Visit—A Handful of Dust

On a visit to Toronto, I had the opportunity yesterday to visit an interesting exhibit at the Ryerson Image Centre. Curated by David Campany, A Handful of Dust: From the Cosmic to the Domestic brings together work from a broad range of artists (Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Jeff Wall, Walker Evans, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Mona Kuhn and others), all connected thematically with dust. Campany has also published a book of the same name as a catalogue and further exploration of the theme.

The pieces, mostly photographs but with one or two paintings and a couple of video installations, seem to have been selected by Campany as conceptual responses to a photograph by Man Ray (Dust Breeding, 1920) of a piece by Marcel Duchamp. The monochrome photograph looks like it may be an aerial shot of a wasted landscape, but it is hard to get a sense of scale because of the lack of reference points and the uniformity of tone and colour. All the viewer has to go by is line, form and texture. In fact, the photograph depicts a glass plate that had collected a thick layer of dust while lying on the floor of Duchamp’s studio. Viewers are informed that the two artists may not have agreed who was ultimately responsible for the work and later agreed to share credit.

Robert Burley - Implosions of Buildings 65 and 69, Kodak Park, Rochester, NY [#1], October 6, 2007 — Robert Burley – Implosions of Buildings 65 and 69, Kodak Park, Rochester, NY [#1], October 6, 2007

The selected images are set in two rooms and, apart from a few dust-related quotations painted on the gallery walls, visitors are largely left to derive their own meanings from the display (which I welcomed). The sources of the dust vary—sand, destroyed buildings, human beings—but the overall message is one of human impermanence and mortality: sand covers everything in its path, the built environment doesn’t last forever, humans shed skin and eventually shed their lives.

At the same time, the dust that gathers can both conceal and reveal. It can cover tracks but it can also heighten our ability to see texture and form.

Nick Waplington - from the series Patriarch's Wardrobe, 2010 — Nick Waplington – from the series Patriarch’s Wardrobe, 2010

I went to the exhibit because I have often appreciated the shows that the Ryerson Image Centre hosts, although I have to admit that I was a bit doubtful because of the subject matter. In the end, I was won over and came away thinking that it amounted to an excellent meditation on aspects of the human condition. The images on display also served to show the power of abstraction and the role of imagination in interpreting what appears in front of us. In short, the show works.

A side benefit of the visit to the Ryerson Image Centre was a chance to see Extending the Frame: 40 Years of Gallery TPW. The show is a history of the founding and evolution of the Toronto Photographers Workshop (TPW), a group which has worked diligently to advance photography as an art form and has involved such people as Edward Burtynsky, Robert Burley, and the duo of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge. It was fascinating to see how the dedication of a relatively small number of people has had such an impact on the direction of photography and art more generally in Canada.

Study Visit—Ruth Maclennan

I was looking forward to taking part remotely in the live study visit to meet Ruth Maclennan and hear her discuss her work, “Icebreaker Dreaming,” on display at Pushkin House. The visit was organized as part of the BA Photography and OCA’s Arts & Environment series, led by Dan Robinson and Melissa Thompson.

I very much appreciated Dan’s efforts to make the study visit accessible to a wider audience than just those who were able to attend in-person. Distance from the UK is a downside of being an international student at the OCA, so many of us make extra efforts to compensate with participation in Google Hangouts (both tutor- and student-led) and our own visits to events and showings closer to our own homes.

Unfortunately, the audio was so poor that I thought it would be better to bow out after a few minutes. There were several issues with the audio: low bandwidth (garbled and missing bits); a lot of echo in the room and more than one voice speaking at once. I suspect that two of the three problems could be mitigated with a using a separate, directional microphone pointed at the speaker/presenter.

So if Dan, and/or other tutors (I believe I recognized Andrea Norrington in the group) are willing and able to take that suggestion on board, I would be very glad to take another crack at remote participation in a study visit. It’s a great idea and I’d love to see it done successfully, not just for me but for all OCA students who could benefit.

Or perhaps some enterprising student will take it on him/herself and we won’t need to wait for the tutors.

Visit—Japanese photography

“Hanran: 20th-Century Japanese Photography” opened recently at the National Gallery of Canada. The exhibit was curated by the Yokohoma Museum of Art and features works by 28 photographers from the early 1930s to the 1990s.

I went to the members’ pre-screening of the exhibit to beat the crowds and so was able to take my time going over the images on display. It was something of an education for me because I have been more familiar with contemporary Japanese photographers (Hiroshi Sugimoto, Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama) than those of the previous century. According to the promotional text for Hanran, the works in the exhibit break with the Pictorialism of early Japanese photography and begin with “the avant-garde Shinko Shashin (New Photography) of the 1930s”.

