Author Archives: Matin Momen

Peter Hujar at Pace/McGill

So finely attuned is Peter Hujar’s (1934-1987) photographic voice that the eighteen black and white photographs comprising the mini-retrospective at Pace/MacGill are more than sufficient to present his world and his take on it.

A prominent artist in 70s and 80s New York, the at-ease portraits of William Burroughs, Vince Aletti, Paul Thek, John Waters and David Wojnarowicz included in the show are properly seen as portraits of friends as much as of art world luminaries; with that said, the head-on ’78 close-up of a cow mindlessly chewing on a strand of barbed wire is brutally economic in alluding to the harsh environment that was downtown New York City back then, AIDS crisis to come (to which Hujar himself would succumb).

Exhibit Review: Dan Flavin and Donald Judd

The nine grand Dan Flavin works and one big five-unit Donald Judd aluminum cube installation, now collectively up at the David Zwirner gallery on 20th Street will serve as a slap in the back of the head for anyone who thinks they’ve had enough of minimalist art.

And, as much as I want “to get” the elevating art historical language that dust-devils around these works, and American minimalism in general, the best response I have come across to date and the one most appropriate to describe this show, is Kirk Varnedoe’s clear-eyed description from his 2003 A.W. Mellon Lectures delivered at the National Gallery. In the process of debunking the theory that the CIA actively promoted American abstract expressionism to highlight “the freedom of the individual” against Communism, Varnedoe described minimalism as follows –

Luc Tuymans : The Summer is Over

To stand in front of a painting by Luc Tuymans means accepting that while you can “get” what it’s about you can never really say you fully understand it. This later point stings in that his paintings calmly stand as a rebuke that so much of what we think we have independently earned in terms of knowledge or sophisticated understanding is really just second hand.

What makes it uncomfortable at times to look at Tuymans’s paintings for an extended period is the sickening feeling that comes out of the inability to engage the paintings using our own eyes and wits.  The paintings lay bare, in the here and now, our intellectual impotence to create meaning from them without inside knowledge.

And then it kind of dawns on you, maybe that impotence shadows you in some form or other wherever you go. Maybe, to a large extent, you are only as good as your information.

Fall Books, Part 1 | In Case You Missed the Show…

To think of Christopher Wool only as a painter is to deprive oneself enjoyment of his accomplishments as a bookmaker and photographer. For three decades now Wool has brought to bear his trademark attention to detail, professionalism, intelligence and disquieting use of copy and re-presentation to over 30 books. While some were published in miniscule edition that would be rough to come by now, the admirable thing about Wool is that each of his book projects – regardless of price — is produced with the care normally reserved for more valuable and marketable works of art. In this regard, a book by Wool is part and parcel of his artistic practice.

Rather than merely document and reproduce his works — as art books traditionally do –the design of each publication pushes further the questions his paintings raise about authorship, the original, the copy, gesture, mechanical reproduction (silkscreen,, photography, Xerox), seriality, reading (of books, of paintings), and the glitch versus the mark.

RUSSIAN PHOTOGRAPHY 1908-1938

It takes a show like the current exhibit of early Russian photography at the Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York to remind us of several things. One, that the visual age we live in is neither as sophisticated nor as original as we think. Another, that the size of a photograph is part of its intended meaning or, at least, an important part of its impact, and that this critical information is frequently obliterated in physical reproduction or on the Internet. Or that we need to get into galleries where we can experience physical prints, particularly vintage prints, because their featheriness, deep blackness, greasiness, technical (im)perfection and chemical tactility ground them as physical objects as much as imagery itself.

Requiem for the sun: The art of Mono-ha

Acrylic sheets, neon tubes, cement, steel plates, glass, rubber, cloth, paper, cotton, sponges, light bulbs, electrical outlets, wire, stone, earth, water, fire, wood, charcoal, and oil – industrial materials, household products, and natural materials were placed together in neutral arrangements. They were brought into temporary involvements or confrontations with a variety of spaces and phenomena, including the ground surface, mid-air, room interiors, walls, floors, corners, columns, windows, light, and dark. Mono-ha did not use physical objects and space as materials to realize certain ideas; their approach was a way of giving new life to these elements in interdependent relationships.

Sarah Moon: Now and Then

For her current show in the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, titled “Now and Then,” the photographer Sarah Moon had the following quotation from T.S Eliot stenciled on a column

— What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present

While Moon may be associated in the popular mind with fashion photography, that understanding does not necessarily serve her work well because, frankly, most of us have not developed as sophisticated an understanding of “fashion” as she has. Where fashion brings to mind frenetic change, disposability, consumption and surface concerns, Moon equates fashion to fiction. And what fiction prizes, if anything, are interiority and empathy.