Matthew Osborn’s “My Bones – Your Skin” at Pageant and “Candida Hofer – Philadelphia” at Arcadia University are two shows that take you to the limits of 2-D art being shown locally.  Osborn’s drawings and Hofer’s color photographs represent some of the best of what’s being done here — from hip musings in ink on paper by a young local talent to majestic architectural photographs by an internationally-acclaimed artist at the top of her game.

Matthew Osborn, drawing from his show at Pageant. The artist plays with the duality of personality and with the difficulties in personal relationships.

Osborn’s show is chock full of drawings and paintings and a video animation.  The 50-something works in the show — all made in the last two months according to gallerist Daniel Dalseth – are but a small fraction of what the artist brought to the gallery to install.   (See short clip of the video here.)

Matthew Osborn, drawing. The words are an important part of the drawings which sometimes have an R. Crumb-ian notebook style of internal musings

The images combine cartoon characters and words in turgid, funny, chatty, confessional pieces that channel both monsters and our better angels.  Osborn’s fascinated with the duality of identity and people’s ability to slip from one face to another.  At a time of increasing cyber-identity games and confusion, the many-faceted human personality is a great subject to be working.

Matthew Osborn. Scary image, sweet (or could be interpreted that way) sentiment of the words.

Part of the charm of the works is their word-smithing.  Osborn is a gifted artist/writer on par with Scottish artist David Shrigley.  In places the words achieve almost Hallmark Card sentiments about relationships and inner strength “Last night, today, tomorrow, forever” says one poster-like work with a pattern of upside-down spades in red, black and white.  “Either we can choose to be humble or we can be compelled,” says another.  In both works you might expect a pleasant graphic to accompany the words but what you get instead is a big hairy monster shouting the phrase at you like in some nasty dream.  And hello art buyers, Osborn’s works are incredibly affordable—prices range from $10-$1000 with most works priced under $100. 

Candida Hofer, Beth Shalom Synagogue Philadelphia I. 2007 C-print. 72 7/8 x 97 ¼ inches (185 x 247 cm). Photo courtesy Sonnabend Gallery. The photo captures the building's nautical charms. The sails, the mast...and the almost '50s auto ornament colored sculpture are captured beautifully.

Hofer, a German artist, came to town in 2007 via a local connection, collector Mari Shaw, who helped the artist gain access to the interiors of some of Philadelphia’s landmark buildings.  Hofer, who is known for her photos of historic interiors makes large scale works with crisp detail that showcase rooms where humans interact, laws get written, books get read and audiences watch.  

Candida Hofer, City Hall Law Library, 2007. C-print. 72 7/8 x 98 3/8 inches (185 x 250 cm). Photo courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery.

Hofer has made works that enfold the viewer in their spaces and make them feel the space with their bodies.  After the 911 attacks Hofer had not done a photo shoot in the US until now, she said at a seminar at Slought the year she was here.  The buildings she chose in Philadelphia continue her fascination with light, color, space and the activities of humans. 

Candida Hofer, Masonic Temple Philadelphia I, 2007. C-print. 72 7/8 x 97 ¼ inches (185 x 247 cm). Photo courtesy of Sonnabend. As with all her photos, she puts you right inside that space where you feel you are surrounded by the ceiling, walls, decoration and details. It's photo magic.

Last January, Hofer’s Chelsea gallery, Sonnabend, exhibited eight of the Philadelphia photographs (see all).  Four are on display at Arcadia and even if you know the buildings(PAFA’s Furness building; Fisher Library at University of Pennsylvania; Beth Shalom Synagogue; Masonic Temple) you will be wowed by the images which allow you to linger in the rooms and observe details you would probably overlook when visiting them in person.

>>Matthew Osborn-My Bones-Your Skin, to May 2.  Pageant Gallery, 607 Bainbridge St.,  215 925 1536

>>Candida Hofer-Philadelphia, to April 19.  Lecture and reception, Sat. April 11, 4 PM, Stiteler Auditorium and reception to follow in the gallery.  Arcadia University Art Gallery, Spruance Fine Arts Center, 450 South Easton Rd, Glenside.  215 572 2131. 

Candida Hofer’s wall-sized photos — portraits of grand architectural interiors, printed so large that the gallery-goer feels almost as if she’s in the space depicted — are both deadpan and glorious. Hofer’s love of these beautiful, historically-reverberant interiors is palpable. The way the rooms are lit, the painterly color, the stillness and drama of the shot, all this telescopes the artist’s love like a kiss. There may be blemishes in these old places but they’re sure not visible.

Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery.
Palacio Nacional de Mafra I
2006
C-print
250 x 200 cm
CH-380Notice the pink and blue.

Hofer’s photos are not glam shots meant for advertising the architecture. And if one were to speculate on what these pictures are really all about, it’s a good guess that the subject is what’s everywhere implied but never stated, human history. Humans commissioned the buildings, built them, lived and worked there, loved and died there. And that history, some of it small and intimate and some of it public and political and presumably involving power struggles and actions not so humane, inhabits these room. These are the proverbial walls that could talk.

Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery.
Teatro Nacional de Sao Carlos Lisboa I
2005
C-print
200 x 276 cm
CH389
When you stand in front of this work in Sonnabend, you feel like you’re on the stage.

There’s no way to capture history in a photograph if there aren’t people in the frame. People make the history. But all photos of buildings are in effect portraits of the building’s inhabitants at a certain level. And what Hofer does in her monumental works is offer up the space as a puzzle, something with secrets to be discovered or perhaps dreamed.

