There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

― David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

I went on sabbatical from teaching last year.  It is one of those things that I, a kid of working class parents, could never have imagined when I was younger.  My institution was enabling me to take time off of work to concentrate on my artistic development: to focus on my studio the way that I have been focusing on my students for the past 10 years.  This time was hard-won, precious; I was looking forward to it opening up for me.  I had a lot of ideas that had filled my sketchbooks over the years.  Also, I had bookcases of texts I could not wait to devour.  It had been so long since I had read anything for pleasure that I was so looking forward to curling up with all the tomes I had purchased that work had not allowed me to open.  Also, to be perfectly honest, I was looking forward to getting some rest. I purchased supplies and cleared out my studio for new work.  I was cleaned up my email and finished up school business.  I got to a clutter-free place. I thought about what was possible.

Then Michael Brown happened.

While news channels kept showing his body lying in the street for hours, we found out about John H. Crawford, III.

And then Ezell Ford.  And Dante Parker.  And Kajieme Powell. And more.  And many many more.  Some captured on grainy videos replayed on television and computer screens.

In the studio, I could not stop thinking about this march of death.  I painted almost every day and every day this parade of killing was on my television and radio and social media feed.  Some of the dead became Twitter hashtags.  Some did not, but they were no less dead.  Why were some people more important than others? Did people think that some victims more worthy than others of not being shot to death, or tased to death, or run over, or beaten to death by the state?

I was on sabbatical, so I had time.  Time to create turned into time to think, and I couldn’t think about anything other than death.  I didn’t read any books.  I painted.

It’s summer (July) and I’m at dinner with a friend.  We are in a bistro with televisions all over the restaurant and bar area.  The sound is turned down but the images light the entire place.   The video of Officer Daniel Pantaleo choking Eric Garner to death plays over and over and over interrupted by silent talking heads. I wonder why are they playing this man’s murder on a loop? People eat, drink, laugh, walk about.  No one seems to notice that a man is being choked to death on television.  Then I start to think that maybe they do see it and that it doesn’t bother them.  This is the first time I witness this, a black person being killed on television.  It will not be the last time.  Not by any measure.

Over my sabbatical, I saw black people shot to death on television over and over again.  News casters and pundits would issue verbal warnings that the video they were about the show might upset “sensitive viewers.”  I tried to imagine a viewer that would not be upset about seeing someone like Walter Scott shot to death (or that his killer, Officer Michael Slager, planted evidence on his corpse).  Or Tamir Rice shot to death.  I wondered why they didn’t tell the “insensitive viewers” to hook up their DVRs.  When I am in the studio, the images fill my head.  I jump when cars backfire.

People would ask me how my sabbatical was going.  They would say, “I hope you are taking advantage of this time.”  They would tell me how lucky I was.  They would ask, “What is going on in the studio?”  I wondered if they watched the news at all.  I wondered if they know about what was happening.  I wondered how they felt about these images of black people being killed.  I posted about this stuff on social media and it is ignored for the most part. Ferguson explodes.  Social media does not believe in tears.

In August of 2015, two reporters are shot to death on live television.  Alison Parker and Adam Ward are killed by Vester Lee Flanagan, II who uploaded video of the killing.  Immediately, the television station, Facebook, and social media erupted with requests for people not to view of share the video.  To maintain the dignity of the victims, people begged the public not to watch the video.  It would be a terrible thing to give the killer satisfaction by watching his murder of the reporters.  

I started to wonder why black people are allowed to be killed on television.  Why we are allowed to be transformed from subjects to objects and left to lie in streets for hours?  Why is it acceptable to show the end of a black life on television?

I start to make work about the historical impulse to turn violence against black people into part of our domestic structures.  People continue to ask me what I am doing on sabbatical.  I think of Neruda and I wish I knew Spanish.  (“Come and see the blood in the streets….”)  I decide to make a work about all the people killed by police while I was on sabbatical.  I dismiss the idea as too agitprop.  I talk to my mentors.  One of them tells me, “Make the work.  Just don’t trivialize.”  I work with a friend and learn how to make photographs.  It is harder than I imagined.  I finish this work, Family Pictures.  I show it to a few people.  I finish my sabbatical.  I’ve read few books.  I feel surrounded by ghosts.

I paint everything I think.  I don’t trivialize.  I realize a new body of paintings.  My studio is full of murderers, victims, liars, and accusers.

I return to work in September.  In December, I am hassled and detained by the police.  I write about the experience.  Many people want me to come and talk to groups to “raise awareness.”  I decline.  They seem to be unaware that I would not like to relive a traumatic experience in public. People want me to talk about #BlackLivesMatter.  The college intervenes and offers to handle calls from the press for me. I am deeply grateful because this allows me to concentrate on my job and my students.  CNN calls the college and wants to know if I will talk to Don Lemon.  I tell the school that I will talk to anyone at CNN except Don Lemon.  I get hate mail.

Lisa Tung, the Exhibitions Director asks me what work I want to put in the biennial faculty show.  I decide to make the piece I thought was agitprop.  I call Carmine, my neon fabricator.  I want him to make a sign that mimics police light that spells out what is lost.  I research police killings of unarmed civilians.  I find no central list.  I find no definitive list.  I find no government statistics.  I rely on activist sources.  I rely on The Guardian.  I make the piece.  It is installed in the faculty show.  It is a timeline.  It’s information: date, name, gender, city, state, method of killing. I title it A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans who were Killed by Police or who Died in Police Custody During my Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2014-2015. 

There are 262 names.

A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans who were Killed by Police or who Died in Police Custody During my Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design 2014-2015

People tell me that they look at the wall and measure time.  They lift up the people in their thoughts.  Someone asks me if I am influenced by Maya Lin.  I answer that we all are influenced by Maya Lin.

Someone will say their names and they will be alive a little longer.

