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.”

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.

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.