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Stéphane Couturier, Chandigarh – Secrétariat no. 1 (detail), 2007
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Paris Photo
November 12-25, 2008
Since its inception in 1997, Paris Photo has transformed the Carrousel du Louvre
into a microcosm of the world's best pphotography — each year, tens
of thousands flock to the fair, to travel the globe vicariously through the lenses
of more than 500 international artists. With special attention given to
Japan, this year's guest of honor, Artkrush previews a handful of the
keenest perspectives on display in Paris Photo 2008,
including that of New Orleans-born contributor Sharon Core,
who tricks our eyes with her
delectable still-life photography. Contributing editor Shana Nys Dambrot
sits down in Los Angeles with Jeff Brouws to discuss his contributions to
the fair, as well as his thoughts on the new US President-elect; and, before taking our focus away from the City of Lights,
we recommend Aperture's multimedia
compendium of Erwin Olaf's period-driven photography and films. Lastly, on
the gallery circuit, we direct your attention to Marilyn Minter's
portraits of Pamela Anderson at Stockholm's Andréhn-Schiptjenko and
Lothar Baumgarten's anthropological installation at New York's Marian
Goodman Gallery.
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Prospect.1 Scores High Marks
(Artnet.com, November 10)
The inaugural Prospect.1 New Orleans, running through January 18,
arrived in the Big Easy as a shining counterexample to the biennial
circuit's familiar circus-like precipitancy. While Prospect.1 is no less
ambitious than its peers — it bills as "the largest biennial of
international contemporary art ever organized in the United States"
— the city-wide exhibition surprised would-be detractors like
Roberta Smith of the New York Times, garnered positive reviews in the
local press, and lifted the spirits of residents and volunteers alike,
still struggling to repair the damages done by Hurricane Katrina. While
some works courted controversy, the highly publicized event was largely
viewed as a success for New York transplant and veteran curator
Dan Cameron.
Morphosis Builds Green in China
(Architectural Record, November 4)
Embracing China's openness to "aggressive, uncompromised, out-there"
architecture, the Los Angeles-based firm Morphosis announced plans to
break ground on Chinese soil for the first time. The Giant Group
Pharmaceutical Campus, to be completed in April 2009 just outside
Shanghai, will dramatically alter the site's landscape. Plans call for
massively cantilevered office spaces, swooping above and around a
four-lane highway, canals, and a man-made lake. In a related story,
architect David Fisher looked to the New York skyline as a potential
second site for his "rotating skyscraper," a similarly ambitious project
that generates energy via a building-wide system of dynamic, interlocking
housing units.
Recession Hits Art Museums
(Wall Street Journal, October 30)
Though small galleries
are by no means exempt from the rising tide of
financial woes, directors at some of America's largest museums have begun
voicing their own concerns over the struggling economy. In the last two
decades, a wave of museum expansions was propelled by donations from
companies now making headlines with announcements of widespread collapse and
crippling mergers. While construction might be complete, many recent
renovation projects will continue to weigh down museum budgets for years
to come. In related stories, the
St. Louis Art Museum
decided to table its expansion project, citing unstable markets, and Boston's
Museum of Fine Arts
embarks on an ambitious $500m fundraising
campaign in hard hats and tool belts.
Steven Holl Nabs Copenhagen Project
(Inhabitat.com, November 10)
US-based firm Steven Holl Architects was declared the unanimous winner of
an international design competition to build two waterfront towers connected by bridges in
Copenhagen. The public walkway hangs an impressive 213 feet above the
harbor, creating a new landmark to welcome freighters from around the
world to Copenhagen's bustling waterway. Wind turbines running the length
of the bridge will power a number of public spaces also included in the
project, and glass curtainwalls on the exterior of both towers will generate
solar energy for the buildings' heating and cooling systems. In a related
story, solar power is also gaining traction in a handful of Los Angeles
homes.
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London street artist Adam Neate giving away £1m worth of art more »
Gehry design approved for Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem more »
Chloe Sevigny among the lucky few to 'check in' at the Guggenheim more »
Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum authenticates two new portraits more »
New York's Rivington Arms to close in January more »
London artist collective squats posh Mayfair house more »
Boston artists stage a literal economic meltdown more »
The journey from Hitler's 'degenerate art' exhibit to Sotheby's more »
Shepard Fairey creates free commemorative Obama sticker for Moveon.org more »
Photos of nude Muslim women incite attacks on London gallery more »
Art and music collide in two Montreal exhibitions more »
Dubai registers Capital Gate tower as the 'most inclined in the world' more »
Art Production Fund opens an experimental art lab to support artists' visions more »
How the Tate acquired nine Rothkos, while missing out on more more »
Chinese contemporary artists team up with major fashion brands more »
Damien Hirst art-directs, and Sienna Miller stars in, new video for British band The Hours more »
Towel off with Julian Schnabel's Schnowel, available at Target more »
Munich turns out for public toilet turned museum more »
Plans unveiled for China's largest museum of contemporary arts more »
Could-be Pollock popularized by PBS doc is for sale in Toronto more »
Australians still debating Bill Henson's photos of nude minors more »
Audacious building projects to wane with economic prosperity more »
Anish Kapoor profiled more »
Note: Some online publications require registration to access the articles. If you encounter a registration screen, try a
shared username and password from BugMeNot.