10. Inhotim

Chris Burden’s BEAM DROP, Inhotim

Inhotim is a 240 acre botanical garden/museum/restaurant complex in Brumhadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil. I had the opportunity to go there this year and I have to say it was the most amazing art pilgrimage I have ever done.  It was a day long journey to get there.  I had to hire a car to drive me from the airport to an AMAZING hotel (the Pousada Fazenda Nova Estậncia, which you will see again in this list). Then I had to hire another car to take me from the hotel to Inhotim.  I ended up spending three days walking and looking at art in the most incredible lush environment.  None of the works there circulate; you can only see the works in the sites that have been created by the artists.  There are whole pavilions dedicated to artists as diverse as Ernesto Neto, Adriana Varejão, Helio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles Janet Cardiff (in which I burst into tears), and Doug Aitken.  In addition, there are site specific, environmental works by artists like Chris Burden, whose BEAM DROP and CONCRETE BUNKER are at the very top of the park.  Seeing these works was a feast for the eyes and the soul.  And seeing large scale works by Doris Salcedo, Tunga, and Matthew Barney as a reward for hiking through the woods was something akin to grace.

9. Toni Morrison, Home

I repeat, if you want to know about America, you have to read Toni Morrison.

This book, her shortest at 140 pages, is a condensation of power that turns the nostalgic lie of the “Greatest Generation” on its head.  Through the eyes of a returning veteran, Morrison explores and exposes the subtle and vicious ways 50s society worked to undermine familial and cultural connections among people.  The perseverance of Frank, the naivety of his sister and the razor they walk between madness and oblivion is manifested in Morrison’s rich prose and evocative use of metaphor. Her descriptions of PTSD resonated with me deeply.

8. Rice Cookers

As some of you know, I got pretty sick last year and had to do a bunch of things to get better, one of which was changing my diet.  In all of my research I learned a lot about healthy eating, organic food, veganism, and some other things that I have incorporated with varying levels of success.  I also started to cook for myself a lot more.

When you have to eat better you make a lot of brown rice.

I have to say, I bought an inexpensive one at Bed Bath and Beyond and it completely changed my life.  It took a significant amount of time out of my cooking.  I can put the rice on, run errands, and when I come home, I have the perfect basis for beans, curry, or anything else.  Then I heard about this article in the New York Times that tells you how to use a rice cooker to make practically anything.  I am in heaven.  I think I will be upgrading to a Zojirushi after I get my tax refund.

7. GRAN FURY at 80WSE Galleries

Gran Fury with The Pope and The Penis at the 1990 Venice Bienale, L to R: John Lindell, Donald Moffett, Mark Simpson, Marlene McCarty, and Loring McAlpin.

This show was up in New York City at the beginning of the year.  GRAN FURY  is a collective of artists who used strategies of media and design to make public statements, accusations, and advocacy during the beginning of the AIDS pandemic.  Linked to ACT-UP, they made billboards, fliers, posters and signage and were invited to the 1990 Venice Biennial, where they showed The Pope and the Penis. 

The show contained graphic works, videos, signage and leaflets.  Since GRAN FURY decided that all of their works would be in the public domain, the show had gorgeous reproductions of the posters along with archival images of the original works.  In the age of social media and “Occupy,” the show made clear just how different activism is in the digital age and what could be wrought through creative collective action.  Even though one of their last posters cautioned that “Art is not enough” to end the AIDS crisis, their call to “take collective direct action” is as germane today around climate change and public health as it was then regarding AIDS.  GRAN FURY and Donald Moffett are featured in the gorgeous THIS WILL HAVE BEEN at ICA Boston.  (That show will be on my top ten list of 2013.)

The Pope and The Penis, Installation view at 80WSE Gallery

The hard thing about the show was the sense of desperation and loss.  I sometimes feel like the last of my kind at certain times, and this show made me think a lot about that murderous time, the fights, the horrible things that were said about gay people and the indifference of the health system.  Most people do not realize that the reason they are able to question their doctors and have better access to responsive health care was because of the struggles of gay men dying during the AIDS epidemic.  The fact that important medical information had to be distributed to people on posters because the government, with pressure from religious leaders, prevented vital safer sex education was in evidence in this show.  It was and is a crime.

6. Live Tweeting the Political Conventions and Debates

I know.  I, too, think it’s terrible that we all don’t sit down and watch TV together as a family, but watching the run up to the election with a bunch of people on Twitter and Facebook made the racist, mendacious, climate-change-avoiding, drone-strike-not-mentioning, plethora of ads and speeches somewhat navigable.  Watching the Republican Convention was a real education for me and it helped me understand the thinking that was behind so much of the animosity that is directed at the poor in this country.  Seeing the Democrats made me wonder how something that sounds so good could fail to be implemented so many times.  The Rope-a-Dope first debate, Biden educating Ryan in the second, The Comeback in the third had me texting, typing and chatting as fast as my not-so-little fingers could go.  Rove’s meltdown, the palpable dislike between the President and Romney, and Romney’s complete surprise at losing the election were amazing to see and to share, in real time, with a connection of friends around the world.

5. Los Angeles

I visited my friends Ryan Widger and Gillian Pears in LA this year.  It was the first time I had been there since I was a child. (I found Disneyland disappointing at the time, but I loved Knott’s Berry Farm.)

If there is such a thing as love at first sight, I felt it.  From the moment Ryan picked me up at LAX in his convertible until I left my heart beat a little faster.  I had an amazing time.  I cannot wait to go back.  I want to live in LA.  I could move there tomorrow.

While I was there I got to see the amazing Blues for Smoke show at the Geffen Contemporary and the incredible Destroy the Picture/Painting the Void at MoCA.  Blues made good on its curatorial promise to see the blues as a “web of artistic sensibilities.”  Once you thought about that, you could make your own connections with the work and it made complete sense that Mark Morrisroe, Kara Walker and David Hammons would all be in the same show.  Unlike some critics, most people can see how their human experiences can link them. This show made a strong case for the blues as an access point for multiple subjectivities and their diverse expressions.

Destroy the Picture is Paul Schimmel’s last MoCA show and it is a brilliant investigation of what painting and political agency can do.  Covering a range of artists who refused to be satisfied with the tenets of a reductive modernism, the show takes painting as an arena for action and discovery.  There are Burris, Rauschenbergs, and Bontecous that all looked so incredibly bad ass that I had to remind myself that some of this work was over 40 years old.   Add to the work a thoughtful and compelling installation and catalog text.  I don’t know why anyone would let Paul Schimmel go, but wherever he ends up will be the luckiest museum on the planet.

