Years ago when I was taking a course in photography and aesthetic with Gary Metz at the International Center of Photographer in New York, he used to cite Henry James on the questions a critic should ask about a work:
What was the artist trying to do?
How well did he or she do it?
Was it worth doing?
So when I read Richard Woodward’s WSJ review of the show of “Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium since 1960,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I feared the worst.
“The theme of the show is self-consciousness, interpreted here to mean any work that comments on photography’s unnerving mutability.”
Or, as Associate Curator Douglas Eklund, presumably, wrote in a wall label:
“Recent years have seen much hand-wringing about the future of the medium [photography] as 150 years of analogue photography are rapidly giving way to its digital successor.”
The exhibition in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography wasn’t nearly as bad as I had anticipated from Woodward’s writeup.
At least, once I got past Sherrie Levine whose work consisted of copies of Walker Evans’ Depression Era photographs.
But back to the video tape. Ok, the wall label. “Levine’s work from this series tells the story of our perpetually dashed hoped to create meaning, the inability to recapture the past and our own lost illusions.”
Or maybe it is just another girl photographer who can’t get outside her own walls to photograph the world. Ever noticed how many self-portraits, created scenes, and pictures of tableware are done by women photographers? (See below for my comments on Catherine Opie whose very much world-engaged work is just up Fifth Avenue at the Guggenheim.) Anybody remember Jan Groover?
Uh oh. From citing Gary Metz I might have to transition to Tom Wolfe. No doubt they would be both be offended…but concept shows like this present a great opportunity for curators with art history degrees to strut their stuff.
It’s up to the viewer to make sense of it all, and weigh the words against the pictures to see if they make sense.
“I read the descriptions of these pictures and I have no idea what they’re talking about, and I’m not a dumb person,” said a man walking past me in the gallery, talking to his wife.
The widely collected Richard Prince is represented by images taken from publications – perhaps news or ads, and blown up so they are grainy and the tonal scales abnormal. They are sort of interesting.
James Welling has a very large print of a plumbago blossom with shifts in color, looking beautiful (oops, pre-postmodernist concept) at 24x30 inches or so. (I forgot to bring a tape measure and the wall labels didn’t give dimensions. I also forgot a small level, but I could swear that a lot of the labels and some of the pictures, were crooked. In the way they were mounted on the wall, that is. Same at MOMA last week. Really, what do a couple of small plumbers’ levels cost? Can art historians learn where to put the bubble?)
Roe Etheridge ‘s somewhat faded looking of a marina, tightly cropped to show several somewhat faded boats, “is considered a post-appropriation.” Ok, but I might consider it a picture of a marina with the print made to match the condition of the boats, kind of worn…nothing terrible pristine here in either the boats or the image, but a glimpse of the toys of life past their prime.
Moyra Davey’s images of her home, with open photography books, Maker Mark’s bottles, images of images on her walls – all displayed in 13 photographs attached to the walls with nails holding glass in place over the images, was unpretentious and gave off a warm feel for the photographer. Among the books on display were Robert Franks’ The Americans, a book about or perhaps by Andy Warhol, flowers – if she walked into the gallery to talk I would know a bit about her, and like it. Some of the prints had masking tape on them from the last time they had been exhibited.
If you have time, see this show, try to understand the wall labels, decide if you really want a degree in art history so you can be equally obtuse
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