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[ Paris Photo 2008 ] |
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Laura Letinsky / Nobuyoshi Araki / Paul Graham
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Now in its 12th installment, Paris Photo 2008 arrives in the European capital with a marked turn toward international photography.
The 107 exhibitors that fill the great Carrousel du Louvre hall include a healthy mix of first-time contributors from
around the world.
Galleries new to the fair include India's Nature Morte, Stills Gallery
of Australia, South Korea's Keumsan Gallery, and Cologne's Claudia Delank Gallery
. But the exhibition's undoubted focus falls on its guest of honor, Japan, boasting the most comprehensive European
exhibition of contemporary
Japanese photography to date.
Currents of intimacy and sublimity underpin the wide selection of international photographers on display. Nowhere are these
themes more apparent
than in the juxtaposition of two photographs: one, a 1945 US Army Corps archival image of the bombing of Nagasaki, being shown by Munich's
Daniel Blau gallery; and the other, Shomei Tomatsu's Blood & Rose 2,
on display at London's Michael Hoppen Gallery. The former image documents in brilliantly
haunting detail one of the worst acts of human violence, while the latter captures an intensely intimate embrace between
lovers.
Yao Lu of Beijing's 798 Photo Gallery looks toward the sublime with epic images of the
Chinese countryside that resemble delicate woodcuts,
while UK documentary photographer Paul Graham captures the bewildered landscape of New Orleans
in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Dutch bookseller Antiquariaat L. van Paddenburgh shows
Bert Teunissen's grainy, black-and-white image of a dirt road that reaches out toward the horizon,
hinting at endless possibility.
Other photographers confine their work to the microcosm of human relationships and everyday observation. Japanese artist Yuichi Hibi
portrays a couple tenderly dancing; Henry Wessel, well known for chronicling the American
West during the early 1970s, captures a businessman standing on the beach, contemplating the view. French artist Lise Sarfati and Japanese photographer
Rinko Kawauchi commemorate two moments of personal reflection, and still-life photographers Laura Letinsky,
of New York's Yancey Richardson Gallery,
and Yuki Onodera, of Tokyo's Zeit Foto Salon, take alternatively minimalist and comic views of the detritus of everyday life.
Comedy and frivolity also have their place in 2008. Tokyo's Takashi Homma photographs a disgruntled dog right after its bath, and
Bernard Demenge, a finalist in France's SFR Young Talents competition, delights with a series of
hilarious self-portraits, tying string around his face or peeking through fake flowers. Martin Parr, of New York's
Janet Borden, provides a fittingly cheeky view of an elderly woman obscured by a string of flags,
rendered in saturated Technicolor. New Delhi's Dayanita Singh
shows us a young Indian girl literally jumping for joy, and Paris' Denis Ozanne provides comedic precedent with Man Ray's jubilant and racy
experiments in double exposure from the '30s.
Of the many smirk-worthy works on display, Magnum photographer
Trent Parke's
image of a young child kissing the lips of a doll is the most startling. At first glance the image appears to document innocuous toddler affection,
but it soon reveals a far more sinister view of love in the absence of human touch. Even more disturbing is Japanese
bad-boy
Nobuyoshi Araki's portrayal of
a bound young woman hanging upside-down like a wilting flower.
By contextualizing contemporary trends in the complex and contradictory history of photography, Paris Photo presents each
work — no matter how violent, intimate, or beautiful — with an even-handed respect for the medium in all its diverse
forms.
- Adda Birnir
Paris Photo, which coincides with the month-long Parisian biennial Mois de la Photo, is on view at the Carrousel du Louvre from November 13 to 16.
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Lee Bul
Seoul
PKM Trinity Gallery
Now through November 20
Enjoying her status as one of South Korea's most prominent contemporary
artists, Lee Bul presents a new series of works at PKM Trinity Gallery in
Seoul. Evoking the country's cultural, political, and architectural
environment, Lee employs two-way mirrors and fluorescent lights to extend
painted polyurethane into seemingly endless depths.
Also included are
several well-received mother-of-pearl paintings that frequently refer back
to South Korea's political climate; a series of carefully crafted ceiling
sculptures in hand-cut polyurethane; and the large-scale installation
Heaven and Earth, which was shown at
Fondation Cartier in Paris last year.
Complex and sensuous, Lee's new works manifest her genius for uniting
aesthetic and conceptual strength.