4. Jane Fox Hipple‘s The Way of Things at Dodge Gallery

Jane Fox Hipple, Sebastian, 2012, acrylic on hydrocal and wood, 26 x 18 x 15 inches

Jane is a a great friend of mine.  I met her when I was working at Skowhegan and we became friends after.  She used to live in Cambridge and I would overcome my deep hatred of driving in that city to go visit her studio.  She also would come to mine.  Over the time she lived here we talked all the time about painting and how our work was developing. We ate a lot of pizza at Emma’s.  She is a major influence on my thinking and on my work. I really miss having her here.  She lives in Alabama now.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was to be able to see her new work in her second solo show at Dodge Gallery in New York.  It was really a terrific show.  I know one usually is supportive of the work of one’s friends, but the paintings in this show were risky, beautiful and complex in a way that has been missing from a lot of contemporary abstract painting.  They took my breath away.  They are beautiful, no doubt, but they also reference wounds, scars, absence, and decay.  They are paintings about a life as it is lived and not just hackneyed abstract “models” or evidence of solving problems in painting. (I swear to the fat renaissance baby jesus if one more person talks about solving painting problems as a reason for making work I may have to immolate myself.)  She got a terrific review of the show in ARTFORUM and I am so happy for her.  It seems like other people are finding out what an awesome artist my friend is.

3. Pousada Fazenda Nova Estậncia, Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brasil

I told you I would tell you more.

This is the hotel where I stayed while I was visiting Inhotim.  The seasons are reversed in Brasil, so it was winter when I was there.  I also visited after an exhibition I had in Sao Paulo at Mendes Wood Gallery so I was there during the week.  The hotel was pretty empty save for a group of Italian tourists who were not very friendly.  But then again since I had been traveling for the better part of a day neither was I so I guess it was a wash.

So I arrived very late and I was starving.  They had to find someone who spoke english to check me in and the staff was very sweet about it, they seemed happy to see me.  I got to my room and they told me to go to the restaurant (where I met the surly Italians) and they would have the chef come and tell me about dinner.  I was thinking maybe a protein bar and a bottled water.

Raphael came to my table.  He was the sous-chef and since it was so late he would be making me dinner.  He gave me three, 4 course meals from which to choose.  I was stupefied.  He explained that the Pousada is known for having one of the best restaurants in Minas Gerais and that all the food was local, organic, and made from scratch in their kitchen.  I told him that I couldn’t decide.  He asked me what kind of meat I wanted and he would do all of the rest.  I chose the pork chops. He told me it would take about 55 minutes for dinner and was gone.

He came back in about 50 minutes with an amazing meal with hand crafted relishes and sauces indigenous to the region.  I cannot even begin to describe how amazing the meal was.  I had the entire restaurant to myself, with Raphael coming to explain each of the courses and telling me how everything was prepared.  Plus, it was all organic, so I didn’t have to worry about what I was eating (as I said, I had been pretty sick so eating healthy was really important so far from home).  It was the best meal I ever had.

A bad photo of the amazing grilled stuffed fish with Brasilian pasta, coriander mustard, plantains, and some other amazing stuff I can’t recall.

And then the chef came back the next day.

I spent most of the day at Inhotim and so I didn’t meet the chef, Marllony Perez, until I came into the restaurant in the evening.  He and Raphael greeted me and we were able to talk more at length since I was having dinner at a more reasonable hour.  Then I had the best meal I ever had, prepared by Marllony.  The fish he made with regional spices and slow grilled with stuffing was sublime.  I was a little embarrassed because I was trying to slow myself down, but it was so delicious I had to keep my self from shoving it into my face with my hands.

The next day I was preparing to go to Inhotim and there was a knock at my door.  It was Marllony.  The Italians had left and I was the only person in the hotel.  He asked if I would mind if he made dinner just for me.

Once I could make my mouth work again, he told me he would make me a traditional Minas Gerais meal and that he would explain all of the courses as they came out.  THAT was the best meal I have ever had in my life so far.

Afterwards, Marllony and Raphael took me on a tour of their kitchen and the garden in back where they grew the vegetables for the meals.  It was truly and amazing experience.

Raphael (l), Marllony (c), and the waiter at the pousada. (The waiter called in sick when he figured out that I was the only person in the hotel, so I never got his name.)

2. Isaac Julien, The Ten Thousand Waves, at ICA Boston

Maggie Cheung in a still from The Ten Thousand Waves

Presented on multiple screens at varying heights, Julien’s newest film presented a challenge to narrative by shifting time place and characters.  Moments of cinematic magic were contrasted with their green screen origins.  Archival film of Shanghai was juxtaposed with  Maggie Cheung soaring into that same skyline.  Beautifully remade scenes of a Chinese melodrama talked about the emotional dangers of crossing boundaries while digitally rendered wave forms suggested the ocean that claimed the lives of Chinese immigrants off the British coast.  Combining all these elements with densely layered music and sound made for a rich sensory experience that punctuated the comings and goings of the images across the nine screens.  Waves was the most exciting film I saw last year.  I sat through it multiple times at ICA.  The unconventional viewing allowed you to lie on the floor, stand and move around in the installation.  Your shadow exited and entered scenes, making the viewer’s presence, in effect, a marker of absence in the lush imagery.

1. Math

Nate Silver

Math was incredibly important this year.  “Arithmetic” never sounded sexier than when former President Clinton said it during his nomination of President Obama. The forty-seven percent.  The One Percent. The 99 Percent. The unemployment rate.  Plus the constant polling of an election year made numerical analysis incredibly cogent in the past year. But the focus on what is being called “big data” reaches its apex in the wonderfully normal, nerdy, kind of sexy persona of Nate Silver.

With his FiveThirtyEight Blog and his algorithms, Silver predicted almost every aspect of Election 2012.  His clear and cogent analysis of the state polls and crunching the numbers had the President in the lead the whole time, despite the groupthink on the right that had Romney ahead after the first debate.  The furious right wing spin after the first debate was so discouraging I almost began to believe it.  (I confess, I almost bought a t-shirt that said “KEEP CALM AND TRUST NATE SILVER.”)  As August turned to October attacks against Silver became increasingly vitriolic and homophobic, partisan and cruel (the National Review was particularly nasty and was taken to task by Paul Krugman).  Through it all, Silver kept his eyes on the numbers and simply talked out of the data, unlike his critics, like Niall Ferguson, Karl Rove, and Dick Morris who were talking out of their asses.

