Screenshots from Jonas Mekas’s “John & Yoko Bed-In” video that was part of the 40 Short Films series. (via Kianga Ellis’s YouTube channel)

UPDATE: Thanks to an anonymous commenter, I learned that ALL the 365 web videos are on an newer Jonas Mekas site that doesn’t seem to show up on individual video searches. ENJOY ALL 40 SHORT FILMS AND ALL 365 VIDEOS AT jonasmekasfilms.com. THANK YOU, ANONYMOUS COMMENTER!

In light of yesterday’s shocking news that avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas is suing art dealer Harry Stendhal for a supposed swindle, I wanted to share one positive highlight of the business relationship between Stendhal and Mekas that just surfaced online.

In 2006, the Stendhal Gallery coordinated the simultaneous release of 40 short films that were available for download at jonasmekas.com. At the same time as the release of this archival series, Mekas announced a web project that would consist of 365 videos slated to be released everyday during 2007. The gallery presented the web project this way:

Inspired by a poet writing a poem each day of the year for his lover, he will create a similarly poetic statement through these deeply personal films, reflecting on his life and sentiments of both past and present. Working from his vast video archive of footage, these films aim to “celebrate the small forms of cinema, the lyrical form, the poem, the watercolor, etude, sketch, portrait, arabesque, and bagatelle, and little 8mm songs.”

A screenshot from one of Mekas’s 365 videos

Thankfully, self-professed art evangelist Kianga Ellis has posted 14 short films on her video channels — 13 on YouTube and one on Vimeo — that represent three episodes from the 365 web project and 11 from the 40 Short Films release. Alas, jonasmekas.com is no longer a functioning website, so these videos are some of the only ones from those Mekas projects that are accessible online — there are a few others scattered around the web, including this very zany segment from February 21, 2007, which records the filmmaker’s reaction to Britney Spears shaving her head, (he explains that he doesn’t trust artists who don’t go through nervous breakdowns since they are too normal), and a June 17, 2007, segment where Mekas shares his thoughts on Paris Hilton (who he respects for being able to change her mind, though his reasoning is a little odd).

Among the classic videos, all (I believe) edited or narrated in 2006, are:

• A 1964 video filmed in Andy Warhol’s Factory, which shows Warhol with some of his friends, including Baby Jane Holzer, Ivy Nicholson, Gerard Malanga, Gregory Battcock, and Gregory Markopoulos. The film is narrated by Mekas, who shares his insights about experimental film during the era and Warhol’s factory, which Mekas describes as “a psychiatrist’s couch.”— you may also be interested to read a review by Mekas of an early Warhol film that appeared in the Village Voice in 1965 and was posted on their website last year.
• A 1969 film of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Bed-In” (1969) in Montreal, which is probably one of the more artistic of the shorts.
• Salvador Dali at Work (1964), which features a series of Happenings staged by Dail in New York in 1963-64.
• A film portrait of Dr. Carl Jung at his home in 1950.
• A Fluxus boat trip film titled, “Fluxus on the Hudson” (nd).
• An almost YouTube-like video titled “Allen Ginsberg Singing”m (nd).
• A rather poetic 05:12 film titled “fragments of AN UNFINISHED BIOGRAPHY OF JACKIE & LEE” featuring Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill that captures some odd private moments from their lives.

In regards to the 365 web videos, there is a brief 2008 review of the project by Ed Halter, which appeared on Rhizome. In it, Halter explains:

Intended for “eye-pods” (as his May 31 entry puts it), many of these tidbits are created from now-archival film and video diaries years or decades old, while some employ content shot only days prior to posting …

Each daily dose is under 10 minutes, and their effect is collective; a years’ worth of these forms a digital approximation of the monumental quality of his long-form films.

In a 2008 interview with Rouge 12, Mekas described his interest in the 365 web videos this way:

You can do with those films whatever you want. You can carry them on your iPod, literally in your pocket. You can download them and screen them wherever you want. You can use any existing technology on them.

Online and related to these two proejct, you can also find the original Stendhal Gallery press release, an interview with NPR and an interview on Senses of Cinema.

If anything, I think these newly resurfaced clips remind us why Jonas Mekas is such an intriguing artistic voice that continues to evolve. I hope after his legal issues are resolved we will continue to see interesting things from him.

As part of the deal, Lebron James has purchased Jeff Koons’s “Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank” (1985) and has agreed to use each ball during an upcoming playoff game as a way to create synergy between the city’s sports and art worlds.