- Josephina E. Lee
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Lothar Baumgarten
New York
Marian Goodman Gallery
Now through November 16
Lothar Baumgarten's current solo exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery
fuses the artist's interest in reflective anthropology with photography,
sculpture, projection, and audio installation. The show's centerpiece,
Fragmento Brasil, began soon after Baumgarten moved to the Amazon
in 1978 to live with the Yanomami people. More than 500 images are
projected on the walls of the main gallery, combining photos from the
artist's five-month walk through Brazil and Venezuela, abstract drawings
from the oral Yanomami culture, and 17th-century paintings of the region's
birds by Dutch artist and anthropologist Albert Eckhout. An audio
installation playing in the darkened back gallery provides an almost
symphonic arrangement of birdsongs recorded in the wasteland of Fishkill
Creek.
- Julia Fryett
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Clegg & Guttmann: The Age of Syncopation
London
Wilkinson Gallery
Now through November 16
At the heart of Clegg & Guttmann's show at East London's Wilkinson
Gallery lies a simple metaphor: one beat playing off another, as in
syncopated music. To this end, the artists construct playful yet sometimes
sinister contraptions that require visitor participation. Patrons are
invited to strap ankles together in The Chain-Gang — a
somewhat obtuse evocation of the rhythms created by laboring slaves
— while Continuous Drawing/Exquisite Corpse harps back to the
surrealists' game of unintended consequences. The four remaining exercises
show us how new orders grow out of old, as each piece is created anew
within its own physical parameters.
- Helen Holtom
Clegg & Guttmann's work is also on view in a solo show at Galleria
Lia Rumma in Milan through November 30.
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Yael Bartana: Mary Koszmary
Milan
Galleria Raffaella Cortese
Now through November 30
From the 2007 video Mary Koszmary (Bad Dreams), a male voice echoes
throughout Raffaella Cortese gallery in Yael Bartana's latest solo show.
Bartana – whose work has long dealt with both individual and collective
experiences of political conflict – focuses here on the leftist theories
of Polish scholar Slawomir Sierakowski. The camera directs its attention
on the 29-year-old Sierakowski, looking very much the visionary as he
delivers a speech full of emphasis and pathos. As the camera turns, we
discover that there is no public before him, only an overgrown field. From
this empty arena, he appeals to Polish refugees, imploring them to return
to Poland. This anthem for a better future is punctuated by one final
message, spelled out in large letters on the green field: "3,300,000 Jews
can change the life of 40,000,000 Poles."
- Chiara Agnello
Yael Bartana's work is also on view in a solo show at P.S.1 Contemporary
Art Center in Long Island City, NY through January 19.
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Marilyn Minter: The Pam Show
Stockholm
Andréhn-Schiptjenko
Now through November 16
American artist Marilyn Minter's third solo show at Andréhn-Schiptjenko presents seven photos from a 2007 shoot with Pamela
Anderson, originally commissioned by the contemporary-art quarterly
Parkett. The large-scale, pastel-colored works take an up-close
view of the actress, drenched in water and soap bubbles. Each print
reveals a rare and refreshing side of Anderson, seen here as a solemn and
imperfect woman complete with wrinkles, birthmarks, and freckles. Also
included in the exhibition is Barbed Wire, a dynamic enamel
painting on metal that combines various elements from the same shoot into
a composite portrait of the iconic actress. The exhibition continues
Minter's exploration of failed glamour, an ever-present theme in her work
since Coral Ridge Towers — the celebrated 1969 photo series
of Minter's drug-abusing mother.
- Elna Svenle
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[ Sharon Core ] |
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Sharon Core
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In a world saturated by images, untangling a particular picture from its
referents can be a thorny exercise. Pastry chef, horticulturalist, and
artist Sharon Core
embraces this layering game to create
photographs that recreate paintings. The result is a complex play on sight
and memory, similar to the contemporary trompe l'oeil practices of Vik
Muniz and Thomas Demand.
Core's own meticulous baking artfully recreated pop artist Wayne
Thiebaud's confectionary compositions in her 2003-04 photographic series
Thiebauds. In order to faithfully mimic the fanciful desserts, Core
devised tricky perspective shifts and shapes for her rows of cake slices
and candied apples. The images recalled the frosting-like paint of
Thiebaud's originals, reconciling that texture with the smooth surfaces of
photographic prints. Following solo exhibitions at
Bellwether Gallery and
White Columns — both of which are considered New York talent
incubators — Core's work has been acquired by the
Guggenheim Museum
and was included in the Phaidon's touchstone compendium
Vitamin Ph: New
Perspectives in Photography.
Her current body of work, Early American, finds fertile pictorial
ground in the still-life paintings of 19th-century artist
Raphaelle Peale.
