For Kravets/Wehby Gallery
Two things in Aaron Romine’s paintings jump out at you right away. First, there is the obvious and unusual skill with which they are painted. Then, there is the sex. Perhaps most eyebrow raising is the over 6 foot long ‘Untitled (Esso, Taise and Kerry)’ in which three larger than life women begin a charged romantic encounter.
Two characters from this group appear in another untitled canvas, a party scene in which a topless Esso straddles a coffee table while Taise eyes her with a look that can only be described as wicked. To either side, fully clothed partygoers embrace, talk or stare into space. In both scenes it’s the people, not their surroundings, which draw our attention. Some, like Esso, appear in more than one painting, which makes it tempting to image who they are and how they are involved with the people around them. This is particularly true in paintings of the impassive Natasha, for example, who poses variously with Charlie or Peter in intimate or post-sex scenarios. The impulse is to read the scenes as documentary and suppose that Romine has access to a world of beautiful people living for sensual excess. Aaron Romine, 'Untitled' (Esso, Taise and Kerry), 2000, Oil on CanvasIn fact, they are staged, using borrowed clothes and starring friends or hired actors. Romine employs these artifices in order to recreate a type of idealized situation, familiar from fashion photography, which leaves the characters’ identities ambiguous.
In conversation, Romine will freely mention the names of painters he admires from previous centuries, an inclination that tends to invite comparison between his work and theirs. Any search for direct sampling will be disappointed, however, because while Romine has taught himself to paint by looking at old masters, his style is completely contemporary. Flip through any art history survey book and it’s a guarantee that you won’t be able to match styles and poses with Romine’s paintings. What will happen is that Romine’s composition and his foregrounding of physical, emotional and erotic relationships find the right context. All of a sudden, the lesbian trio’s careful arrangement of limbs slots into a tradition as old as daVinci’s scrambling disciples at the last supper and as sensual as Ingres’ Turkish baths. Olivia’s sprawled position on the couch in ‘Je le vaux bien (Olivia and Nicholas)’ relates to odalisques from Titian to Manet. Centuries of history obscure an old master’s original intentions, the identity of his sitters and other details, so that what’s left to do when viewing his paintings is to consider their style or look for clues that explain the given scenarios. Likewise, Romine creates a certain distance between viewers and his subjects by carefully staging his scenes before photographing and then painting them. As we stop, look and ponder, the dynamics between sitters speak for themselves. Time slows down as we become absorbed in the way Charlie plucks at Natasha’s shoe strap, for example, or the way the sunlight delicately illuminates their shoulders. Romine converts models in contemporary dress into timeless characters, stopping us in our tracks as we rediscover the pleasure of looking. Aaron Romine, 'Untitled' (Charlie and Tasha), 2000, Oil on Canvas on Board
For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine Wangechi Mutu, 'The Rare Horn- Hair Thought', 2004. Ink, Acrylic, Collage on Mylar
Wangechi Mutu creates collages of fantastical creatures, beautiful but damaged.
Her studio was just as I expected: body parts littered everywhere, a tray full of lips on the table, a pair of sleek legs in strappy heels affixed to the wall. In the telling, Wangechi Mutu’s workspace at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she is a resident artist, sounds like a campy crime scene. In fact, it is a sort of laboratory in which she uses collage and drawing on paper and Mylar to inscribe real crime stories onto hybrid bodies. “Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male,” says Mutu. “Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.” This includes everything from the violence perpetrated against innocent civilians in war zones to the ‘modifications’ made in order to follow fashion.
Artists from Cindy Sherman to Orlan have explored the chameleon-like nature of female bodies for decades. So what makes Mutu’s work unique? Apart from being skilled in montage she coherently refers to race, politics, fashion, and African identity in portraits that pack an aesthetic punch. This cocktail of influences strongly recalls Weimar artist Hannah Hoch’s collages of African artifacts and European bodies in her portrait series, ‘From an Ethnographic Museum.’ But Hoch’s montages beg the question, like ethnography itself, of whether her then-colonial subjects themselves are represented as they think they are or in a manner that reflects Hoch’s view of them. Eighty years later, an artist who was raised in Kenya and has traveled and lived overseas ever since, gives an answer as complex as her experience.