Sources close to Hyperallergic have learned, from sources close to artist Jeff Koons — and his 120+ assistants — that the artist of choice of the last gilded age has met with NBA player Lebron James this morning in a final pitch for the New York Knicks to land the basketball superstar. That’s right, it seems that even the art world has been consumed by Lebron-mania.

In what appears to be a last minute deal, Koons has agreed to design Knicks uniforms if Lebron decides to land in the Big Apple. The meeting lasted for just under an hour with the art and sports celebrities comparing Rolexes, bank statements, photos of lovers on their cell phones, and finally the moment James had been waiting for.

Koons presented what is believed to be the prototype for a “new” look New York Knicks. Word has it that James was amazed by the work, which consisted of a Sharpie doodle on a Four Seasons napkin and an inflatable toy. He asked Koons if there was any art he and his friends could purchase as a thank you for the artist’s hard work and, of course, there was.

Sources close to the artist and the athlete claim James is agreeing to join the Knicks if Koons not only redesigns the uniforms, but also the team plane, the exterior of Madison Square Garden, and the Knicks locker rooms – even suggesting Koons integrate balloon dog benches into the final design and that he should consider designing tattoos for the players. The meeting also revealed that there have been discussions over the past month with the city of New York that Koons may redesign not only Penn Station but the entire West Side, in what is surely an act of irony.

Both James and Koons have not returned calls at the time of the publication of this article.

[SPOOF]

*    *    *

Left, Marina Abramović, “Holding Milk” (2009); right, Antony Gormley, “Domain LXIX” (2009) (click to enlarge)

One of the definitions given by the Oxford English Dictionary for sculpture is, “as a type of silence or absence of movement of feeling.” After 700 hours of sitting ‘still as a statue’ and silently engaging a series of 1400+ visitors at MoMA, Abramović has completed what is being hailed the longest work of performance art. Paradoxically, Abramović has engaged the phenomenological experience of Robert Morris’s engagement with dance. “The Artist is Present” and the other stock still performances recreated for the MoMA retrospective resemble what the historian Maurice Berger describes as, “the passive operational, and task orientated choreography” of the Judson Dance Theater. Berger explains:

Deconstructing the style, conventions, and aesthetics of Ballet and Modern Dance, these choreographers—who in addition to Morris, included Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer—advocated the elimination of narrative and the employment of everyday movements in their dances.

In the late spring of 2001, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project [SEE ENDNOTE] re-staged a series of Judson Group dances at Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a show called “PAST Forward.” Baryshnikov described the performance as “an extraordinary investigation of pedestrian mentality.” I remember it as one of the best dance performances I have ever seen. Films of the original performances were projected above the stage, then they were faithfully re-staged, finally, the seven-person troupe would perform a variation. So for instance, David Gordon’s “The Chair” was first shown as a black and white film of a scruffy dancer in street cloths climbing, sitting and stepping on, folding and unfolding a standard metal folding chair. This was followed by Baryshnikov re-enacting the exact same movements with a very similar chair. This whole exercise was pretty boring to be honest, but then, without signaling that anything had changed, Baryshnikov switched it up and began to run through the entire piece, move for move, in reverse. That was followed by all of the troupe reenacting the dance precisely, move for move, but slightly out of sync. I was no longer bored. I was totally caught up in the weird symmetry of it.

Left, Gap’s “Khaki Swing” Ad (1998); right, Marina Abramović, “The Lips of Thomas” (1976)

That said, something was lost in the jump in scale between the intimacy of the first Judson performances and the monumental White Oak re-stagings. The original dancers were funky, mop-headed down-town types, pedestrian for their time. The White Oak dancers attempted a pedestrian look, however Baryshnikov and his troupe (even the slovenly Mark Morris) could not avoid looking extraordinary. The Gap had been running a series of ads directed by Mike Mills around that time of an all white sound stage filled with young people in Gap khakis swing dancing. The Khaki Swing were great ads. As I watched the White Oak performances, I remember thinking that they would make a fantastic Gap ad – Khaki Judson. (Perhaps the problem was the leap was not ambitious enough. It is possible the London Summer Olympics could be saved from themselves if Danny Boyle were to embraced a truly monumental postminimalism. He should couple Clare Brew’s smart postminimalist light show with a massive Judson-based performance — imagine pedestrian flocking on a scale of the Beijing opening ceremonies — London could challenge the neo-Nuremberg pageantry of the Chinese Communists with the democratic pedestrian mentality of the woolly-headed Judson crowd writ large.) Abramović does not suffer from the leap in scale between her performances from the early 1970s to the weight and spectacle of “The Artist is Present.” Her retrospective has the same miraculously successful attachment to its origins as Richard Serra’s Torqued Elipses have to his first lead props.

