Looking at Thinking

The most intriguing photographs I have come across recently are those of Patrick Lakey. A body of work entitled "German Photographs (1794-2005)" is a fascinating intersection of art, history, and philosophy.

Here is what he does. Lakey goes around Germany and photographs the homes and landscapes of celebrated German philosophers, including Schiller, Engels, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Goethe. (Technically I think these represent the 'German Enlightment'?) The resulting photographs are still and beautiful, revealing and withholding.

For what is the relationship between external and internal? What clues might the external offer as to what went on internally? The cool, sparse rooms reveal both somber chambers of thought and also ordinary rooms, which could have belonged to any German family of the time. Is there a clue in the outside world, Lakey seems to be asking. A clue to what leads certain individuals to think for their entire lives, and be able along the way to offer great theories of thought and being. Would the thoughts of such an individual leave an imprint on his external surroundings? Is there any physical manifestation of so much thinking?

Another satisfying aspect of this series is the use of photography as a device, rather than an end in itself. While the photographs are beautiful, it is the concept that deepens the experience, and the medium truly functions as tool to bring the viewer to this idea.

Hello Mordechay

The work of Shiri Mordechay is on view at Plane Space gallery Nov 28- Dec 30 2007. Her meticulous works on paper combine (and confound) deeply psychological imagery: beasts, violence, dismemberment, erections. That the images are bathed in her laborious sincerity carries the work; Mordechay's attention to detail and deft ability to work small well give her work a serious and strong presence.

The Twombly

Cy Twombly has new work on view at Gagosian on 21st Street in NYC. This work is different, bold and full of color.

From the Gagosian Press Release:
Twombly conceived these vast and exuberant panel paintings with the décor and balanced order of the typical eighteenth century hôtel particulier in mind. This most recent group of paintings are of a large horizontal format, each comprising six wooden panels. Across their broad surfaces, ideogrammatic blossoms of vivid crayon and viscous pigment, and haikus pencilled in the artist's tremulous scrawl, combine and contrast with drips and efflorescent flows of startling, sometimes offbeat, mannerist color – burgundy, damask yellow, vermilion, rose, and mint green. Each of these so-called "peony" paintings is a daring invention, combining influences as diverse as French Enlightenment art, furnishings, and architecture, Japonisme, and the élan vital of Twombly's own original Abstract Expressionism.

Twombly's previous Bacchus series (2005) seethed with the visceral energies of war. In "A Scattering of Blossoms…" war cedes to flowers, for which the hero of the famous haiku disarms himself. Peonies are the favored flowers of Japanese aesthetic contemplation, appearing frequently in illustrations, folding screens, and haikus of the Edo period. Once in bloom, they offer a rush of color and texture. Here, their fragile headiness is captured and memorialized in both image and inscription. By adding his own recollections of haikus by the famous seventeenth century Japanese masters Basho and Kikaku, Twombly points to the human implications that these full-blown, elegaic paintings hold for an artist in the later stages of his life and career.

Additionally, I will add that I always feel a connection between Cy Twombly's intimate mark making and the sense of the present moment. There is something so mindful and delicate in his work, all the surrounding going-ons collapse into a perfect awareness of the stillness and engagement of the moment. I think that time is a major element in Twombly's work: the present, the past, the lack of actual relationship between the two.

Real/Fake

The sculptures and photography of Jeff DeGolier are an other-world into which we escape to only to be confronted with strange systems which evoke our own strange systems. That you can walk into a factory, or cannery, or even boiler room, and see industrial elements which you have no way to grasp or even visually understand...such the feeling DeGolier preys on in his abstract worlds. The sense of another world is strong, as the scene is meticulously arranged and the photos luminous with a strange energy.

The concept is as interesting as the product. DeGolier makes the sculpture and 'scenes' from industrial left-overs. Part of the process is in the sculpture, but yet the photography is actually a more powerful representation. In front of the sculpture, one faces a miniature industrial other-world, part fairy tale and part factory, and one grapples with the substance of this real thing. The photographs are beautifully composed and vignetted, with a dramatic absence of any markers of scale or function. While with sculpture we know immediately we are seeing a thing that is not anything else, in front of a photograph we are unsure: are we seeing pictures of a real place? No, it seems staged. But what is it? There is a much longer period of suspended understanding, as we hang in the limbo between "real thing" and "fake thing"--- although as far as photography is concerned anything photographed is "real" because the image automatically becomes the "fake" in relation to the "real". So, DeGolier's photographs bring us, in a very elegant manner, to a moment where that which we suspected was "fake", the elaborate stage of a uncertain industrial world, becomes "real" through its photographic documentation.

Ben-Torrent

Exploration in the Domain of Idiocy was the title of Tamy Ben-Tor's show & performances at Zach Feuer Gallery in 2005. In her work, of course, she dons costumes and wigs and transforms herself in a menagerie of satirical characters. What these characters have in common are their pompous egos and their lack self-critical thinking. Each of these figures is in center of their own ideological melodrama. We have been transported to, or presented with, the domain of idiocy, which is uneasily familiar.

In panel discussion in 2006, Ben-Tor came out against ideology: "Ideology hides the truth. Once you have ideology, people have interests.” More than true, this is the heart of her work: the raw exposure of our "ideology", our personal and cultural paradigms about our history, other cultures, and why we are right. Her characters share the same trapped-in quality-- trapped in their own minds and worlds and truths, shouting at each other.

I saw Ben-Tor at Salon 94 on Nov 4, performing Judensau. It was the first time I had seen her live and it was incredible, transportive and persuasive. Ben-Tor has been compared to comedians such as Tracy Ullman and Sarah Silverman, but that seems to miss the point of her work (that she is not in this for entertainment, but in a quest for our self-reflection-- that haunting feeling that follows you out, thinking, I'm not like that...am I?). There is a deep feeling of commitment which emanates from Ben-Tor which separates her from the entertainment-industry, or maybe its just the myth of the noble artist talking.

video link: Suspeseous Tourists - project by Tami Ben Tor, Daniel Sinichkin and Boom
TLV, "Cosmonaut", 14 August, 2004

Symphony of a Great City

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. (Link goes to GoogleVideo where you can watch the first 1 hour 12 minutes of this full-day, 5 reel silent movie (Walther Ruttmann, 1928).)

This film is profound for so many reasons. 1. The human desire to capture the whole, the entirety of an experience through the collection of as many viewpoints, factual tidbits and stories...the idea that there is one absolute truth or essence that these composite documents will build for us. Ultimately is an exhaustive endevour, but it is within us individually and collectively. Nowadays I think we doubt the possibility that such measures could point to a 'universal experience' but the idea in the 1920s can be seen in all facets of human action, from Joyce's Ulysses to Dorthea Lange's photographs of families in the US Depression. Additionally, in the twenties there were other "city films" made, attempting to capture the whole of a city-- physicality, people, feeling, rhythm-- including Sheeler and Strand's Manhatta (1921).
2. You can't help but thinking, at some point when watching either of these films, that everyone in them, everyone that you, that passed by the camera, is no longer alive. (Exception, of course being babies carried past the camera-- they are now 86.) An entire city, populated and bustling, people sharing in the time in their city and in the fabric of that city. And only the buildings remain, that the new people--us-- live in, the buildings that used to be home to those people.
3. In a more specific way, you think of the film, released in May 1928; and you know-- although they don't know-- that in 5 years Adolf Hitler will come to power and their city will enter a very dark period of war and death. It is strange that you the viewer know all this, and as you are pulled into the scene in a way only film can take you, you are with them and also watching from beyond, as history rolls massively along its course.