The heart of a society is most open when dealing with death. Its spoken and unspoken fears and hopes, both for life and the afterlife, are embedded in rituals of remembrance and memorial. In China, this has taken the form of detailed objects made of Joss paper that are burned for the deceased.
LOS ANGELES — Standing atop buildings in skyscraper-bound cities like New York and Hong Kong, we’re bound to look out. And across. And somewhat downward. But never down, like straight down. Detroit-based photographer Dennis Maitland took a different approach.
Floating around Twitter and Sina Weibo as of late has been my new favorite blog, Yowayowa Camera Woman Diary. Lifted to the web by Tokyo-based photographer Natsumi Hayashi, the diary features a series of “daily levitations,” as Hayashi drifts through the hustle and bustle of her city.
“Everybody ought to go careful in a city like this,” Joseph Cotten’s character Holly Martins is warned in The Third Man, the classic 1949 film noir that takes place in a war fractured Vienna. The line came into my head while viewing the photographs in Weegee: Murder is My Business at the International Center of Photography (ICP), where corpse after splayed corpse was flashbulb lit on the New York streets, crowds watching in curiousity or strange amusement while lantern-jawed police officers and a fedora-wearing photographer analyzed the scene.
There is something about artistic clutter that I love. The crumpled remains of discarded experiments, the crusts of paint dripped on floors and furniture, the outlines of finished pieces long since removed, frames of overlapped color left like burned shadows after a nuclear bomb. These remnants have a calm, yet chaotic, beauty, similar to debris after a storm, that draws me to visit artist studios and empty art classrooms. When looking at David Gilbert’s art, now on view in his solo show Angels at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery on the Lower East Side, I see this ephemeral aesthetic appreciated in his quiet photographs.
People often comment on how people and their pets lookalike but usually they’re not talking about fish. In his Evolution series, photographer Ted Sabarese captures carefully composed images of people with the fish they resemble — no, they’re not pets. Even though the concept sounds peculiar the results are enough to make you do a doubletake.
NEW ORLEANS – Prospect 2 isn’t just about the new or the conceptual or the overwrought: William Eggleston brings a pair of several decades-old works to his Prospect installation at the Old US Mint on the edge of the French Quarter, and together they offer the most satisfying viewing experience of anything I’ve seen so far in this edition of the biennial.
CHICAGO — I was standing in front of a large black and white photograph by Angela Strassheim in the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. It appeared to show the interior of a boring suburban home, complete with bad furniture and family photos in ugly frames. Everything seemed normal, nothing was out of place — except for the tidal splatter of white marks, like someone had hurled a can of paint at the walls.
Don’t you love attending a high profile art opening on a Friday night and instead of getting a nice big glass of vino, being handed a plastic cup of imported mineral water? Forget about TGIF. Obviously, we all have to suffer if the artist is in recovery and the legendary bad girl photographer Nan Goldin, now 58 years old, is trying to stay off the stuff.
It’s not often that we get to be present for a posthumous lecture given by the deceased being honored. An Evening with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel, presented at the School of Visual Arts in collaboration with the Aperture Foundation, was just that. Out of the pure darkness of a hushed theater came the crackling sound of Diane Arbus’ voice, saying cheerfully as a slide machine started to whirr, “Let me show you some pictures.” What proceeded was a shy, stumbling, incredibly humorous and deeply meaningful lecture by the infamous and famous artist herself. On the 40th anniversary of the artist’s suicide in the summer of 1971, this presentation is a recording of a lecture Arbus gave about her artwork, interests and motivations as she saw them in 1970
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