Gormley, according to Mitchell, conceives of the human figure as a place, the only place he has ever occupied. Abramović has made herself, her actual person, a place and a destination. That the two have made their selves monumental this spring, only blocks from one another is nothing more than a coincidence, that both have evoked death is not. Both these artists have a career-long relationship with the sinister end of the corporeal. Gormley’s figures when posted on the beach would never be mistaken for idle bathers, they have more in common with a man standing on a ledge. His exploded and dematerialized figures are, if anything, far more fey than his solid metal castings. They’re apparitions. Abramović career is loaded with even more sinister imagery, from beating her chest with poor Yorick’s skull (“to be or not to be”), to the the-Great-Wall-of-China of breakups (in it’s blank-faced procedural candor, “The Great Wall Walk” (1988) rivals the historic romantic suicide of Romeo and Juliet — it was a conceptual folie à deux).

Right, Chris Burden, “Shoot” (1971); right, Antony Gormley, “Event Horizon” (2010) (click to enlarge)

The “historically bounded category,” of sculpture is overloaded with memento mori. Classically monuments, mortuary or not, are intended to out live their makers, and so the “logic of the monument,” as it is handed down, can be hard to discern from the logic of death. Krauss identified modern sculpture as a kind of cenotaph, but instead of a marker for an empty grave it is a homeless marker, a monument set adrift from site — “siteless.” What Abramović’s “The Artist is Present” and Gormley’s “Event Horizon” make clear is that siteless is not deathless.

———————————–

ENDNOTE: In addition to Baryshnikov, the White Oak Project includes choreographer Mark Morris and the dancers Raquel Aedo, Emily Coates, Rosalynde Le Blanc, Michael Lomeka, Emmanuele Phuon and Tadej Brdnik.

*   *   *

Left, Anthony Gormley, “Event Horizon” (2010) (tagged); right, Marina Abramović (carved)

At its best, modern art begs the question, “Is this art?” There is a death wish that threads modernity – death of God, death of the author, death of history, even the death of the modernity itself (the post-modern) but perhaps most insistently of all, is the existential interrogation that is modern art. In his book, Kant after Duchamp, theorist Thierry de Duve, explains that, “It is not when the crowd says ‘this is a painting’ that we have a true modernist avant-garde painting, but rather when it says ‘that is not a painting.’” (Note that while de Duve is discussing art generally he does not say ‘this is not a sculpture’ — just saying — I’m not bitter.) The death of painting is a perennial favorite and gets the most attention, but death hangs over all of modern art, and sculpture especially. Abramović and Gormley both make contact, in very different ways, with the moribund “logic of the monument.” Together these artists highlight the most morbid aspects of modern sculpture as a “historically bounded category.”

Those phrases, “the logic of the monument,” and “a historically bounded category,” come from Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” — one of the best pieces of writing about sculpture ever written by anybody, anywhere. In it, Krauss argued that sculpture was a category with conventions that were “inseparable from the logic of the monument,” a logic that, she believed, had gradually failed some time towards the end of the 19th century.[SEE ENDNOTE] Krauss’s “Expanded Field” was a mapping and a defense of what she then called postmodern art, but what we now refer to as post-minimalist art. She wrote that the art in the minimalist vein “were demonstrably contingent — denoting a universe held together not by Mind but by guy wires, or glue, or the accidents of gravity.” More recently the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl observed that starting in the late 1960s, “classically post-minimalist procedural candor … obliged you, if your work was, say, electrical, to expose the cord and the plug.” Post-minimalist art is nominally abstract, so while both Abramović and Gormley adopt the “procedural candor” of post-minimalist art, because they both are focused on the human figure they are not obvious candidates to use as example of post-minimalist art (typically an iconophobic set of objects and object makers). But there fixation on death cements the link.

Left, Robert Morris, Lucida Childs, & Yvonee Rainer, “Waterman Switch” (1965); right, Marina Abramović, “The Artist is Present” (2010) (click to enlarge)

In her magisterial 1977 book, Passages in Modern Sculpture, that set the stage for her “Expanded Field” essay, Krauss wrote:

“The continuation into the twentieth century of a traditional treatment of the human figure is not given place in the pages.”

