I liked a lot of Strassheim’s black and white pictures of
blood splatters under uv light and the sunny suburban exteriors they were
paired with. I was excited by the set-up pictures from Israel that she showed
up during Bushwick open studios two years ago. I’ve really never had anything
against her work in general, there is just a part of me that saw her work as
the death throes of staged photography, a tradition birthed by Cindy Sherman,
best executed by Philip Lorca-diCorcia, made popular by Gregory Crewdson, made
cool by the Yale Girls (Katy Grannan, Justine Kurland and Dana Hoey) and
rightfully ended with the brilliance of An-My Lé. Leaving Strassheim as the
back end of a broad, general photo-historical arch, the Joanie Loves Chachi of
set-up photography.
But something struck me seeing her work from the last decade
in this best of show. Yes, there is a little stiffness and some unbelievably
and overdetermined narratives that plague the worst of Crewdson’s work, but in
general her pictures were really good, and god damn after Lassery and Kelm, it
was so refreshing to see pictures that meant something. More importantly, times
have changed. I came into art in the 90’s, when set-up photography was all the
rage, and making straightforward pictures pre-Alec Soth was something you very
much had to explain. There was a tension and a politics in the photo world
about staging photographs. Hell, it was a genre. But now that stuff seems like
a distant memory, like fax machines and physical address books. Set-up
photography is now just a style of making photographs no different from making
straightforward pictures. The act of setting up a picture is so passé
conceptually that it has lost all meaning, which in Strassheim’s work just leaves
the image, and to her credit, at her best, the pictures start tapping into the
general unhappy and unsettling suburban world that her narratives inhabit, like
the young woman getting undressed, the fish tank or the father and son in the
mirror. I am not sure yet how I feel about the installation reenacting an
earlier picture of a similar looking closet with a TV on in it, but I do enjoy her
attempt to reach into another medium, even if it left me just wanting to see
the photograph. It is an odd still life, and trying to imagine where the closet
was and why there would be a TV in it lets me escape into the believable
narrative where the actual thing just feels like a diorama. In general, the
show is really good, and I’m actually kind of bummed not to get to see more new
work, but I guess for Strassheim’s first show at Andrea Meislin, it does leave
me wanting more.
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