Two Photographers, Both Revealing Friends
Ryan McGinley: Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere at Team Gallery through April 17
Catherine Opie: Girlfriends at Barbara Gladstone Gallery through April 24
Time was when photography was a kind of bastard stepchild to an art world that disallowed this craft the exaltation that attended the canon of painting, drawing and sculpture. If the video, installation and performance arts have been given a wider berth of acceptance in the last 20 years, this might be owed to the folly of decades-long deliberation over the mechanical art of photography having a place in exhibition. It does. And no more so than right now for two practitioners of this art who have respective solo shows: Ryan McGinley at Team Gallery and Catherine Opie at Gladstone Gallery. Each possesses an adroit precision for unveiling the secret lives of the worlds they inhabit.
Ryan McGinley has for sometime now been a darling of the art world, having earned his accolades (and the envy of countless of other artists), from the very start of his career; perhaps beginning with his much-resented one-man show at the Whitney, which featured his then-métier: the Polaroid portrait—and scads of them, depicting his friends in various states of undress or just plain nude and the debauchery of their parties. Not exactly new since Warhol, to be sure—but is anything new since Warhol? What’s perhaps new for McGinley, at least this time around, is his location shift: from the grungy apartments and cross-country American landscapes of past work to the somewhat grown-up confines of his New York studio. In this splendid exhibition called Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, he has captured a series of black and white portraits (yes, nudes), in which the subjects—young men and women, all androgynously smooth—are laid bare more earnestly than their nakedness alone could ever reveal: their interior lives an exchange of currency for the pleasure of our viewing. Subjectively not unlike Larry Clark, to whom he’s been likened, McGinley’s strength in elegantly apprehending the budding sexuality of what appear to be pubescent teens is done so without apology. This isn’t kiddie porn, after all: the models are all at least 18, even if they don’t seem so. And that ambiguity only reinforces our quarrel with this taunting sense of arousal, as these young people languorously testify to the awareness of desire that lurks within us all from the moment we reach maturation. (more…)
Our Aesthete in New York Magazine
Further substantiating his role as an aesthete, Theodore Bouloukos, our Aestheticism columnist, found himself in this week’s issue of New York magazine.
Read Theodore wax poetic about the charms of his Carnegie Hill neighborhood, the importance of all-night restaurants, and his belief that, “Dissolute behavior in a coat and tie is always more amply forgiven,” at NYMag.com.
photo credit: Andreas Laszlo Konrath for New York magazine
From Womb to Tomb
Update: Please plan to catch Federico Solmi this week at VOLTA NY, the cutting-edge satellite art fair, featuring only 92 artists by invitation, which is being held in tandem during the Armory Show, at 7 West 34th Street, 11th floor. www.voltashow.com
Without further ado, we welcome our newest Your It List columnist, Theodore Bouloukos.
As an actor whose performance origins reside in video art, I’m often at pains to define this genre for even the most reasonably sophisticated friends. Video art, as a medium distinct from, say, early artistic cinematic experiments in 35-mm film (such as Buñuel’s 16-minute silent surrealist short, Un Chien Andalou), is thought to owe its latter-day roots to Fluxus artist Nam June Paik and the portable video-audio experimental pieces that he created on his Sony Portapak in the mid 1960s. Contemporaneously, Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, employing both film and video, manipulated both medium and content in their work to either imitate and extricate the conventions of its motion picture and television brethren; in so doing, their collaborations have long influenced the visual vocabulary of what we see in a gallery and what we see on TV. The introduction of digital video in the 1990s enabled many artists to expand their artistic practices, engulfing such previously discrete media as design, sculpture, installation and electronic arts. In so doing, video art itself became more variegated, amplifying its boundaries while rigorously challenging the viewer’s expectations of video as an enterprise of either narrative or entertainment. The preponderant use of home video these days for the sake of the Internet alone has only added to this heterogeneity of hybrid practice, wherein everyone can be the director and the distributor of his own movie.
If the fluid relationship between art and cinema (viz. Cocteau) sees its tradition extended in Matthew Barney’s five feature-film Cremaster series (in which the interstitial plot lines serve as metaphors for the descension of the suspensory muscle of the testis); or in The Rape of the Sabine Women, Eve Sussman’s gorgeous epic, in which the myth of Romulus’s founding of Rome, depicted famously in in Jacques-Louis David’s 1799 painting, is re-envisioned as a 1960s allegorical musical with a cast of hundreds, shot on location in Berlin and on the isle of Hydra, Greece, then so, too, might animation, itself the womb of the video game, find companionable conflation in the work of Federico Solmi (1973), whose second solo exhibition at LMAK projects, entitled “From Uterus to Grave with no Happy Ending,” can be seen at the gallery through February 14. In it, he has combined traditional, hand-drawn animation with digital models, utilizing computer gaming engines to create a real-time 3D framework, thanks to his long-time collaborator, 3D artist Russell Lowe, a New Zealander who is also a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales, in Australia.
If the title of his show is provocative, so too has Solmi gained currency as something of an enfant terrible; although not in the masturbatory way of, say, Sebastian Horsley, the British dandy-memoirist-artist of self-crucifixion fame, denied entry to the States for previous controlled-substance violations a couple of years ago, forfeiting his only New York book-signing appearance in the bargain. No, no, for Signor Solmi, the offense was creatively crucifying–depending on one’s stridency of commitment to religious dogma–and more in the vein of a good old-fashioned duel with the Roman Catholic Church. Solmi’s an Italian, after all, and his native land is one in which it’s A-okay to elect a porn star to Parliament just as long as you don’t fuck with the Pope. Brought to trial for “obscenity, blasphemy and offense to religion,” after his work, The Evil Empire (2007)–seen at his first solo show at LMAK Projects in 2008, coincidental with the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to New York–appeared at the Arte Fiera Bologna art fair a year later. While Solmi was being absolved of the “religious offense” charge, the work in question was sold for $7,000 at the fair, but remained in custody. Since that time, these censorship charges have all been dismissed, and Solmi, a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient for Video Art, has moved to New York; and he has since been invited to exhibit his work at the upcoming Santa Fe Biennale in New Mexico. Through his media of video, drawings, mechanical sculptures and paintings, Solmi has infused the imagery he plucks from pop culture with art-historical references to realize his irreverently rambunctious manifestations as depictions of gorgeous phantasm. His is a place where extravagance and irony are the collaborative devices in showing us why moral decay might be our only legacy.