But nothing is as simple as it seems. In his 1967 essay on minimalism, “Art and Objecthood” (a classic, but not a personal favorite), the critic Michael Fried complained that, “In fact, being distanced by such objects is not, I suggest, entirely unlike being distanced, or crowded by the silent presence of another person.” Likewise, neither Gormley nor Abramović represents a traditional treatment of the figure. In Abramović’s performances the silent presence of anther person is not entirely unlike being distanced or crowded by a minimalist object. Her nudity, self-mutilation, and acts of physical endurance feel less like acts of provocation than an instance of the post-minimalist artist’s obligation to “expose the cord and the plug.”

Gormley says he “was never really interested in figurative sculpture per se.” I believe that. The machined circular nubbins visible on the breast and thighs of the “Event Horizon” figures are the remains of “risers” — the channels that feed molten metal into the sand molds used to cast iron. These artifacts of the casting process, or bozzetto, are usually ground down by an artisan skilled in working metal and, by trick of craft, made to look like the original form and surface the artist sculpted, thereby expunging all sign of the the artisan’s own participation in creating the work. Gormley’s choice to leave the risers, to have them machined flat like one might see in an industrial casting (where simulation is not the goal), is a example of the artist “playing to the band.” He is telling other sculptors (and artisans, and educated specialists who pay attention and know about this kind of stuff) that he is not interested in representation. The importance is not the representation of a gesture. The bodies in his work, therefore, are more like modules. They could be bricks, blocks, plates or even bars. They are “one thing after another.” This is an instance of what Krauss called “demonstrably contingent.”

Left, detail of Antony Gormley, “Event Horizon” (2010); right, Carl Andre, “12th Copper Corner, New York” ‘plain’ (1975) (click to enlarge)

The theorist W T J Mitchell explains that Gormley’s figures are all simple castings made from his own body:

Like the minimalist objects which are among their sculptural ancestors, they refuse all gesture and syntax, forcing the spectator’s attention back into the specific object, this body, understood as place, a space where someone has lived.

All the same, there is no such thing as a neutral human body. In “Event Horizon” Krauss’s “accidents of gravity” have become sinister. If one of the cast iron figure were to jump (or be pushed from a window) one would imagine that a Carl Andre plain would be the result. As cruel as that image is, conceptually and procedurally it isn’t far from the truth. Gormley places his modules, the “lived” space of his own body, on the edge of buildings. That is a gesture, placing the specific object of this body on extremely precarious ground, does indeed “force the spectator’s attention.” It is impossible not to empathize with a space where someone has lived in such peril — a space on the verge. Gormley is evoking and invoking death.

Likewise, the images of Abramović’s performances are deeply morbid. (Is that like “kinda’ pregnant”?) She puts her body on ice, beats her breast with a skull, scrubs a room full of bloody bones, drugs herself into a stupor, passively offers herself to roomful of strangers and arms them with scissors and a gun, and most upsetting — carves into her own flesh. (One member of the audience at the recent re-performance of her 1975 piece “The Lips Of Thomas” at the Guggenheim cried out “You don’t have to do it!”) Again it is impossible not to empathize. As viewers we our attention is forced back into the most disturbing aspect of the body as place.

Again however, the figure is denied in minimalist work, but like just as Fried believed, not altogether absent. In her essay “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power” (a BFF personal favorite), the art historian Anna Chave observes that “we are accustomed to regarding works of art as having identities, not unlike people; we are capable of having special feelings for them, almost as we have for people: to humiliate or abuse an other, even if that other is a very thing-like work of art, may feel like unworthy, even humiliating behavior.” More then the absent figure, however, it is death that is the linchpin of minimalist practice. Chave writes that the “death” at issue “was not only that of the spectator, then, but also that of art”:

Andre challenges the viewers’ cultural conditioning, their habit of ‘looking up to’ art as something ideal and untouchable, by putting it literally beneath them, forcing them to look down on it. Walking on his work may make some viewers feel less triumphant than uncomfortable, however.

Gormley is forcing us to look up to his art, but exactly like Andre, his work is less likely to make us feel triumphant than profoundly uncomfortable.

Left, Marina Abramović, “Holding Milk” (2009); right, Antony Gormley, “Domain LXIX” (2009) (click to enlarge)

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ENDNOTE: “There is nothing very mysterious about this logic; understood and inhabited, it was the source of a tremendous production of sculpture during centuries of Western art. But the convention is not immutable and there came a time when the logic began to fail. Late in the nineteenth century we witnessed the fading of the logic of the monument. It happened rather gradually.” Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” (1979), The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1985), 279.

