The show
is made up of some distressed black and white pictures of contemporary young
people, as you might expect from pictures that are young and contemporary. They
are paired with pictures of cloths, which I assume are curtains, and outright
abstract pictures that seem to be the work of a very productive alternative-process
class. I first saw Walead Beshty’s photograms at Wallspace back in 2006, and I
remember thinking he was clearly onto something different. His description of
the work as trying to address photo history without looking like photo history
made sense for the large, color, cubist photograms. Around the same time (ok,
maybe two years earlier), Saltz was complaining on about the reinstallation of
MoMA’s permanent painting collection and how they missed an opportunity to
better understand art by including some of the valleys of art history, the trends
that didn’t last and the people who made art that was similar to work that
became famous. Out of a confluence of these two ideas, I came to see the rise
of abstract photography as a mining of untapped veins of art history, things
that were lost or discredited, like photo abstractions. I guess what I am
trying to get at is this work at one time had a context and a point, but now
just feels like people hiding under Roe Ethridge’s rather large umbrella, which
makes anything, no matter how oblique or quizzical have value, simply in being
contemporary, without aspiring to anything more.
Now there
might be something more going on here, but the press release refers to the work
as pretty standard alternate-process interventions into the photographs to create
larger metaphorical interpretations of the medium, which seem pretty standard
for, say, a 70’s copy of Aperture or a sculptures talking about photography, as
if its own practitioners have never pondered the materials that make up the
medium. Which would all be fine with if the abstractions were attractive, but
they have all the appeal of an abstract black and white watercolor or an
abstract charcoal drawing minus an appealing surface. Of course this seems to
be all the rage, so what do I know?
PS Apparently
the work references an early performance piece of some importance, but that was
completely lost on me.
Through December
8th
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