Using produce grown in her own greenhouse and highly choreographed
lighting, Core transforms elegantly arranged fruits, vegetables, and
flowers into painterly moments of an otherworldly hyper-reality. The small
prints on matte paper oscillate between the detached crispness of the
camera and the gestural expressiveness of brushwork. Moreover, the
unadorned beauty of nature strikes a timely chord, as sustainable
agriculture becomes increasingly desirable.
Similar to those sentiments raised by photographer Tim Davis' series
Permanent Collection, Core points toward the disconnect of
artworks in reproduction, examining the appearance of paintings reproduced
in textbooks and catalogues. Core's work takes great pleasure in
exhibiting each of these particularities, while continuously acknowledging
the intricacy of culture's vast visual archive.
- Catherine Krudy
Sharon Core's solo exhibition, Early American, is on view at
New York's Yancey Richardson Gallery through December 6; and the gallery
presents Core's work at Paris Photo from November 13 to 16.
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[ Jeff Brouws ] |
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Jeff Brouws View more images » |
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| Photographer Jeff Brouws has a voracious appetite for the real America — the one
that unfolds along the continental highways, arranges its post-industrial ruins in daisy chains of small
towns, and does its best to resist its neglected urban centers. Evincing influences from Richard Misrach
to Charles Bukowski, from FSA projects to the songs of Tom Waits, Brouws' substantial career of international
exhibitions and books, most recently the monograph
Approaching Nowhere, is part sociopolitical activism, part melancholy poetics — and
is opening the eyes of Paris Photo audiences to a powerful strain of intellectual realism in
contemporary American art. Artkrush Contributing Editor Shana Nys Dambrot gets into his head. |
AK: You have pursued the four major series (Approaching Nowhere, American Typologies, Highway, and Inside the Live Reptile Tent) and their sub-series simultaneously, and over the course of many years. Which series did you start first and which is the
most recent?
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JB: The earliest series comprised the carnival images (later titled Inside the Live Reptile Tent
when the book was published by Chronicle in 2001). I began shooting these carnival spaces in 1987 in
Ventura, CA. I had never worked with a series in mind prior to this — I'm self-taught, a high-school
graduate who never attended art school, so I was unfamiliar with how an "artist" might go about making work
— but there was something sociological about it, and metaphorical, if we think of the "American Dream"
as a bit of a con. I worked diligently on it for about six years, put it down, and then picked up a few
additional images in the late '90s when I moved to the East Coast. As a Springsteen fan, I had to check out
the Jersey Shore, and Asbury Park in its state of
sublime ruin just proved too compelling to pass up. However, you're also right: I was simultaneously working
on other projects during that same 1987-1993 time period.
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Erwin Olaf
Alasdair Foster
Aperture
A provocative commercial photographer and introspective fine artist for the past 20 years,
Erwin Olaf
has captured the public's imagination — in major magazines with his ads and editorials, and in international galleries
and museums with his
photographs and films. In his fine-art work, the Netherlands-born photographer and filmmaker constructs psychological
scenarios to be played out by
models and actors that appear trapped in these fictional settings. This elegantly designed
monograph offers photographs from three recent
series — Rain, Hope, and Grief — plus a DVD of excerpts from five films.
The '50s-era sets and costumes
used in the Rain series call to mind the American stereotypes illustrated by Norman Rockwell,
but tinged
with the somber paintings of Edward Hopper. Grief reflects the following decade;
the sorrow expressed
by the actors in the photographs and film was motivated by news reports of John F. Kennedy's assassination.
Meanwhile, the film-and-photo installation
Le Dernier Cri (The Latest Fashion)
projects the viewer into the future,
where the actors wear facial prosthetics and exaggerated hairstyles that look like something out of the
The Twilight Zone.
- Paul Laster
Aperture exhibits Olaf's work at Paris Photo, and he joins other Aperture photographers
for a book signing at Colette on November 14. His work is also on view in solo shows at Hamiltons
in London, through November 22, and at the Hague Museum of Photography in the Netherlands, through January 18.
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Cover Art
Stéphane Couturier
Chandigarh — Secrétariat no. 1, 2007
C-print
71 x 92 in. / 180 x 234 cm
© Stéphane Couturier
Courtesy Galerie Polaris, Paris
All Rights Reserved
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Editor
Paul Laster
Deputy Editor
Joel Withrow
Contributing Editors
Adda Birnir
Erin Cowgill
Shana Nys Dambrot
Sarah Kessler
Doug Levy
Andrew Maerkle
H.G. Masters
Marlyne Sahakian
Sarah Stephenson
Greg Zinman
Contributors
Chiara Agnello
Julia Fryett
Helen Holtom
Catherine Krudy
Josephina E. Lee
Lauren McKee
Elna Svenle
Mailer Design
Jessica Bauer-Greene
Mark Barry
Cultural Partner
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Production
Morgan Croney
Publishers
Sascha Lewis
Mark Mangan
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