Many of the photographs, both pre- and post-WWII, struck me as being close in subject matter and approach to the images produced in the West at that time. Modernity was in full swing and there is a preoccupation with mechanization, news magazines, fashion and advertising. The photographs produced during the War itself are a departure to much of that, however, and the exhibit devotes a fair bit of space to early propaganda, documentation of the Tokyo it raids and then the horrific aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not until much later that the are-bure-boke (grainy, blurry, out of focus) school of photos start to appear.

And this is more of what I had been hoping to see. For me, much of the exhibit looked a lot like the photography with which Western audiences are familiar. Few of the pictures told me anything new or exposed me to a different way of thinking. If anything, I wondered if much of the photography could be read as a desire in early 20th-century Japan to emulate the West, but this might say more about my ignorance of Japanese history and culture.

All told, I was ready to learn more about the are-bure-boke approach, but that is my problem and not the fault of the curators.

My first exhibit

A bistro in my town held an open “call for artists” last fall and I decided to take along a selection of images that I had made for EYV, along with some others that I was pleased with. I had never done anything like this before, so I didn’t know exactly what to expect or how best to present my work. In the end I took along one large canvas print (24″ x 36″) and a selection of 12″ x 18″ prints in a borrowed portfolio case.

It seemed to me that many of the people who brought their work to the call had done this before and a number appeared to be well-established, if their work and preparation were anything to go by. Nevertheless, the little review committee (the bistro owner and her artist friend) liked the colour and humour in my work and left me with the impression that I had a chance of being selected. A few weeks later I received an e-mail asking if I would display my photographs in the bistro for six weeks in fall 2019.

Well before the exhibit, I made a to-do list of tasks and questions that I wanted to cover well in advance:

Do a comparison of canvas prints for price/quality
Do I need to look at alternate prints?
Short explanatory text for each image
Look into changing my e-mail address and using my domain name
Have cards printed with contact info, etc.
Prepare a distribution list to get the word out (my Facebook, wife’s FB, Instagram, Twitter, colleagues, church, local English theatre group, networks of friends and family)
Create an event on Facebook
Reminders at intervals leading up to the exhibit
Create a title for the exhibit (thematic?)
Any lessons learned from OCA people re: exhibiting work?

Two months before the opening day I created two Facebook ‘event’ invitations (one ‘private’ to directly invite friends and family; one ‘public’ that could be shared more broadly) to encourage people to come. I also used Twitter and Instagram to help drive online traffic toward the public Facebook event page.

One of the three large canvases. Also used on the Facebook invitation and small promotional posters.

The bistro provided me with diagrams outlining the two rooms where I could exhibit, along with the maximum dimensions that each wall space could accommodate. Since there were two rooms and space for 11 of my photographs, I decided to give the exhibit the theme of “Night and Day,” knowing that I could use one room for ‘night’ and the other for ‘day.’ This worked well and viewers seemed to understand the division easily.

Diagrams provided by the bistro to outline placement and maximum dimensions of works.

One month before the event I bought eight 18″ x 24″ black frames and made new 13″ x 19″ prints (matted to a “12 x 18″ window). I also ordered a 24″ x 36” canvas print to go with the two large canvases I already had, bringing the number of works for display to 11. At the same time I made two smallish posters to hang at work, one on the glass wall outside my office and the other on the cork wall of the kitchenette. I wanted to use my workspace to promote the vernissage without overdoing it—and I wanted to be sure that the people who report to me felt welcome to attend but not compelled. During this time I also used a design my wife created to create business cards (both for people to take away and to affix prices next to the photographs) and to create a small poster for the exhibit area to outline my approach to the works on display. The design was clear and mirrored the key elements on my website.

The owner of the bistro is generous and offers the display space freely to selected local artists without asking for a percentage of any sales. She leaves transactions entirely to the artist and purchaser. It was also good of her to make snack food (chips/crisps and small plates of sausage, cheese and olives) during the opening.

With the help of my wife and the owner’s artist friend, we hung the exhibit in about two hours on the morning of the opening. The hanging system the bistro uses is simple, easy to use, adaptable and very strong: it consists of a length of wall-mounted, steel ‘rebar’ with a length of chain dropped from it. Art works are attached to the chain with ‘s’ hooks and then secured at the right height with plastic tie-wraps. Once the pieces are checked for placement and levelled, the two bottom corners of each frame are lightly attached to the wall using putty.

Placement of two photographs for display.

Leading up to the opening I had two contradictory fears: the first, that no one would come; and the second, that people would come. As the day got closer I found that I had two or three moments of real doubt that I should be doing this (who would want to come to see my photographs, never mind buy them?), but I forged on. I had promoted the event to a lot of people I know and I had made a commitment to the bistro owner. I knew that someone else had recently decided at the last moment not to exhibit their work and had no intention of doing the same.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. Some 60 people attended the opening and a good proportion stayed to have drinks and order a meal at the bistro. I sold three pictures during the event and there is a chance that a fourth sale may be in the works. All told, I need to sell at least five photographs to cover my costs for printing and frames, so there is still a good chance that I will manage to do so (there are roughly four weeks left before I have to take down my pictures).