Silver’s intelligence made the “right wing echo chamber” manifest. All of those pictures on “White People Mourning Romney” are photographic evidence of people who were completely blinded by science.  They really thought that everyone in the “liberal” media was lying about the polls, and only their people were telling the truth.  They believed it when they were told that Romney had momentum, that Ryan was the “ideas man” and not a narcissistic huckster and so on.  None of these things were true and in the hard light of fact all of these illusions evaporated leaving a stunned Mitt Romney to give a concession speech that he was not prepared to give on a very early election night. The days after the election were filled with politicians like sharks with a corpse of one of their own.

It was sent via email as a letter to the editor of the New York Times on 27 October 2012.

Dear Madam/Sir:

I am an artist who lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. While I often enjoy the writing of Ken Johnson, I was greatly disturbed by his review of the above referenced show. His text is really a lazy piece of writing. It assumes that black people make art with social and timely connection and so-called white people don’t. What was DaDa if not a response to the political madness of WWI? Black and white people have lived together for 3 centuries in this country. If so-called white people cannot access the texts and sub-texts in the work of black artists it is because they choose not to, just as some of them choose to ignore the social realities of the country. These things are not beyond their comprehension or experience, despite the article’s reification of the myth of inscrutable blackness.

While it is appropriate to discuss the history and context of every artist, and race is a part of that, we need to stop pretending that black people are the only ones with a “race.” Does anyone ever talk about Robert Ryman and whiteness? Also, does Johnson not realize that the presence of the work of a black artist like Melvin Edwards, alters our understanding of what a work by a white artist like Richard Stankiewicz can mean? Johnson reinforces the spurious notion that black people make art about being black and so-called white people make art.

Also shame on Johnson for positing the notion that if you aren’t black you aren’t going to get the work, or that some of its poetics will be lost or inaccessible to you. There is one art world, and it’s long past time that people stop treating black artists like they are from some other planet. We are part of the traditions of Western art and I’m tired of people telling us that we aren’t.

Sincerely,
Steve Locke

Tom Brady, New York, 2012. Mario Testino

I’m standing in the Mario Testino; IN YOUR FACE show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and I hear three ladies a little older than me (I’m 49) talking about how upset they are about the way that a doberman is represented in a large photo of Gisele Bündchen’s husband.  They thought someone must have taunted the dog in order to get it to respond the way it does in the photo. Mind you, they are in a room filled with photos of women in various highly erotic and problematic situations.  But the dog.  That really gets them.

I don’t write about work that doesn’t excite me, so you may be wondering about why I am writing about Testino.  The show did excite me. It made me think about a lot of things.  I don’t care for the work.  At all. But it did make me think about some things.  First of all was the thought, why this work?  Why here? Why now?

It’s not that it is photography.  I happen to love contemporary photography.  And it’s not that the show is filled with many many pictures of sexy women.  Even the few images of men in the show are photographed like sexy women.  I like sexy women.  I enjoy pictures of a half-naked Mrs. Tom Brady from behind, too (there are quite a few of them in the show).   You may be shocked to find out that gay men, myself included, have been socialized in an image culture dominated by the eroticized and available female body.  I’m gay, I’m not dead.

What the Testino work reifies is that eroticized and available body as a tool of capital, but the show tries to re-present the work in the context of art – specifically the art of portraiture.  “Sex Sells” could be the name of the show instead of “In Your Face.”  (Truthfully, it should have been called “Money Shot.”)  The work is to be judged as independent from its means and purpose.  These are images that are aligned with the production of objects and aid in the promotion of the commodities depicted.  OK.  I’m fine with that.  But now, I have to look at these  images, writ large (and in some cases, crazy large) and the MFA asks me to consider them outside of their origin as advertising and promotion.  I think that is a hard thing to do.  Without the magazine, what are these pictures?  (And since every picture has been produced in a magazine or for a promotional purpose, why are there no photos allowed?  Everyone who buys a fashion publication has access to Testino’s images, so why are they excluded from personal consumption when they are in the museum?)

The exhibition is on walls a color that could only be described as “Conde Nast Green.”  It is dark and illuminated with spots and frames that contain light. This adds a great theatricality and import to the pictures.  A giant image of a glamorously sweaty J. Lo-as-a-boxer arrests you before you are confronted with an enormous image of a blackfaced tanned Lady Gaga.  There is an aluminum rail with label  information that keeps you from getting too close to the pictures.  The darkness and the spotlighting, the sudden gleam on the aluminum, and the images of beautiful people and the “beautiful people” all conspire to turn the entire space into an exclusive club where it is completely plausible that you would see Kate Moss at the next table, and OH MY GOD THERE SHE IS!  It’s the only time you’ll ever be this close to people like this.

This is going to sound harsh, but I really got tired of the images very quickly.  They say it’s hard to make a bad photo of a beautiful subject.  I don’t think Testino’s pictures are bad, that’s not really the point.  They just are uninteresting in light of the the truly innovative and powerful images of other people working in fashion.  So many of his images look like the work of other photographers that it is hard to see what the appeal of the work is if you know anything about fashion photography over the last 40 years.  It’s not that the pictures are quotations of previous work on which he then expounds; he is simply redeploying the tropes set forth by other fashion photographers.  He tries to talk about fashion’s relationship to fetishism but he just ends up trying to channel the perversion of Helmut Newton; and Testino’s theatricality squelches any erotic charge.  He tries to talk about the private erotic world of women, and he just reveals the enormous debt he owes to the truly amazing Ellen von Unwerth, who is able to make women sexual objects without stripping them of their agency along with their clothes.  He even tries to mimic Wolfgang Tillmans in his photos of “kids being kids” in Amsterdam and his “alternative” installation techniques (some photos are printed on photo paper and tacked to the wall) but you end up looking at the labels on the kids clothes to discern what the ad is for.  You don’t believe for a second that these images, or any of the images in the show, have any life outside of their editorial or promotional function.

That’s not to say that there are not some amazing photos in the show. I do have to say though that every picture that was knock out fantastic had one of two elements: Kate Moss or Tom Ford for Gucci.  I don’t know why.  If I had to guess, I think it is because Tom Ford really knows how to make clothes that make you want to fuck the people wearing them. That and I think it may be impossible to take a bad photo of Kate Moss (even the blogs documenting her without make-up or her “bad teeth” can’t diminish her otherworldly radiance). So one has to wonder what is the secret of the success of these pictures over the other.  Testino is quoted in the wall text talking about each photo being a “colloboration.”  Maybe the particular vision of Tom Ford-era Gucci or the peculiar devotional relationship between camera lenses and Kate Moss was what enabled these images to be so successful independent of their function as ads.

