate the standards of a juror or jury that has experience in the current culture of art. Both can be enlightening, for the artists who receive criticism and the viewers who can view their work and observe, reconsider and critique the nature and future directions of one segment of the art world. Shows like “Onward” provide an important bridge between two artistic precincts normally separated by a series of complicated factors. Whether these types of exhibitions result in fulfilling, inspiring, troubling, enlightening or disappointing shows should not be the only gauge of their success. We need shows like these.
This year “Onward” set out to jury the work of emerging photographers and succeeded in its task. And with a new juror each year, the ongoing endeavor by Project Basho maintains a necessary variable in the selection process. The work in “Onward” 2010 made me curious to see and know more about many of the emerging photographers in the show, which compelled me to locate and navigate through their individual Web sites. I am sure others will, too. Isn’t that the point?
Stefan Strumbel is an artist from Germany, whose creations are well known national-wide. He combines a strong details in his works, coming up with items that make a statements. Most of the elements used are German images with great meaning for the citizens. His style was also connected to pop art, a current which challenges tradition and emphasizes mass production. Here is a better interpretation of Stefan’s work from Wicked Halo: “Although his work includes cultural artifacts such as cuckoo clocks or the traditional costume of the Black Forest, he isolates and recontextualises using everyday objects such as tree-shaped air fresheners and shopping carts and giving pieces of his work titles such as “What the fuck is Heimat”? Heimat is a quintessentially German concept, which roughly means homeland. “There is no English word for Heimat,” Strumbel explains. “Some people link Heimat to a place, for others it is a feeling.”