After completing her MFA at Yale in 2000, Mutu found herself in New York without the school’s resources and faced with a crisis of direction. With pen and paper as her chief art supplies, she created the ‘Pin Up Series’ (2001), which established her interest in adaptable female bodies. In two grids of twelve small images, topless women preen and posture for the viewer like calendar girls. “I wanted you to walk up to them assuming you were going to see these pretty, interestingly posed females,” explains Mutu. “It takes people some time to see that every single one of them has some trauma or alteration that is severe and aggressive.” The women, who strike come-hither poses, are amputees. The series was inspired by violence in Sierra Leone, where an illegal diamond trade fueled fighting that maimed many civilians – in effect, trading one person’s well-being for another’s beauty.
Ironically, the more severe the violence done to her subjects, the more attractive they become, until their flesh, mottled with colored blotches produced by trauma, is as decorative as it is damaged. In ‘Riding Death in My Sleep’ (2002) a bald woman with bloodshot, Asian eyes and huge red lips crouches in a field of mushrooms, her beautiful orange, red and black skin resembling that of a poisonous snake. Mutu graphs animal or mechanical body parts onto other characters, such as two figures in ‘Intertwined’ (2003), from the ‘Creatures’ series. The scantily clad women have the heads of hyenas, animals whose name is an extremely derogative slang term for women in the Swahili language. In other collages, the figures adopt mechanical prosthesis, with several motorbikes becoming a foot, for instance, or joining together to be worn in a shoulder pad arrangement.
For all their mutations and injuries, Mutu’s characters come across as empowered. Using the body language of fashion divas, they simultaneously play the roles of victim and aggressor, adapting to the harm inflicted on them by whatever means necessary. ‘Centipede’ – a series of site-specific wall drawings accompanied by racially-charged texts that appeared in several New York group shows last season – best conveys Mutu’s intentions for her audience. “The point is to get people to access their own position, to enjoy and work at understanding what role they have to play,” she says of her hybrid, exploding insects, which represent the destructive creature foretold by African soothsayers before the arrival of European colonial powers. We are attracted, repelled, and implicated all at once by Mutu’s solitary survivors who remind us that the past is both behind us and looming ahead.
The sense of expectation was huge. In the first issue of Artforum published after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, the first sentence of the first article read, “In the days following September 11, it was agreed upon by just about everyone that art, along with everything else, was going to ‘change forever.’” Two and a half years later, nothing as obvious as a revolution towards the political has come about. Instead, the way we look at art has changed. Aware of political events in which we have a direct stake, we look for corroborating references in artwork. At the same time, there is a growing consensus among U.S. critics and curators that there is a resurgence of craftsmanship and the handmade, a widespread interest in art and culture of the 60s and 70s and a tendency amongst artists to create fantastical worlds of their own.
Recognizing these trends in an article on young art dealers, a New York Times reporter recently observed that, “Nobody is protesting anything.” Lack of protest doesn’t automatically disconnect art from politics, however. This article samples from the recent work of three young artists who are making waves with artwork that explores the consequences of American politics at home and overseas. Aaron Spangler’s woodcuts of anarchic Midwestern communities are a vision of American ‘can do’ spirit gone horribly wrong. On the international front, several artists have traveled to Baghdad before and after the war, including Paul Chan. His DVD ‘Happiness’ makes no illusion to the Middle East, but is highly relevant to the topic of war. In her latest five-screen installation, showing in the current Whitney Biennial, Catherine Sullivan responded to a terror attack that took place on the other side of the world, but which she nevertheless felt personally. Aaron Spangler, Mercenary Battalion, 2003, Carved and painted maple, Courtesy of the Rubell Family Collection
Anarchy in the U.S.A.
On Aaron Spangler’s studio wall hangs a photograph of a young man with long thin hair grasping a megaphone and shouting for all he’s worth. The picture depicts a younger Spangler and the occasion is his war, that is, one that he planned and staged with a friend at college. Since he was a child, the Brooklyn-based, Minnesota native has been fascinated by war’s devastation and its potential as a metaphor for psychological conflict. However, while the U.S. is obsessed with terrorism in its cities and abroad, Spangler focuses on anarchy in rural America in large woodcarvings of battle ravaged landscapes.