Helmut Newton, Saddle I, Paris (at the Hotel Lancaster), 1976 by Helmut Newton

This is maybe the thing that made me so interested in this show; so many images in the show and so few of them resonate with me outside of their origin or the moment when I first saw them in magazines.  Why is that?  And why is this the contemporary fashion photographer that the Museum wants to put forth for a larger consideration?  The only reason I can think of is that Testino is easier than Newton, or von Unwerth, or David LaChappelle or Jurgen Teller or any other photographer who makes work about or with fashion.  The Testino images at their most radical don’t generate the tremendous heat of a von Unwerth or inspire the pearl-clutching gasp of a Newton.  There is a Testino photo of a woman wearing nothing but a large mirrored collar on her hands and knees.  Next to her is a glass of champagne.  (I’d post a photo but, I wasn’t allowed to take any.)   It sounds like it would be a demeaning image (and it kind of is) but it’s also just a boring photograph about “decadence.”  The quotation is clearly Newton’s Saddle I, Paris (at the Hotel Lancaster), 1976 (part of the Sleepless Nights folio).  The image is problematic to be certain, but there is a real commitment to imaging fetishization, femininity, servitude, decoration, and power.  Newton is all in; he’s not holding anything back for propriety and that’s what made (and makes) him so shocking in the world of fashion and in the world of art.  His image is an unsettling re-presentation of the consequences of desire.  How horrible would it be if you got what you wanted?  This is what your desire looks like. It’s obscene and wrong and so hot that you can’t tell anyone about it.  But here it is.  It’s not just a photo decadence, it is decadent.  And you cannot look away, can you?  (It really is a shame that the Helmut Newton retrospective hasn’t travelled here.)

That’s the core of it really.  (And it is spelled out by the separation from the sexless Royal portraits upstairs and the other photos downstairs.  The black and white seriousness of the Royals reinforces notions of purity. If Testino is channeling Newton downstairs, he’s certainly trying to be Lord Snowdon upstairs.) Testino’s pictures skate on the surface of sex; they don’t dive down into the realms of sexuality they claim to be about.  The exchange of power and agency that comes in the give and take of sexual experience is absent from these pictures.  That absence makes the work palatable and manageable.  Even the title “In Your Face” projects an idea of transgression that the work never reaches.  Instead it’s crime without breaking any laws, domination without leaving any scars, and sex without shedding any tears. Because he is so willing to adapt the truly radical discoveries of other artists and marry them to advertising he is able to create titillating work that encourages staring, but doesn’t make you feel badly for looking.  You aren’t implicated in any of these pictures.  Your position as an uninvolved spectator is affirmed.  It really is like flipping pages in a magazine.

I wanted to say to the ladies who were so upset about Brady and the doberman, “Don’t worry, I’m sure no one was hurt in the making of any of these pictures.”

A detail of Marshall’s UNTITLED. Please go to the link so you can see the entire image. It is MUCH larger than this.

I have a tremendous love for the work of Kerry James Marshall.

So I was completely thrilled when I heard that the Harvard Museums had acquired Untitled, his 12-panel woodcut and installed it at the Sackler Museum.  The first time I saw this piece was in New York at Jack Shainman.  It seemed to big for the space then. It was almost impossible to understand it as an image because the space didn’t allow for the gestalt of seeing the entire thing. It could also be my youth and my inability to understand what the work was positing, and how, in so many ways, Untitled reveals Marshall as an artist who locates his practice in the core of the Western tradition of art.

Rodin’s ETERNAL IDOL and Marshall’s UNTITLED

The Sackler has two ways to approach the work.  Those using the elevator have to walk through many of the masterpieces of the collection. (The Harvard Museums are being renovated and the Sackler is filled with some of the great works of the collections of the Fogg and the Busch-Reisinger as well as objects from the Sackler.)  You essentially approach the piece after walking through the history of art.  If you come up the stairway, you leave the Sol LeWitt and walk up many stairs through the earth toned concrete atrium to the fourth floor of the museum. These two journeys, one through history and the other from the ground to the sky, affect how you approach Untitled. 

Opening the darkened door after climbing all of those stairs you see the first panel of the work, which spans the entire rear wall of the gallery. The size of it is overwhelming.  And the process of woodcut applied to this particular scale of image making shows a mastery of the technique.  The 9-color print is made up of 4 x 8 sections, the size of plywood.  Marshall uses a building material to make an image of an architectural space.  The remnants of the wood grain haunt the image with the history of it’s making.

We start in the first panel with a view from high up.  We can see the city below us and the edge of a yellow brick building.  Then the severe black lines of the frames of the work come into view; they reinforce the perspectival grid system of Alberti that Marshall uses to create the sense of deep space in the work.  As we look from left to right, we see the reframing of space.  We have entered not just a skyscraper, but someone’s home were a group of men are assembled, having coffee, eating, talking, engaged with each other.  A hallway leads to a bedroom.  The wall turns and black rectangles decorate and the surfaces.

It’s a really strange image.

First, we are outside, high in the air.  Then, as suddenly we are close enough to a window where we can see the flowers in the window box.  Do skyscrapers have window boxes?  That could prove sort of dangerous.  There is a window but we cannot see into the space, but then suddenly, we are in the space.  And the ground of the room is green and textured, more grass than carpet.  So we are outside looking in, and then the inside has element of the outside.  We were high up and now we are in the same space as this grouping of men.  Six men in two groups.  Having coffee, eating, talking.

Marshall reveals his deep interest in the history of art without making a post-modern “pastiche” of style.  He makes a stage set of perspectival relationships in the room.  The bench is the central perspectival device (it is also very similar to the George Nelson benches in the gallery.) We are with these men in their appointed, modernist space. The black squares on the wall reference Malevich.  Using the co-terminus space of baroque painting and marrying it to the severity of the perspectival grid, Marshall collapses the distance between us and these men.  He also uses the pyramidal composition of Raphael to create these monumental groupings of men, who declare and frame the space with the gestures and placements of their bodies.  They point with their limbs and their gazes.  The twist of the figure on the left shows the influence of Mannerism and its emphasis on the extreme action of the body.  The hands and plates establish the planes in the same way that Manet uses his figures in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.  In fact, the grass in the living room is a direct link to that moment, when a painting becomes a declaration of a constructed truth.

