Fuck yeah, I am gonna ignore the two panels of looping video
of the beginning and ending credits of vintage black and white porns, that
reveal static and white text against a black backdrops and just focus on the
awesomeness of the one story high projection loop of the extended version of diCorcia’s
hustler series. This body of work should be understood as the culmination of a
set-up style of photographs that questioned the very authenticity of photography.
diCorcia’s set-up work starts in the early 80’s at almost the same time Cindy Sherman
was making her more renowned film stills and decades before Crewdson started
his much more commercially successful staged tableaus. By the early 90’s, when
Hustlers was being made, diCorcia was addled with a rather debilitating intravenous
drug habit. He had survived his brother’s death at the height of the AIDS crisis,
when it was still the gay cancer and US Senators were calling the epidemic the
rightful vengeance of God upon gays and drug users. diCorcia made Hustlers
using the last NEA grant to an individual after Mapplethorpe’s mildly controversial
museum show and Serrano’s lack of artistic ability caused the NEA to stop
giving grants to artists (which, in all fairness, it is not completely
unreasonable, for Congressmen from conservative parts of the country to object
to tax money being spent on work that it’s safe to say most of their
constituents would have a hard time recognizing as art). But as the last individual
grant from the NEA and in a move of conceptual genius, diCorcia used his grant
money to hire as his models male hustlers in Los Angeles, a group very much on
the front lines of the aids epidemic in the early 90’s. The pictures are
conceptually tight with their cinematic lighting and occasionally surreal
narrative, creating work that directly addresses what a believable fiction
photographs can be. While the 90’s
would evolve into a generation of photographers wallowing in the fiction of the
imagination, diCorcia made work that was about more than just academic art
issue. In a very direct way, he was able to help people who were in need,
people who were, up until that time, being ignored by their government, by
paying them to sit in front of a camera if only for an hour or so and take time
off from their grueling profession. Fuckin’ rad.
Even if you remove the back story, the pictures paint a
punishing picture of Los Angeles. diCorcia portrays the Los Angeles of Bukowski
novels, the Los Angeles where men in the pictures flock for greater dreams,
that in the glint of late day sun seem attainable, only to end up in a stranger’s
car in a nameless parking lot as the sun sets on the day and on any hope. It’s
utterly brilliant work, and if you, like me, spent time shitting on Chelsea, or
Zwirner for being the Wal-Mart of galleries, I would like to apologize. In this
show, they put up an outstanding expanded version of one of the most important
bodies work in the history of photography, and it isn’t in a museum. It’s free
in a gallery. Oh, and like diCorcia’s polaroid show, there are a lot of extra
shots from hustlers that are pretty amazing and certainly could have been in
the original MOMA book. The pictures you haven’t seen are on the fringes of the
original body of work the pictures are a little bit more surreal or a little
bit more sexual than the work you’re familiar with. Occasionally. a woman even works
into the series. If you aren’t jazzed on this, you should immediately start
suspecting that you aren’t very intelligent or interested in photography or
just have bad taste and are a subpar human.
Already Down
0 comments:
Post a Comment