Blowing apart the stereotype of the quiet farming community, Spangler carves hellish scenes set in the Midwest. In ‘Mercenary Battalions’, a 7 x 3 ½ foot panel, a helicopter hauls an old wooden farmhouse into the air, centuries-old trees topple to the ground and an electrical tower lies on its side to act as a makeshift bridge over a river filled with debris. Similarly, ‘The Revelers’ is an apocalyptic account of a town’s destruction seen from the main street. The buildings that have not been bombed out are being used as bars and meeting places, their awnings painted with anarchy symbols, pentagrams and upside down crosses. Directly overhead, a bomber drops its payload, intent on wiping out whoever has occupied the once tranquil burg.
With rebellious zeal worthy of an adolescent, Spangler reverses the social order of small town America – damaging it physically and disrupting the prevailing morality. ‘Revelers’ and ‘Battalions’ are so given over to chaos, that you’d think the artist delighted in the idea of wiping out his roots. The opposite is true. In fact, Spangler feels an allegiance to country life and culture that is virtually unknown in the cities, an idea elaborated on in the monumental drawing, ‘The Poachers,’ which depicts rural citizens reclaiming land from the government and big business. They are ‘poaching’ from the powers that be by planting crops and trees and by pulling down the huge electrical towers that cut through their farmland and increase cancer rates. This resurgence of self-reliant, pioneer spirit, likely as it is to be crushed, belies notions of the peaceful heartland evoked by politicians. Spangler’s scenarios are a mix of utopian, anarchic freedom and hellish destruction, American ‘can do’ mentality and radical anti-social insurgence. They’re dark and pessimistic, despite their irony, but ultimately envision a fascinating and frightening revolution against passive consumerism ‘of the people, by the people’. Paul Chan, Happiness (finally) after 35,000 years of civilization, 2003, Digital Video Installation, 18min, courtesy of Greene Naftali, New York
Trouble in Paradise
Paul Chan keeps his art and politics separate. His consequent double life leads him back and forth between the roles of artist and activist. Case in point – when he traveled to Baghdad last year, he went not to produce his own work, but as a volunteer for the peace organization ‘Voices in the Wilderness.’ Nevertheless, the trip impacted Chan’s artwork, making it, as he explains, more extreme. When he returned to New York, he finished the DVD ‘Happiness (finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization’ which was so well received in a group show at Greene Naftali Gallery that a still from the DVD landed on the front page of the New York Times arts section.
‘Happiness,’ more than Chan’s previous moving image and graphic work, is politicized rather than political. The 18 minute animation tells the story of a community of pre-teen hermaphrodites who live in harmony, suffer an invasion, and then wipe out their oppressors. The protagonists are direct relations to outsider artist Henry Darger’s Vivian girls, while their lifestyle is modeled on the ideas of 19th century ‘outsider’ philosopher Charles Fourier. Following their passions, they loll about in flower-filled meadows with piles of books, enjoying each other’s bodies and their own as they laugh, run and play. Soon, men in suits and army uniforms disrupt the tranquility. Their houses burn and the girls are brutally murdered by a host of men in the guise of various authority figures. As brutalities are inflicted on their helpless bodies, a mysterious wind begins to blow. Just as suddenly as the invasion began, it is over; the men lie dead and dying on the ground as the girls run free again.
In ‘The Communist Manifesto’, Marx and Engels briefly discuss the Utopian Socialists, including Fourier, commending them for their willingness to “…attack every principle of existing society.” Chan combines Fourier’s method of radically rethinking social structure with Darger’s outlandish band of heroines to introduce us to a land far removed from our own. Viewers may not relate to the girls’ utterly abandoned lifestyles – wild to the point of eating flowers and relieving themselves like animals in the fields. But we’re asked to imagine abandoning our inhibitions and letting our passions lead us to fight against injustice. We don’t know how the girls recover their autonomy, but Chan’s insistence on dreaming of a better life is clear. “Utopia is a proxy that stands in lieu of absolute freedom,” he has explained, “…to imagine what this looks like is…an exercise in hope.”