I am very pleased with my first foray into exhibiting and will do it again. The bistro was a low-risk way for me to get my feet wet and allowed me to bring friends, family, colleagues (and some people I don’t know at all) to a local place that means something to me. “Come for the photography and stay for the beer—or vice-versa,” may not be the usual marketing ploy for an exhibit, but it worked just fine for me. Now to sell the fourth and fifth prints…

World Press Photo 2019

The World Press Photo 2019 travelling exhibit is currently on show in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. I have had the chance to visit the exhibit a few times in previous years, but I found that I saw it with different eyes this year.

Although the specifics of the images change from one year to the next, depending on where the latest trouble spots are in the world, I find that there is a sameness to the images, exhibit after exhibit. Conflict and violence occupy centre stage, as you’d expect from the world’s journalistic businesses—if it bleeds, it leads. The environment is also an area of photojournalistic attention as exploitation of the planet continues at a furious pace (one image of frogs dismembered alive for restaurants illustrates our appetite for destruction particularly well).

There are less shocking, but still dramatic, images every so often from the world of sport and there is the occasional human interest story about people with colourful costumes, interesting diets or religious practices that the media tend to depict as quaint, disturbing or both.

The difference for me this year had to do with the way I looked at the images: how they communicated as a body, rather than one by one.

The first thing I noticed is that there is still an audience for this type of photography. No matter how violent, graphic or disturbing we are fascinated by this type of photojournalism. I suppose that part of this feeds into the idea that we must document the happenings in our world, no matter how terrible they are. Or perhaps it is especially when terrible things happen that we must bear witness to them, although the witness has had little discernible success in keeping similar things from happening—how many times have we said “never again!”? Maybe the best we can hope for is that the perpetrators of this particular outrage might be brought to account, and the victims might receive some degree of recognition or vindication.

The next thing I noticed about the exhibit is that much of the coverage is of things that happen to vulnerable people in or from the developing world. Whether it is migrants to Germany turning to the sex trade just to live, a baby boom among former Colombian guerillas, or the plight of Mayan beekeepers, the collection suggests that bad things are going on among them, far away over there. Sure, Donald Trump shows up—by implication in a caravan of refugees heading to the U.S. border, or leading Emmanuel Macron by the hand—but most of the really bad stuff is happening somewhere else.

After recently reading Roland Barthes’ “Rhetoric of the Image” (Barthes and Sontag, 1989), I was also struck by the power of the caption to “anchor” and constrain the interpretation of an image. The best example of this is the first image one sees when entering the exhibition, which is Brent Stirton‘s picture of an African woman at night, heavily camouflaged and carrying an assault weapon. Is she a guerilla? A jihadist? A government soldier? Is she attacking or is she preparing to defend? Where exactly is she? The image itself could be read in any of a dozen or more ways, but the caption ends the questioning and settles the matter (in a surprising way, for me):

https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2019/37622/1/Brent-Stirton

Petronella Chigumbura (30), a member of an all-female anti-poaching unit called Akashinga, participates in stealth and concealment training in the Phundundu Wildlife Park, Zimbabwe.

I realized how often we simply we accept such captions as Gospel. But what if the caption writer gets it wrong, accidentally or by design? Is the caption a reliable guide? Has the photographer understood all the implications of his or her image, and the complexities of the context? The viewer has no way of knowing (but may accept or reject the authority of caption depending on how ‘reasonable’ or palatable it may sound).

Finally, one of the signs in the museum set me thinking about the role curation plays in an exhibition like this. The sign read, “The stories that matter.” We can take that statement at face value, but the obvious question is: to whom do they matter? Who decides? On what basis? This is certainly not a kick at the organizers of the World Press Photo Contest, but it is a reminder that we never see an unmediated or unselected image. We don’t have to cast aspersions on the motives of the people who choose images to remember that they do indeed have them. And so do we.

Reference

Barthes, R. and Sontag, S. (1989) Selected writings. Fontana.

Cindy Sherman at the NPG

Images from Cindy Sherman’s “Society Portraits” (National Portrait Gallery, 28 June 2019)

The visit, led by OCA tutor Jayne Taylor, began with a brief overview of the Sherman retrospective by Giselle Torres from the National Portrait Gallery. While a good idea, the overview went over a lot of the material already covered in the suggested readings. This suggests two things: the reading/viewings may be sufficient on their own and, if there is to be a speaker, it might be helpful to let her know what has been provided to participants. (To be fair, speakers may already have a prepared text to work from and it may not be reasonable to ask them to customize it for groups.)

