To hear “Quay Brothers” is to instantly think of filmmakers famous for handmade, dusty, stop-motion puppet films that harken to some marginal eastern European animation tradition legible to a select few is more a result of the haphazard way we have come to know their work. The principal achievement of the Quay Brothers retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is to correct this misperception.
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.
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.
The Aperture Foundation’s description of their newly opened exhibition, “Delpire & Co”, is that it “showcases [Robert] Delpire’s rise to prominence in the world of photography through his pioneering and seminal work in magazine and book publishing, films, curatorship, and advertising for the past fifty years.”
This it certainly does — in a herculean installation that will span four venues and two supporting gallery shows. But, beyond the stated goal, it may ultimately showcase photography’s rise to prominence in the world. When the elevator takes you back down from the show to the sidewalk below, it is worth reflecting that what you have just seen represents a world of images that not only predates the Internet and the hellish proliferation of images that marks our time but an epoch in which it was possible to ask with a straight face whether photography matters.
A question relevant to contemporary concerns quietly resonates in the elegantly understated show of 30 or so vintage prints shot by Constantin Brancusi in the 1920’s and 30s, currently showing at Bruce Silverstein gallery in New York, and it is namely one of intent. What are we to make of photographs taken by an artist known as a sculptor? What purpose were these photographs intended to serve? To whom were they addressed? What has the passage of time wrought on them and on our interpretive efforts?
The gut reaction is to see the photographs as simply documentation. However, even a cursory stroll through demonstrates that there is more going on than just Brancusi photographing sculptures for his consumption alone.
Upon parting ways with the 120 or so vintage photographs, artist books and short videos installed in the Guggenheim’s Francesca Woodman retrospective, I found myself feeling, oddly, a little more solid in my own skin. Because these photographs emphatically exclude any sense of exterior setting, color, narrative, time, the weather even, and, in withholding anything that could be considered photographic information, they draw one in – literally, these prints are intimately sized about 5 inches square, so you’ve got to get your face into them – to focus one’s gaze on a particular young woman who, in print after print, conjures forth herself amidst natural light, scuffed wood, crackling paint and peeling wallpaper. And she does it masterfully, each time getting to exist, just more so, in a way that only the physical, photographic print seems to have managed do for her, until she killed herself at the age of 22 in 1981 in New York City.
‘Tis the season to be jolly, and not because of Christmas. The super-duper limited edition definitive Sarah Moon monograph “12345,” whose first printing several years ago sold out in weeks, has been reprinted by Thames and Hudson. The five soft cover volumes come in a sturdy slip case and it is the most comprehensive body of Moon’s work thus far. And if you don’t know her work, you should.
To our knowledge the book is only available in Europe at this point, but we are sure it will come stateside one day. 125GBP and worth every penny.
We reviewed the newest Deborah Turbeville’s book, The Fashion Pictures, in the first issue of SZ magazine. This week I was pleasantly surprised to find out that a selection of Turbeville’s photography is on view at Staley-Wise gallery, hidden above the hubbub of Broadway in SoHo.
The exhibit consists of twenty-one prints that transport you to another time and place. Beautifully haunted spaces are occupied by beautifully haunting models and it’s hard to believe that most of these photos were commercial work for US and Italian Vogue in 70s and 80s.
If the thought of peeking into a wealthy woman’s closet makes you feel uncomfortable, you are not alone. Surely there’s something odd about finding in a museum context what is ostensibly a display of personal taste (and a taste made possible by vast and inherited means, at that). And isn’t there also something improper — if deliciously so — about bringing something as intimate as a wardrobe before promiscuous public eyes?
But if the exhibition of Daphne Guinness’ wardrobe, currently on view at FIT, indulges our voyeuristic impulses, it also provides a rare opportunity to see the work of some of the finest minds and hands in fashion.