Theater of War
Audiences are well advised to take a deep breath before trying to unravel the series of references that lead from Catherine Sullivan’s inspirations to her finished artwork. Sullivan, an L.A.-based artist whose work usually inspires confused admiration from critics, merges performance with visual art in film installations of alarming complexity. Her most recent production, ‘The Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land’ results from a trail of references that begins with the hostage drama in October 2002, when Chechnyan rebels took over a Moscow theater. Storming the building in mid-performance, they not only captured the audience but interrupted the simulated reality of the musical with a terrible drama of their own.
When it was overtaken, the theater was performing ‘Nordost’ a production adapted from a novel featuring the long suffering lovers Sanya and Katya. Their story is transplanted to the time-warped ambiance of Chicago’s Polish Army Veterans Association, where most filming took place. This building’s ballroom, small bar area and offices provided Sullivan’s cast of 25 with idiosyncratically decorated spaces in which to enact five pantomimes from each of the novel’s ten sections. Each actor learned all of the parts, so a motion performed by a row of women representing Katya at different points in her life is, for example, performed at other times by male and female actors in a variety of costumes. At the same time, odd characters, like two stony-faced pilots who put on masks, refer to the actual events that took place in Moscow. Catherine Sullivan, Production Stills from Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land, 2003, courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York
Sullivan invests ‘Ice Floes’ with many more layers of meaning than most viewers will ever realize, particularly if they only watch the piece without reading about it. The disconnect between what is seen and what Sullivan means to communicate would be a problem if we didn’t realize that this probably occurs with most art that we see. Although the installation is overwhelming, with actors constantly swapping roles and costumes and action happening on five screens simultaneously, what we do see references the conventions of old Soviet and American film enough to capture the imagination. Most vignettes, particularly those in which only a few actors are involved, are staged and acted in a way that entices viewers to stay and try to figure out the meaning. Of course, a search for narrative will be frustrated. But what may remain is the memory of how Sullivan marshals acting conventions and snippets of action to consider the Moscow siege without making it into another story, burdened with its own point of view. Sullivan doesn’t seem to want her viewers to ‘understand’ ‘Ice Floes’ but somehow, this doesn’t make it any less tempting to try. Instead, the artist correlates confusion in the art gallery with the confused and tragic events of the real world.
For ‘Art Review’ magazine Sergio Prego, 'Tetsuo Bound to Fail' 1998, Video Still
Royalty doesn’t travel the way it used to. In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela of Spain commissioned Christopher Columbus to travel for them. Not a bad idea, considering that the adventurer’s fourth and final voyage not only ended in shipwreck and mutiny, but initiated Spain’s rocky relationship with America’s natives. Despite the limited success of ‘The Royal Trip’, as it was known, the journey inspired ‘The Real Royal Trip,’ a show by powerhouse curator Harald Szeeman. Promising a different kind of voyage – one of cultural exchange not conflict – the exhibition showcased work by several artists from Spain and a handful from South and Central America. Originated and part-funded by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it also aimed to demonstrate, in the words of MOMA director Glenn Lowry, “…the emergence of Spain as a major center for contemporary art.”
Despite the promising premise, few of the artists actually engaged directly with Latin American history or culture. One exception was Fernando Sánchez Castillo, whose installation of eight bronze dogs, hanging by their necks from lampposts in PS1’s courtyard mimicked an act by Peru’s Shining Path terrorists. Nearby, Pilar Albarracín personalized foreignness in her own country by piling a blue Mercedes with the possessions of an imagined family of North African immigrants.
The pervading influence here is not Latin America, but international pop culture. Carles Congost’s overacted soap-opera video starred a teen vampire who worries her parents. Ana Laura Aláez also tapped the world of youthful glamour in ‘Superficiality,’ a music video featuring models in adventurous makeup dancing to electro-pop. By contrast, documentary work that was specific to a given place and time was the strongest element here. Cristina García Rodero’s large, black and white photographs of rituals in Spain and Haiti was an exhibition unto itself. Wide-eyed Haitians in the grip of spiritual ecstasy appeared alongside theatrical Spanish renditions of feast day rituals, comparing ‘exotic’ rites with equally bizarre images from home. In an unusual curatorial twist, two documentary videos focused on the life work of Justo Gallego, a 78 year old man who has been hand-building a cathedral since 1963.