Continuing through the room (in the sixth panel) we see that one of the plates does not seem to “agree” with the planes suggested in the rest of the image, thus declaring a different kind of space.  The difference here makes other differences clearer.  Marshall uses brown in two of the figures, the coffee server, and the man with crossed arms.  There are linked on a strong diagonal in the composition which is split by the square vase on the table.  This split to me talks about a certain idea of doubling and time.

The Master of the Argonaut Panels, The Judgment of Paris, c. 1480
Tempera on panel, transferred to canvas

There is a small painting in Harvard’s collection called The Judgment of Paris.  It is a depiction of the event that causes the Trojan war.  The interesting thing for our discussion is that there are two depictions of the same group of people on opposite sides of a panel split by a flowering tree.  Common elements are repeated and illustrate the narrative; the golden apple that Paris holds on the right is held by Venus on the left.  Nature acts as a divider, and an indicator of the passage of time.  In light of this, it is possible that instead of a depiction of six people, Untitled could be one grouping of three people at two different times.

Because of its size and scale, Untitled is experienced in time, not just visually.  Like Eakins’s Swimming Hole, each figure leads you to the next in the composition and the pyramidal composition in both paintings lends a sense of monumentality.   But unlike Eakins, where your eye tracks the movement of what could be a single body in a smaller scaled painting, Marshall makes you move your body to experience the image.  Once you enter the room, what you can see from one part of the house you cannot see from another. Therefore, we experience this as two groups of men in a vast domestic space.  For all the focus on the figure grouping, there is a tremendous amount of space in this picture that is absent of activity on first examination.

The image offers a sense of domestic life, of privacy, of community, of home, of rest and restoration.  There is a safe place to gather and a safe place to rest.  In light of Marshall’s other work, most notably the heartbreakingly beautiful Souvenirs (there is a glorious one at the Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy), I look at this image as a respite.  In the Souvenirs, a luminous black angel prepares a place for us; a bit of heaven, as it were.  She prepares a place to mourn. This place is absent of participants, but the angel looks out at us.  Untitled may posit the use of that space of mourning prepared in the Souvenirs. Where else but heaven could a group of black men relax and have privacy and safety to speak their minds to and for each other? It also makes me think about the two brown figures and the groups split by the vase.  Is one side the past and the other the present?  The two brown figures actually seem to face each other.  Are they “real” and the other figures memories?  Or ghosts?  These questions shift the functions and readings of the black rectangles in the image.  They are clear references to Malevich and Mondrian (vis-a-vis the verticals of the black frames and in the later panels that hint as well to Ellsworth Kelly), but they also carry the weight of absence and death.  You stand at one end of the work and look down the vast length of it to the black square at the other end.  That square pulsates and vibrates as you approach it.  The small overprinted head on the last panel is like a reflection in a dark mirror.  We are in the “upper room” physically (we just walked up that illuminated staircase to the top of the Sackler) and visually.

If I told you there is an image of six black men at the Sackler, what would you think?  What could you image?  I am guessing that one would not imagine a group of men in a pink room having coffee.  The history of blackness in art, and of black maleness in particular, has been strongly tied to narratives of violence, separation, anger, exoticism, and hypersexuality. Or they are represented as an historical occurrence, reinforcing the notion that black people are somehow outside of contemporary life.  This is not to say that there are not “positive” or “favorable” images of black people in art, but to say that when black people appear in art, they are nothing but their blackness – they are not human, they are indexes.  (You can see this in the gorgeous Ingres Odalisque with a Slave that is directly opposite Untitled in the next room.  This work uses images of blackness and exoticism to eroticize the possessions of the empire.  They are things to be looked at.  In the Marshall, we are participants in the action in the room.  It is a key difference that talks about the nature of subjectivity and the possibility of agency.)

Marshall takes on the reductive notions of blackness.  By using that color, and he is a master of the color black in the same way that Alex Katz is a master of the color pink, he expands its pictorial and poetic possibilities.  In Untitled, black is flesh, fabric, and furniture. It varies in density and texture. It is warm and cool.  It is figure and it is ground.  It is structure.  It is public and private, heavenly and earthly.  In unpacking the color formally he shows that it can be many different things visually and socially.  We can actually think about it as a color and not a label.  It is a site of possibility.  And placing black people in contemporary art affirms their presence in life as it is lived today.

There is a vast amount of space in Untitled that is devoid of the body (although images promoting the piece feature the body).  These are hallways we pass through, spaces we negotiate to get to another space – blank areas whose blankness is reinforced by formal placement of rectangles of pulsating blackness.  Places where nothing happens.  Talking Heads have a lyric that posits heaven to be “a place/where nothing/nothing ever happens.”  Another part of the lyric really captures what I feel when I look at this work: “It’s hard to imagine/that nothing at all/can be so exciting/can be so much fun.”

The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough, I don’t think one needs to depart from it in order to make art.
-Philip Guston

Daniel Rich, Server, 2011, acrylic on dibond, 37 x 31 in.

A lot of times during slide talks, there is this kind of disclaimer for painting, “You have to see it in person to really appreciate it.” I am not altogether certain this is true anymore.  Now, with the number of people who are using graphic strategies, computer and otherwise, we are in an time where paintings reproduce very well.  I call it the Era of Camera Ready Painting.  It’s as if the WYSIWYG aesthetic of the web has taken over the ability to see, and these paintings offer nothing in person that you can’t get from a reproduction.  I have students look at art work on line and feel like they have seen the real thing and when I look at the paintings in which they are showing interest I think, “Well,

maybe you have seen the real thing.”

Which brings me to the achievement of Daniel Rich.

I want to say as clearly as possible that these paintings are completely different and luscious in person.  To see them in reproduction is to not see them at all.  Most of the larger works in Daniel Rich: Platforms of Power are painted in acrylic on dibond.  There are a couple that contain enamel as well.  The main features of acrylic are the range of colors, its drying time and its flatness.  These things conspire to make rather uninteresting surfaces or, worse yet, tend to make paintings that look like naugahyde.  In Rich’s hand the material has an amazing luminescence I have not seen in acrylic works – especially works at such an enormous scale.  The paintings carry and emit so much light that they are in conversation of most of the large-scale light box photography of the past 25 years.  The technical acumen and reserve of Rich’s painting expose the tired bombast of that photographic work and posit a calculated and sustained intimacy that results in an overwhelming image.  You don’t wonder how Rich makes a painting, his methods are clear.  What you do wonder about is the dizzying change in perception that has to take place between the painting each individual window in a North Korean hotel complex and seeing the overall green cast landscape. This shift, this dislocation, is how we experience our relationship to power and its hegemonic presence.  In the presence of contemporary power, we have no indications of whom we are to worship, but we kneel just the same.