The exhibit covered a broad sweep of Sherman’s career, from the time of her student days in Buffalo to works of the last couple of years. The photographer has been dressing up since she was a child and has stayed true to her means of expression, even while evolving in her practice and picking up technical skill along the way. Her earliest works are in series of black and white photographs where the print size is uniformly small. Over time, Sherman moved to colour photography, and from analogue processes to digital, in progressively-larger print sizes. She has also taken on a movie/video production at different points, from brief stop-action animation using photographic cut-outs, to short videos, to a feature-length, low-budget horror movie (Sherman’s favourite film genre).

What struck me across the rooms of the exhibit was how consistent Sherman has been in her approach, even as her work has evolved and become more sophisticated. It seems to me that she has collected a set of types — or stereotypes — and she has used them to challenge viewers about the ambiguity of the images we see every day. The best, and most accessible, example of this is her “Untitled Film Stills” series that offers up familiar-looking images that could have been shot on a movie set. None of the photographs is drawn from a particular movie, however, so the sense of familiarity comes not from having seen the film but from being immersed in the visual language of many films. Without much effort or prompting, we imagine narratives about the women in the images because we have seen this visual language at play in countless films.

ItItSherman’s later series similarly draw on stock elements of a visual language or rhetoric, some of it quite familiar (centrefolds, cover girls, pornography, horror movies, clowns and medieval paintings) and some of it less so (her later work parodying wealthy patrons of fashion shows and society women). Much of this work is designed to subvert visual tropes that we have taken for granted in Western culture, particularly those that customarily reduce women to vulnerable victims or objects of desire. It is cleverly done, with its artifice lying in plain view: Sherman frequently leaves the camera’s cable release lying in the frame, or uses garish lighting and/or makeup, or does not attempt to hide the edges of the prosthesis that she is wearing.

I have to say that I have not always appreciated all of Sherman’s work and thought that she has perhaps more attention than was deserved. After this visit, however, I believe I have a better understanding of what she has been trying to accomplish and think she has done it masterfully.

I still have some questions, however:

Could it have been possible for a man to create a similar body of work with similar effect? Or was no male “Cindy Sherman” possible? (Or necessary?)
If much of Sherman’s work calls into question or confronts the “male gaze,” does any of it demonstrate a female gaze? Is that what some of her ‘society women’ portraits are meant to do, or is female concern over aging and social standing a response to male standards?
How effective is parody once you become part of the very class that you purport to parody? (I have the same question about comedians.) What does it mean when major corporations know you are attempting to subvert their worlds, but pay you to do it because they know they will make a profit anyway?
Is Cindy Sherman’s time up? Some students suggested as much during the post-visit discussion. Or is it more the case that superstars in the art world simply move into another sphere of recognition as brands and commodities?

References

HENITalks (2019) Hal Foster – Under the Gaze: The Art of Cindy Sherman. At: https://vimeo.com/266364876

National Portrait Gallery Press Release. https://www.npg.org.uk/assets/files/pdf/press/2018/CindySherman-Announcement.pdf

O’Hagan, S. (2019) Cindy Sherman: ‘I enjoy doing the really difficult things that people can’t buy’. At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jun/08/cindy-sherman-interview-exhibition-national-portrait-gallery

Sherman, C. and Goldsmith, D. (1993). “Cindy Sherman.” Aperture, (133), 34-43. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24471695

Sherman, C. et al. (2019) Cindy Sherman. National Portrait Gallery.

(2019) Cindy Sherman – Nobodys Here But Me (1994). At: https://vimeo.com/228996446

Nan Goldin at Tate Modern

One of the great things about travelling is the chance to take advantage of cultural happenings beyond one’s usual circle.

Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is on at Tate Modern at the moment so I decided to have a look. I’ve seen many of the images before and the project is hardly new, but I wondered if there might be an angle available in the exhibit that I hadn’t seen before.

A mock-up of the book was on display and Goldin’s original slide show of images set to music was running in an adjacent room. I’ve only seen the images in book or online form before, but even the larger print and projected sizes didn’t make a lot of difference to their impact for me.

I think there might be a couple of reasons for this. The first is that some of the images are shocking the first time you see them, but may lose some of their power after more viewings.

The second might be that I don’t find Goldin’s work very appealing. I appreciate that she helped to open up a field of unflinching documentation of a life “from the inside,” but it is not a life I recognise or necessarily want to explore further. At the same time, viewing the exhibition did lead me to think more about documentary and photojournalism in connection with some of the readings for Part One of CAN and wonder if Goldin hasn’t in some way commodified her own suffering.

Perhaps I am being harsh. Goldin has certainly added to the world of art photography and I’ll make a point of looking at her later images to see if there is something I can latch onto.