‘The Real Royal Trip’ included painting, sculpture, video and even a web project by Antoni Abad, but despite touching all the bases, didn’t live up to its proposal to map the intersection of Spanish and Latin American art. In order to really explore this territory, more Latin American artists should have been invited to participate; then, PS1 Director Alana Heiss would not have had to write in her catalogue essay that, “…the inclusion of Ernesto Neto ensures that the great South American dream is also represented,” as if a single artist could represent an entire continent.
It’s hard not to imagine that Szeeman, credited with helping to bring contemporary Chinese art to the attention of the Western world in the 48th Venice Biennale, was tapped to create a similar miracle for Spanish art. Instead, the near complete lack of wall texts and catalogue essays which sometimes fail to even mention the artists do a poor job of introducing their work to a New York audience. Like Columbus leaving the new world for the last time, visitors to ‘The Real Royal Trip’ will leave only slightly more enlightened than when they arrived.
Jenny Gage, Helen, 2001. Color photograph, 76 x 100 cm. Courtesy Luhring Augustine, New York
“They’ve all gone on to do things in different ways and it doesn’t make sense to think of them as a group anymore. They never were. They just happened to be thrown together, with good reason.” – Vince Aletti, Village Voice photography critic
It was a scramble, but they did it. With only a few weeks to plan, new gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and artist Gregory Crewdson dashed around New York City on marathon studio visits, quickly assembling work by thirteen artists from six countries for the second show at what was then called Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art. Four years later, ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ has become one of the most talked about photography exhibitions of the past decade. Critics have described it as “instantly historic,” the “it show” of the moment, establishing a movement of “it photography.” As the legend grew, the show became the art exhibition equivalent of Woodstock – everyone claimed to have knowledge of it, even if they hadn’t actually seen it. In fact, it so captured the imagination of the art world that the show became a symbol of a new movement, characterized by blurred boundaries between documentary and fiction photography. All but one of the artists were women, and the exhibition focused on photographs of women or girls, so it wasn’t long before the moniker ‘girl photographer’ started to stick. Most of the artists didn’t exclusively take pictures of young women, but in the ensuing buzz, that fact was often overlooked.
Katy Grannan, Meghan, Saw Kim River, Annendale, NY 2002. C-Print, 122 x 152 cm.
Despite their diverse backgrounds, those who became most closely associated with ‘Another Girl’ were Jenny Gage, Justine Kurland, Dana Hoey, Katy Grannan and Malerie Marder, the five women in the show who had graduated from Yale University, where Gregory Crewdson taught. By March 1999, when the exhibition opened, most had already embarked on promising careers, showing their work in galleries and contributing to news and fashion magazines. Although these factors made the moment ripe for a statement, “…there is no way to plan or strategize a show like that,” said Crewdson. “It’s so much about a moment and timing.” In fact, the timing was so right that artists who were not in the show began to be mentioned in the same context. A year after ‘Another Girl,’ Harper’s Bazaar ran a piece on the five women from Yale and Nikki S. Lee, who had studied at NYU but whose fashion background and self portraits exploring identity linked her to the others. In the same month, Deborah Mesa-Pelly, another Yale grad, who took photographs in elaborately staged domestic settings, had her first New York solo show and was quickly drawn into the fold by critics.
‘Another Girl,’ and the publicity surrounding it, may have been an incredible break for the artists, but it also presented them with problems. Most of the artists who were either in the show or associated with the kind of staged photography it represented were happy for the exposure but frustrated at the way they were assumed to be a group. For example, one of them could not have a show reviewed without mention of the other ‘girl photographers,’ a trend that is only now starting to abate. Their media debut also coincided with a number of splashy articles about various young, contemporary artists in magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair, prompting New York Times critic Roberta Smith to brand the new generation the “B.Y.T’s: Beautiful Young Things.” Others, like photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia concluded that, while interesting, ‘Another Girl’s’, “…impact seemed to have more to do with the fashion of the moment and the necessity to create personalities for the newer and dumber versions of the art press than any confluence of artistic merit.