BT Tower London, 2010, acrylic and enamel on dibond, 54 x 57 in.

Because the subject of the work is the locus of power it is fitting that Rich’s project makes us feel a sense of awe at modernist structures and the tools of capital.  There is no way you will be able to look at a server farm of the colored seats in a stadium the same way after seeing these paintings; Rich makes the architecture of power downright sexy.  It’s as if the world was perfect (read: absent of humans), or re-imagined by Donald Judd’s aesthetic sensibility.  The oppressive nature of this vision is put into the sexy, sleek, elegant package of the paintings.  Rich puts us in a position of looking desirously at the architecture of government, sport, data, and commerce.  He heightens their interest with deft handling of color and surface, the tools any painter worth the name uses in the language of seduction.  BT Tower London has a clear relationship to the work of Charles Sheeler, but Rich’s articulation of modernist form is more about undulation than angle.  His paintings touch the edges of their supports in inelegant ways that belie their source in photographs and provide a disruption where Sheeler offers balance.  Rich is not painting markers of repression and balance.  Like Patrick Bateman, the anti hero of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Rich’s work is an expression of sexy perfection of unchecked power. This is powerful work to contemplate in this moment of OCCUPY, the 99%, the 47%, and the ongoing discussion of the nature of contemporary capitalism.

Al Miner has put together a handsome show.  There are a lot of paintings here and there are some smaller scale works that are real gems.  The fact that Miner has installed them as ancillary works is wise, they would have been overwhelmed by the other paintings in this installation, though in another space any one of the smaller works would hold the wall.  It’s nice to see a curator made a decision for the work that reveals an artist’s range without making the show look like “greatest hits.”  (I’m also thrilled that all of the children’s art is no longer in the contemporary wing for this show.  I’m hoping it never comes back.)

The repetitive shapes of contemporary life become achingly endless color intervals that are supported by the stenciled precise drafting of the paintings. That their subtle gloss and gleam allows the reflected presence of the viewer to enter them briefly in no way diminishes the work.  In fact, the paintings make you a ghost in the landscape of power, a sensuous world that excludes your body, and rewards your eyes.

Susanna Coffey, Takenaga’s Division , 2010
oil on panel, 15 x 12 inches

There hasn’t been a Susanna Coffey show in Boston in a long time. It’s been long overdue.  She continues to be one of my favorite artists since she changed my life in a studio visit in graduate school.  Her last solo show at Alpha Gallery was in 2004.  Her work has really changed in the intervening years.  It’s really incredible to see an artist of this caliber and consistency move into new territory with such verve.  These are paintings that challenge and evoke instead of represent.

For most of the time I’ve known her work, Coffey has set up a contest, a meeting, an encounter in the studio.  The artist and the mirror were the consistent elements in the work.  The work that came out of that confrontation was a record of time and explored the elasticity of the flesh, the fluidity of identity and the impossibility of freezing the likeness.  The paintings were a sum total of observations, they were the history of looking expressed on the surface of the support.  This is the thing that so many people do not understand about paintings and especially those paintings that contain something recognizable: that the painting contains the history of time and touch.  Every painting is a performance of the artist in the crucible of experience and in Coffey’s case, that crucible is the encounter with the self.  In the midst of that encounter she was able to find a painterly equivalent to what she experienced in the mirror.  Her mastery of color, tonal intervals, and manipulation of all of the properties of paint made her work a series of fascinations to experience. She is truly a painter’s painter.

The notion of the self portrait expands in her work.  The work is less about recording what is seen.  It takes on the placement of the subject in act of a human experience, especially in later works when she began to change the orientation of the support to mimic the proportions of the computer screen.  This deeply chilling series of paintings, with the artist placing herself in front of images of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had less to do with Cindy Sherman’s “I’m-everyone-and-no-one” ranging across personae and more to do with the particular political moment of an artist trying to come to terms with what was being done in her name.

The show at Alpha is called Apophenia, which is the tendency to see something where there is nothing.  It is related to seeing faces in random arrangements of rock formations or animals in the clouds.  The paintings in the show mark a return to the traditional proportion of the portrait format, which communicates the notion that you are looking for a head or a body.  The show is split into sections which expand and explore this idea in various ways.  In the first section, you see what feels like a deep engagement in certain modes of abstract impressionism related to Milton Resnick but, and this is the thing that sets Coffey far beyond most painters, you are deeply aware of a physical presence in each picture.  The paintings seems to vibrate at differing frequencies that reveal and conceal themselves to you.  Takenaga’s Division, a nod to the artist’s friend the brilliant Barbara Takenaga seems to quote impressionist landscape painting before it becomes an active churning mass that keeps pulsing between figuration, landscape, and non-objective painting.  It contains in painted matter and placement the feeling of the “war paintings” without the obviousness of the subject matter.  The artist is no longer separate from reality.

This is an exciting time in this body of work.  Coffey took on space in the previous work in a radical and exciting way.  She could make the mirror invisible in her paintings; there was the sense that the paintings began at her nose and kept going behind her into these completely realized organizations of painterly space.  These spaces carried light, energy, history, landscape, whatever the artist needed or “saw” in the mirror.

Susanna Coffey, Blanche, 2011, 15 x 11 inches, oil on panel

The difference now is that Coffey is painting a new kind of space, the rich psychological space between her in the mirror.  She is painting the interference, the attitudes, the obfuscations between the understanding of the self.  This new work makes manifest the difficulty in realizing the self and instead of a hackneyed angst about the unknown, Coffey is able to express some delight in the difficulty of realizing the self.  There is a painterly exuberance and deeper material record in the work, the history of the mark making is clearer and more raw.  Enormous changes are made in these paintings and they are left bare.  And still, every picture bristles with a human surge of energy, despite the metaphoric collapse of the possibility of representation.