*    *    *

Left, view of Anthony Gormley, “Event Horizon” (2010); right, Yves Klein, “Leap into the Void” (1960) (click to enlarge)

My most favorite bit of signage ever, was a note I saw taped to a pile of wood when I was in art school. It said, “Art, Not Trash.” I have kept flashing on that note this spring. Dario Gamboni’s book, The Destruction of Art has a whole chapter on mistaking art for refuse (helpfully titled “Mistaking Art for Refuse”), where Gamboni explains that:

The scarcity and poverty of reasons given for attacks against art (particularly modern art) is less due to an absence of motives than to their illegitimacy. This problem is generally solved by anonymity and silence. Another solution, however, proves to be even more economical in that it enforces the attack while exonerating the assailant: it is the explanation according to which a work was not damaged deliberately but by mistake, because it was taken to be something else.

Like art, suicide can be difficult to identify. But while for most suicide is a mark of shame and so will often be disguised as an accident, for art being mistaken for trash can be a mark of pride. In his essay “Defining Art,” the critic Harold Rosenberg, wrote:

Today, renunciation of art has become a ceremonial gesture. A kind of collusion is involved between artist and spectator — the pretence that ‘this time things have gone too far.’ Both knew, however, that the violation is a formality — that the spectator recognizes the art historical background of the ‘atrocity.’ and that artists, whatever else they dedicate themselves to, have an eye on the museum and on their place in art history.

For the past month I have found myself returning again and again to Madison Square Park to look at Antony Gormley’s “Event Horizon” (2010), and (while it was open) to MoMA to see Marina Abramović’s retrospective. I have seen each a half dozen times now. I am not a big repeat viewer of art, but I have gone back as much to watch other people struggle with why the work is art, as to enjoy the art for itself. Why else tag sculpture, shower pamphlets, & projectile vomit on MoMA’s great hall, or grope a young performer? The message is clear, a vocal (and rude) minority was saying: “This does not deserve the respect we afford art.” Vandals and gropers are villains, but art is not an altogether innocent victim, but these two artists are. While Gormley protests, “Event Horizon” is clearly intended to be mistaken for suicide — identical figures standing along Crosby Beach near Liverpool, they were mistaken for a mass-suicide by passers-by, how could Gormley believe New Yorkers would not be alarmed by the sight of figures perched on the edges of high-rise roof tops? Life=Death=Art is not a formula recognized by most art audiences recognize, but like “Event Horizon,” Abramović’s performances often take their force from self-destructive acts; like self-mutilation and self-immolation, promoting a recent biographer to title his book When Marina Abramović Dies.

Left, Anthony Gormley, “Event Horizon” (2010) (tagged); right, Marina Abramović (carved)

Left, Cleveland Museum’s Rodin, damaged by a “rebel” bomb in 1970 (according to police, the perpetrators were a faction of the Weathermen, possibly the same individuals killed in a bomb-making accident in New York City that same year, though no one was very charged); right, the Star Wars Death Star destroyed by the Rebels. (juxtaposed by author)

This week, we are pleased to publish an essay written by sculptor and blogger John Powers about the relationship of death, sculpture, and modernity.

While Powers is widely known for his intense focus on Star Wars as a cultural touchstone of the last fifty years (his blog is called Star Wars Modern and he has published an influential essay titled “Star Wars: A New Heap” in Triple Canopy), his writing also explores the boundaries of sculpture, architecture, and art in general within the bigger project of modernity. He is an engaging writer who often mashes up the worlds of high and low culture with an ease that demonstrates his vast knowledge and comfort with ideas, and he often juxtaposes images to create meanings that go beyond the text.

His latest essay, “Art, Not Suicide,”  takes on a major theorist of modern sculpture, Rosalind Krauss, and his writing both illuminates and calls into question the blind spots in her ideas. Her influential essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” is the starting point for Powers’s exploration of the ominous — if largely ignored — role of death in modern sculpture. In his extensive intro to the series, which he published on his blog (Part One, Part Two), he writes:

When you think about it, it is about time someone make that claim, death is central to the modernist project. The Historian TJ Clark writes in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism that:

… the modernist past is a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp. This has not happened, in my view, because we have entered a new age … On the contrary, it is just because the ‘modernity’ which modernism prophesied has finally arrived … The intervening (and interminable) holocaust was modernization.