” Ironically, the subsequent success of each artist validated the attention paid to ‘Another Girl.’ “So many of those people have gone on to do interesting work,” explains Aletti. “If that hadn’t been the case, I think people wouldn’t be referring back to that show.” Since ‘Another Girl’ opened, critics had been acknowledging that the artwork was, to quote Katy Siegal’s Artforum review, “…a disparate collection of technique and intent.” But even years later, the artists found that their work wasn’t being considered entirely on its own merit, at least when exhibiting work in New York. “Showing in Europe gave me a chance to break away…The people reacted to the work on its own, not in relation to the other women’s work,” said Gage in an observation that echoed the other artists’ experience. Above all, the act of producing and showing their work is what continues to persuade art audiences to acknowledge each artist’s individuality. Last spring, Marder and Mesa-Pelly showed new work, and this fall, Kurland, Grannan and Lee all have solo exhibitions that reveal the extent to which they have found their own voices.
Perhaps more than the others, Kurland was associated with the ‘girl photographer’ phenomenon because, unlike Hoey and Grannan, for example, she actually did intensely focus on girl subjects who she photographed in landscapes. However, by her second New York solo show in Fall 2002 at Gorney Bravin & Lee, she began to focus on adult subjects in two new bodies of work set on communes and gardens across the United States. Most recently, Kurland presented ‘The Golden Dawn’ an exhibition of work completed in 2003 that opened in September at Emily Tsingou Gallery in London. Vast American landscapes dominate, almost swallowing up the often tiny male and female nudes that clamber over boulders or nearly disappear behind mossy trees. Here, nature isn’t so much a spiritual retreat as a setting for interacting with the divine, whether it’s a desert scene in which men, women, and children gather in a circle, or a quiet stream next to which a woman lies on her back as patterns are painted on her skin. In the past, Kurland has expressed interest in utopian ideals, and there is a strong sense here of mixed pre and post-lapsarian boundaries. Some characters, like a wide-eyed blond and her female companion move through the forest with a cautious innocence too young for their years, whereas in ‘The Fall,’ a nude man and woman descend a hill together, his posture recalling Adam’s in Masaccio’s ‘Expulsion from Eden.’
Justine Kurland, Magica, 2003. Courtesy Gorney Bravin + Lee, New York
The landscape also figures in a new way in one of two series of photographs by Katy Grannan on show through the beginning of October at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery and at Salon 94 in New York. Around the time of ‘Another Girl,’ Grannan was making portraits of men and women in their suburban and rural homes, having met them through newspaper ads, referrals and direct contact. In the latest color series, ‘Sugar Camp Road,’ Grannan captures her subjects outdoors, in locations that have personal meaning for them. The title of the show, though it sounds innocuous, refers to the location for one of the last pictures made in the series and to the site of a brutal murder. Despite the setting, the sitters are the true focus of the pictures, even when they interact with nature. In an image titled, ‘Meghan, Saw Kill River, Annendale, NY’ a young woman lies in a shallow stream; goosebumps and beads of water are visible on her pale, almost bloated-looking body. Another scene shows an overweight young woman clasping her naked breasts while kneeling with her back to us in a pool of muddy water. Even without knowing that these are special spots for the models, it’s a mystery who they are or why they present themselves as they do. This lends them an exoticism that is compounded by the imperfections (and sometimes the oddities) of their bodies.
At Salon 94, Grannan showed ‘Morning Call’ a series of smaller black and white portraits made indoors. Opposed to the photographs taken outside, the sitters for the indoor pictures compete with riotous natural patterns on the wallpaper and furniture for the viewer’s attention. In one extreme and completely charming image, an adolescent boy and his little brother, wearing a combination of stripes and plaids, stand proudly before a wall papered with a bold, flying bird pattern. Grannan’s imaginative approach to portraiture plays with identity and location to fascinating effect.
By contrast, Mesa-Pelly obscures identity through location. In ‘Tilt’ a series of seven photographs shown last May at Sandroni Rey Gallery in L.A., the artist almost abandoned the human figure to concentrate on the strange happenings in her domestic interiors. Mesa-Pelly first received widespread attention for her photos of elaborate sets in which young women had just discovered a passage into another world. In ‘Tilt’ the theme of discovery is still strong, but this time, it’s the viewers who uncover the unexpected. The photographs are taken as if whoever is behind the camera has just rounded the corner and pulled up short at the sight of something strange. The effect is less spooky than magical but sometimes borders on the cheesy.
