With the quality of photography in Chelsea at an all time
low, man, Trevor Paglen just kills it. I am standing before you now and saying Paglen
is the greatest photographer of our generation. Fuck Roe Ethridge, fuck Alec
Soth, fuck… Ok, just them, and maybe fuck is a little too harsh, but man, those
guys have to step it up, because Paglen just slaughtered them with his show at
Metro Pictures. If you haven’t seen it yet, go now. No, go right now. Don’t
miss it. Don’t wait till someone does a retrospective or a less exciting
follow-up at Metro Pictures. This is your chance. Go now, best thing ever. In
no way am I overselling this.
If you’re unfamiliar with Paglen, don’t worry, there is time
to catch up. He is an experimental geographer from University of California
Berkeley who creates art that makes experimental geography seem like a real
thing. Oh, and he also fights injustice by making research-based art
installations. Yeah, that’s right, if you can imagine the trite, boring shows
of tables with slides are projected on the wall and stakes of files and books
to read. Yeah, that kind of thing but better, and the EU used it to pressure
the US to stop using Poland as a rendition site in the transferring of prisoners
to be tortured. Oh, and he photographed secret military bases from public land
using telescopes. Oh, and he helped expose the CIA rendition flights by
tracking their flight clearances, or as an experimental geographer would put it,
mapping the useable. I know, badass.
Well, up until now, the only complaint you could lay on
Paglen is that the art was very often so-so visually and not nearly as interesting
as the explanation, which was still a hell of a lot more interesting than most
art of its kind. But he has stepped that up and really come into his own as an
artist. The work at Metro Pictures revolves around two projects, first the
photographing of spy satellites in orbit (I know pretty badass). Paglen’s
apparently been mapping the sky with astronomers, and the resulting pictures of
little light lines across the night sky are downright pretty as well as being
spy satellites. He also has two pictures of secret test flights as seen from
the ground. One just dissolves into a tan gradient. They’re beautiful yet crazy
as all get out. But that is just the teaser, because his most recent project is
a riff on a NASA program that at one point or another was sending up images on long-range
satellites, so if aliens found them, they’d have some way to understand us.
Which is probably the best photo conceptual project ever. Much of Words With
Out Pictures essay are dedicated to the pictures’ ability to truly communicate
information. It really doesn’t take into account photography’s ability to
communicate to aliens. So Paglen has with the help of MIT curated a collection
of a hundred pictures and launched them into outer space on a satellite that
will rotate the earth for the next thousand years. Paglen presents the images,
and you get to sit there and see a cross section of all the pictures and try to
imagine what any of this might mean to aliens. Just fucking brilliant. Best photographer
going, hands down.
Through Mar. 9th
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