To complicate the exhibition, there are some paintings of masks (Yammy is a personal favorite) that should be objects, but actually start to feel more than human. These paintings and paintings of a Buddha statue owned by the late, great Carl Plansky round out the exhibition.  We look for humanity in objects, in representations, Coffey is saying. The clarity of approach with the paintings of objects just makes their poetic implications clearer, especially when seen with paintings of the artist merging and emerging from the dense activity of the painted surfaces.  The ability to look outward is contrasted with the courage to look inward.

I have to say, I saw some of this work in Coffey’s studio before the show went up and I can attest to the radical changes that some of the paintings went through.  Headstand in particular is a painting that is very different that the version I saw in the studio, demonstrating her willingness to eradicate any simple reading of the work. It is really thrilling to see an artist have everything up for grabs in the work, to really engage in the process of painting and in that process discover a new realization of space.  It is an affirmation that painting is not magic, it is a deep engagement in performative labor on an object that holds every decision.  Because Coffey demonstrates the courage to follow those decisions where they lead she has created a show of paintings that truly feel like apparitions.

Ori Gersht: History Repeating is a big show, both in terms of the amount of works presented, the space occupies, and the themes it addresses.  It’s always really exciting when a museum decides to give over a lot of space to a living artist.  You have the opportunity at these times to see what they have done, knowing that they aren’t finished making work.  I say to my students that they are fortunate to live in these times, mostly because they can go to museums and see contemporary art.  In the past, it was the job of galleries to show contemporary work.  “Museums are for dead people,” David Smith said.

Gersht’s work is full of death, from the Vanitas quotations to the “falling tree film” (The Forest) and everything between.  He uses the camera to frame death, decay, destruction, and loss actually or metaphorically. The actual suffers in this show.  The photos of the “masculine” cedars next to the “feminine” olive tree is cloying and reads as essentialist and reductive.  Seeing things blow up in slow motion to reveal their transcendence is right out of the Futurist Manifesto. Unlike Bill Viola‘s (somewhat overwrought) project of slowing things down to see particular details, Gersht manipulations simply reiterate the sense of loss that is inherent in the still life vanitas paintings he quotes.  (It’s kind of tough to get interested in a video of exploding flowers when there is an actual Martin Johnson Heade painting on the wall.) The photographs in their dimensions take on the scale of history painting and Gersht’s digital manipulations mimic those of Church and other painters who re-presented the sublime landscape a lot more sublime than it actually was.  Like Jeff Wall, Gersht is not shy about his connection to painting.

What makes his work compelling is the sites he chooses to represent (or re-present).  In the White Noise series, the blurred view out of a train window becomes an act of reconstruction and remembrance;  particularly since the train’s journey is from Krakow to Auschwitz.  Gersht makes a photo that could not be made. The text and titling become a major part of the work.  Language is key in connection the images to their meaning.

Where the exhibition reaches a level of exhilaration is in the films.  There are two brilliant and overwhelmingly beautiful films (Evaders and Will You Dance For Me) that moved me deeply while boggling my mind with their visual and technical achievements. From animated snow to the recreation of the 19th century landscape Gersht shows that he is adept at reconstructing art as historical investigation.  While the stories of each of the films is vitally important to they way one views them, I often found myself forgetting about the wall text “explanations.”  Gersht’s framing and presentation of the body in Dance  makes you feel complete jubilation in every movement, a feeling exacerbated by the knowledge that every movement is an act of survival and defiance.  Evaders is a perfect metaphor for the artist, journeying alone, against all odds, armed only with one’s work and a death defying determination to reach the light.

The smaller films never reach this level of transformative power (and nor should they) but Neither Black Nor White comes close. The single channel film of the an Arab village in Israel goes from impossible darkness to obliterating light.  The wall text references the blast of an explosion which I think is the easiest metaphor.  Gersht’s film mimics the elimination of information from the screen pixel by pixel, the active lights of the village disappear, consumed in an insatiable whiteness.  It is a powerful and chilling film.  While the exhibition makes no mention of the reasons for antipathy between Arabs and Israelis in Gersht’s homeland, this film spells out the situation in a clear and compelling manner.

In addition to the treat of having the show, I’m so fortunate that the gallery is having an exhibition of photographs by Francesca Woodman. This is the first time the work has been seen in South America. It is a major event and the number of people, collectors, and artists who have come in just for a look has been electric.

Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silverprint, 13.3 x 13.3 cm. © George and Betty Woodman, courtesy George and Betty Woodman

(I’ve provided a link to the SFMOMA Woodman retrospective. Reproductions, online and printed, almost always misrepresent the size of the prints and their relationship to frames and matting. I’ve included an installation picture for a better idea of the scale.)

The show officially opens tomorrow but there has been a steady stream of people anxious for a look at the photos. Their excitement has rekindled mine. I’ve seen this work for a long time, but the installation here is quite compelling. Mendes Wood’s gallery is a white cube but the ceiling has pointed rafters that that add a sense of place to the studied “neutrality” of the white box, as if an attic loft was exposed. It looks a bit like a reclaimed chapel. They gallerists have also chosen frames that have a hint of red wood coloring for the 20+ prints in the show. This tiny pulse of color animates the pictures, which is good. There have been too many sepulchral presentations of Woodman and in my opinion. This exhibition shows a young woman changing before our eyes, in the act of finding and becoming herself.

The show is pretty chronological. There are representative images from most of the bodies of work (unfortunately, none of Woodman’s exquisite cyanotypes are here) and there are some of the canonical images. Far and away my favorites are the photos where the body of the artist is used to expose and explain space and spaces. These pictures to me have always seemed like a fever dream, palpable and hallucinogenic. And like those dreams one tries to make sense of them to no avail. I’m less interested in why Woodman does what she does and more interested in the fact that she does it. When she crawls or floats or blends or reshapes her body she posits a world without boundaries of materiality. Is she crawling into that cabinet or turning into it? Is she kneeling on the mirror of floating out of it? In a pre-Photoshop world, she makes us ask “How did she do that?” I am sure that there are sophisticated technical reasons for the way the photos look (and Woodman is a master of them), but that isn’t the real “how” of my question. And figuring out techniques is not what keeps me staring at the photos. What I am asking is, in truth, how did she become lighter than air? How did she become a shadow?

Her craft is in service to a vision that feels very contemporary. In a world where gender is fluid, boundaries are permeable, and borders are contested, it’s exciting to see a young artist exploring and exposing those limits with her own body.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN
Mendes Wood
Rua da Consolação, 3358, Jardins, Sao Paulo, Brazil
June 23 – July 21, 2012