The best example of this is ‘Matterhorn,’ in which the camera peers into a bedroom through a half open door. On a pillowless bed sits a papermache mountain, a little white plastic tree and several Styrofoam spheres. The resulting image looks like a hybrid, low-budget attempt at staged landscape photography and is reminiscent of a few earlier photographs in which Mesa-Pelly deliberately exposed her ‘natural’ materials as man-made. It’s as if she is taking on ‘fakeness’ itself as her subject matter and forcing viewers to think about how easily they are led into the fantasies she concocts in other photographs. Two such examples are ‘Balustrade,’ in which seductively gloved hands pull a red rope over a wooden banister, and ‘Garland’ in which we peer up a narrow staircase through dozens of white paper or plastic chains. Deborah Mesa-Pelly, Garland, 2002. C-Print, 76 x 100 cm. Courtesy Sandroni Rey, Venice, CA
It’s hard to pin down Mesa-Pelly’s subject matter, because the work is driven by the pursuit of wonder. Malerie Marder, on the other hand, has reduced her subject matter to its essence. Known for her nude images of friends and family, Marder captured the objects of her interest in their most vulnerable state for ‘At Rest,’ a video and portrait installation shown at Salon 94 last January and more recently at blackbox in Edinburgh, Scotland. Malerie Marder, At Rest, 2003. Video still. Courtesy Artemis Greenberg Van Doren, New YorkThe video features a collection of young and old men and women as they lie in bed, the bath or a hot tub. Unlike Warhol’s film of a man sleeping, Marder isn’t interested in teasing her audience with boredom. Instead, she looks for traces of the subconscious in her subjects’ outward appearance, manipulating her footage by altering its speed and adding a soundtrack of labored breathing and energetic snoring. An obese woman appears, accompanied by sounds of heavy breathing that suddenly speed up as her side begins to rise and fall rapidly. This change signals anxiety, whereas when the chest of a pregnant woman begins to rise and fall at speed near the head of her sleeping husband, the breathing is erotically charged. Many of the sleepers also appear in unflattering headshots installed near the video. Like a playbill, the pictures of the actors don’t tell us nearly as much about them as we learn from watching the action. Nikki S Lee, Part 6, 2002. C-Print mounted on aluminium, 76 x 66 cm.
In her past work, Nikki S. Lee took on the role of actor in dramas of her own devising. Dressing the part of a skateboarder, elderly woman, or stripper, she asked friends to snap photos of her as she adopted the look and mannerisms of her chosen demographic group. In a body of work that will be shown in November at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks and Projects in New York, Lee has come closer to producing staged images by working closely with a photographer to predetermine the composition of her work. She is still the central character in the resulting images, but there is no longer an urge to scan the photo to ‘spot Nikki,’ because each image has been cropped to eliminate all but a trace of her companions. In most cases, the shots appear to be candid. Lee is looking away from the camera, absorbed in whatever is going on just outside the frame. In one garden scene, we see a man’s arm held protectively around Lee’s shoulder, and elsewhere Lee beams a smile upward toward a man at the side of a swimming pool. A flushed and happy Lee holds a baby in her arms as she sits up in a hospital room. Elsewhere, she sits in a car’s passenger seat with a broken arm as a man’s hand roughly grasps her breast. These scenarios reveal that Lee is still interest in role-play and identity, but she now challenges viewers to figure out where she is and what she’s doing.
Four years after what Crewdson calls, “…the show that people love to hate and hate to love,” the artists involved are prospering. Plans for an expanded, traveling version of ‘Another Girl’ were dropped soon after they were formulated, but since then, the artists have been invited to participate in group exhibitions which situated their work amongst male and non-Yale artists alike. Dana Hoey, who is working on a radically new body of work, has particularly benefited from imaginative efforts of curators who have recontextualized her work in group exhibitions. At Britain’s National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, curator Patrick Henry included work from Jenny Gage’s ‘Helen’ series in his exhibition ‘Fabula’ which, as he put it, “…moved on from the familiar ambiguities of staged photography to something more searching and sophisticated – something that sought urgently to re-engage with the real.” Gage, who often works in partnership with her photographer husband Tom Betterton, is releasing a book titled ‘Hotel Andromeda’ this month published by Artspace Books and accompanied by a text by writer Heidi Julavitz. In the course of a career, four years isn’t much, but it’s been enough for each artist to mark out her own territory and for us to realize that we’ll be watching them for a long time to come.