Keep in mind that painting dies every two or three years. God dies with the regularity of clock work, but only once a decade. The author hasn’t come up dead since the early 1990s, but we’re all still talking about it like it was yesterday. So it stings that sculpture has never come up dead. Google it. You get 322 results, which is as close to zero as you can get with a Google search. A search for “painting is dead” nets 76,700 results. “God is dead” a solid 466,000 hits. “Death of the Author” 1,330,000. “Postmodernism” (the claim that modernism itself is dead) about 2,900,000 results (0.33 seconds). Those are all proper returns for a search. Hell, even “dick is dead” gets 64,388 more hits than “sculpture is dead.”

Left, Rosalind Krauss’s diagram of Postmodern sculpture, based on the mathematical logic called the “Klein group.” Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths”(1985) (via sculpture.org) ; right, John Powers redraws the diagram. (via StarWarsModern.blogspot.com) (click to enlarge)

The idea for this series began a year and a half ago when Powers imagined reworking the Klein group diagram from Rosalind Krauss’s “Expanded Field” essay to describe the visual program of Star Wars. What came out of that idea was this series.

For those unfamiliar with the “Expanded Field” essay, I would highly recommend reading it (here’s a PDF) before reading this series but it certainly isn’t required reading.

Artist Dread Scott burns money in front of the New York Stock Exchange (photo via Heart as Arena)

Brent Burket (aka Heart as Arena) has a report on artist Dread Scott’s “Money to Burn” performance in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday:

He repeatedly sang, “Money to bur-rn. Money to burn.” while burning the money he had attached to his clothes and also that of any passersby who had their own money to burn. The crowd was a mix of lunching Financial District workers, deliciously confused tourists, and a smattering of people like me who had heard about the action on the internet.

While the whole post is a great read, I do love the ending the most:

During the performance, a couple curious traders had come over to see the action. They seemed mildly amused. This was a joke, really. They obviously felt at home. After it was all over they went back inside for the afternoon and ushered the Dow down 148.89 points. Burn.

Muybridge or Watkins? Green finds out … (via Modern Art Notes)

Curator Phillip Brookman mounted the first-ever retrospective of the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge (of Animal Locomotion fame), which is currently on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. But Tyler Green did some digging and found out some interesting information about this quirky photographer who helped invent modern photography and cinema. Green explains the interesting circumstances of the Muybridge show:

Typically when a museum holds an exhibition of a major artist, say Goya, it’s a sure thing that the works on view were indeed made by Goya. After all, the overwhelming majority of artists receiving the retrospective treatment are known quantities whose oeuvres have been studied by scholars for generations. Consensus has emerged.

Not so with Eadweard Muybridge …

In a weeklong series, Green is exploring the attribution of some of these images and the possibility that they were in fact by another photographers, such as Muybridge’s friend and rival Carleton Watkins. He interviews the foremost Watkins expert Weston J. Naef, who is the retired founding curator of photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum and former curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the photography historian drops a bombshell: “I think that it’s in part the stereographs that would seem to be most open to reattribution.” Naef also calls for “substantial investigation” into Muybridge’s pre-1872 oeuvre, including his pictures of Yosemite, Alaska, and San Francisco.

The most shocking charge against Muybridge:

Naef explains why he thinks that stereographs attributed to Muybridge were in fact taken by Watkins, who sold the negatives to Muybridge. Muybridge then printed and sold them under his own name.

A screenshot of our Hyperallergic LABS Tumblelog

If you can’t get enough of Hyperallergic then you should check out our Tumblelog, Hyperallergic LABS, which we describe as our “visual laboratory and R&D department.”

Hyperallergic LABS, which is hosted on a hot blogging platform called Tumblr, debuted back in October but it has really been taking off in the last few weeks.

In addition to summaries of Hyperallergic.com stories and posts, reblogs from the Tumbliverse, quick links, cool photos, and original content, there will also be weekly “visual essays” that explore a current topic through images, videos, audio clips and text.

This week, Hyperallergic intern Janelle Grace has been focusing on the BP oil spill and the artistic, pop cultural and other responses to the tragedy.

We always like to make things easy, so you can subscribe to Hyperallergic LABS through feed or by clicking on the FOLLOW button on the top right of your screen on this or that site.

An added advantage of Tumblr is that the service allows anyone to submit content for consideration on the site, so feel free to SUBMIT photos, videos, text, audio, quotes, etc., or you can also photo reply to each post.

If you still want more information about Tumblr and why it’s so great, check out this helpful summary from a user.