For once, MOMA’s New Photography is trying to define what contemporary photography is, making this easily the most interesting installment of the series in some time, and for that curator Roxana Marcoci should be commended. The wall text doesn’t go so far as to state that it is trying to define contemporary photography, but the presence of Roe Ethridge is a clear recognition of the very important role he plays in photography.
In the selection of Ethridge, MOMA is taking on one of the two main strands in contemporary photography, that is, the inclusion of well made but seemingly random pictures into a body of work organized around a vague conceptual idea. The other strand being the recent influx of photographic abstractions. In October alone, there were six shows of painterly photographs and that doesn’t even count Sara VanDerBeek at the Whitney Museum of Art. The omission of abstract photography from the current New Photography show seems shrewd, since as trends go it feels more like a gallery-driven response to the down economy than a real artistic revival.
The thread of contemporary photography supported by MOMA this year is Ethridge, Mark Wyse, Collier Schorr and Christopher Williams and their art of embracing randomness. Each of them produces smart collections of alluring but often disjointed photographs that take on the dead end of 90’s conceptualism, where Rachel Harrison was considered a photographer and it was hard to make art without first writing a paragraph about identity. These artists have formed a conceptualism that has talked itself into an intellectual corner so claustrophobic and insular that the photographs can now be seen as a wonderfully random body of images, not much different from those favored in the early 1930’s by the likes of Kertesz and Brassai.
Calling Ethridge a proto-formalist is shortchanging him, because out of these photographers, his work is the smartest and, other than Mark Wyse, the most visually enjoyable. But proto-formalist is a label I’m more than happy to stick on Torbjorn Rodland or, in the current New Photography show, Elad Lassry, who has the misfortune of being shown in the same room as Ethridge. Lassry’s inclusion, despite his enjoyable silent film starring Eric Stoltz, is at best a real-time argument for the pervasive influence Ethridge has had on photography or possibly a very subtle attempt to make Neil Winokur more relevant.
Not only is Elad Lassry redundant in the show but, unfortunately for the talented Amanda Ross-Ho, her inclusion feels forced. She is a splendid installation artist who uses free association and assemblage of objects from her daily life to give a glimpse into her subconscious. And in her installations, Ross-Ho does occasionally incorporate photographs, but they tend to be a small part of her art and far from the strongest part at that. The restricted amount of space that she is given in the show severely limits her installation, and does very little to highlight her particular world of self-reflexive objects. And even worse, the limited installation robs her photographs of a greater context, leaving her work to look like a more sculptural version of Ethridge’s random collections of images.
For almost a decade, Ethridge has been trying to make case for the potential of stock photography as an art form. He has had show after show that displays his ability to make his own vernacular images and then curate them together around loose structures like Rockaway Beach or Apples and Cigarettes. The end results are often touched with a degree of complete randomness, but if you are willing to give him some intellectual leeway, the pictures very often have a startling visual intelligence. He has taken things a step further in the current show by appropriating photographs he might have made for Bed, Bath & Beyond catalogues or fashion week coverage in The New York Times (as the text coyly implies), and then reclaiming them as large pixilated images, mixing them in with his excellently crafted stock photographs of rotting fruit and ballerinas. The inclusion of (possibly his own) appropriated images with images that he has made to look as if they could have been appropriated confronts and utterly obliterates the line between art and vernacular photography.
As random as his images often appear, the arrangement of pictures in his first grouping of photographs in the exhibition have sound visual logic, a plate on a patterned material, a woman in soft focus leaning on a tripod, two pictures of the same ballerina and a bowl of rotting fruit. Together the images make up a stock photography collection of the most common subject matter of art history: attractive women and domestic still lives. His other grouping presents the core of his work, the disappearing line between the practical use of images as seen in his appropriated picture from The New York Times and a picture of his studio that is so visually odd that it could only function as a piece of art, blurring the hierarchy between art and vernacular mages. Making for a passionate affirmation of a deep love of images.
While Ethridge’s images referencing contemporary stock photography nearly disappear into the haze of the everyday, Alex Prager’s photographs sourcing the equally commercial imagery of 1960’s cinema scream for attention. At their weakest, the pictures appear to be scenes from movies that you can’t quite identify. Almost every review of her pictures tends to claim the images reference a different set of films. Which makes it hard to avoid feeling the pictures are just art school kids playing dress up with a budget and a rich visual library, or even worse, the last gasp of nineties set-up photography. But, like Ethridge, no matter how uninteresting the justification, it is hard not to enjoy the work. In Prager’s best photographs, like the women drinking in a hot tub, the artifice and cinema references fade away, inviting the viewer to escape into the narrative.
Or in the case of her actual movie, which is smartly imbedded into the wall, you get to enjoy the slow motion descent of a panicked woman in a green dress jumping out of a window as the sun sets and the sky turns all kinds of purple behind her in a scene that only Almodovar would find subtle.
At its core, the exhibition at its core is a showdown between the aggressively insistent non-art of Ethridge against the super self-conscious art of Prager. The two are strong polar opposites in photography, making photographs that could be mistaken for dry illustrations or images so dramatic they end being compared with other mediums (like painting and cinema). This is the conversation photography has been having since the beginning of the medium. It is the same beef Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson had with each other in the late 1890’s.
This is a great show, and for all the hate the New Photography series has gotten over the years, for making Vince Alletti jokingly suggest the show made him want to quit reviewing photography, let me say, well done.
Through Jan. 10th
MOMA (11 W 53rd St. Btw. 5th & 6th Aves.)
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