Because of the hushed atmosphere and the lack of action of any sort, the works have a slight surveillance buzz to them. They are conspiratorial — showing the spaces–many of them conceived of as private spaces but now public spaces — the way you and I will never see them, quiet and devoid of other people. The photographer’s gift here is to give you access — second-hand, like a voyeur — to the space the way she had access.

Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery.
Biblioteca do Palacio Nacional da Ajuda Lisboa I
2006
C-print
170 x 152 cm
CH-391

These are slow works. Both their large scale and the level of crisp detail requires that they be absorbed not in an augenblick but with a steady studious eye. And what the leisurely perusal facilitates is the reverie about the place’s history. Mostly we don’t really know the history of these places. And in a strange way, they all start to look alike –one palace resembling another; one library or theatre bearing more than a passing resemblance to another. But it doesn’t matter. For the works’ genericity allows the viewer to tap into the universal, almost fairy-tale-like story being evoked. We all know at least one story of a king, queen, palace, castle, opera house, library. We’ve all imbibed the story (albeit fictional) on some level.

Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery.
Mosteiro dos Jeronimos Lisboa I
2005
C-print
120 x 132 cm
CH-400

Hofer’s new body of work on display at Sonnabend Gallery (through Oct. 13) depicts palaces and libraries in Portugal. (See Libby’s post on Hofer in Philadelphia for a synopsis of how the artist came to photograph in Portugal).

I saw the Sonnabend show with Cate, a photographer, who was struck by the artist’s use of light and shadow to cause areas to flatten out as they would perhaps in a painting. Cate noticed for example that in the throne room (top image), the artist (I’m assuming the artist was in control of the lighting) had opened window shutters far away from the throne but kept them shut in the throne area. The result created moments of blinding light in the foreground and a dark vaporous mystery area in the rear. In fact, you need to look very hard past the beautiful checkerboard space to see that the room contains two seats that must be thrones….they are almost beside the point here.

While in Philadelphia, the artist said that she considered her works like a painter considers a canvas and that she took liberties with the lighting and color to enhance the aesthetic she was after. You can see this here and in the other works where the color blue (or in some cases pink) washes over the image in strange and wonderous ways.

Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery.
Biblioteca do Palacio e Convento de Mafra I
2006
C-print
200 x 247 cm
CH-361

It’s possible to read into the artist’s ouervre a critique of culture, of wealth and power. This is an artist who learned from and worked with Bernd and Hilla Becher, noted German photographers whose black and white images of coal and coke plants and other monstrous industrial edifices must be read as not mere documentation but critiques of mankind’s industrial beginnings and the use of (and overuse of) resources.

Like the Bechers, Hofer is documenting so many of the same kind of edifice that the ouervre feels forged with a missionary-like zeal. Also like the Bechers, Hofer’s works possess a manic energy: Their emphasis on detail, detail, detail is almost stupifyingly humbling. These are not photos of nostalgic reverie but images that mean to provoke. And provoke they do.

The works look wonderful in books where they can be studied at leisure. And there are many books. But the way they are seen in the gallery — power pictures of power places that ask you to put yourself into the picture — is the way they’re best seen. That’s when you’re confronted with the reality of these places — their crazy beauty and their dense histories which even if you don’t know can be imagined.

Hofer spent a week in Philadelphia this fall photographing institutions here like Eastern State Penitentiary, the Furness Library on the Penn campus and Philadelphia’s City Hall. We don’t have palaces here and our buildings don’t have the same opulence that old world edifices have. But our new world buildings have history in them, and I’m very much looking forward to how Hofer serves it up.

Candida Hofer, the internationally known German artist acclaimed for her enormous photographs of architectural spaces, is here in Philadelphia until the 27th. What she’s doing here, how her visit came about and what she had to say to a class of art history students at the University of Pennsylvania are what this post is about.

Why she’s here

Hofer is in town for 10 days to photograph a number of architectural spaces in Philadelphia–a miracle of sorts given the trouble she has had until now, and especially post 9/11, photographing U.S. architecture. Yet here she is with access, insurance, and permits, in the most cautious and litigious of cities.

Candida Hofer, Théâtre royal de la Monnaie/Koninklijke Muntschouwburg, 2006, C-print, 78.7 x w: 100.4 in., Patrick De Brock Gallery

The buildings she is photographing are City Hall, the Masonic Temple, several spaces at Girard College, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Temple Beth Sholom in Elkins Park, the Frank Furness art history library at Penn, PAFA’s old historic building, Eastern State Penitentiary and the Academy of Music.

How Hofer came to be here

How she came to be here and get access to all these buildings in Philadelphia has to do with Mari Shaw. Roberta and I first met Mari at the Art Museum, where one of her Isa Genzken sculptures was on loan. It turns out Mari is not only a major collector of contemporary art, but she loves to make things happen.

Here’s Mari Shaw in front of Stuart Netsky’s Grande Jatte, all made of sequins. The Netsky is a part of her extensive collection

Shaw owns not only some photographs by Hilla and Bernd Becher, Hofer’s mentors, but Shaw’s children own Hofer’s giant photographs of the Louvre. Shaw was visiting her friend Alexandra Pinho another major collector of contemporary art, who also established the Banco de’Espirito’s “very significant contemporary art collection.” Oh, yeah, and she’s the wife of the Portuguese Minister of the Economy. Pinho, like Shaw, loves to make things happen.

Hofer was in Portugal at the time, photographing Portuguese buildings at the invitation of the Pinhos, who wanted to project an image of Portugal and its beautiful buildings and its past through contemporary art.

Shaw thought it was a great idea. She met with Hofer in Berlin. “So I talked to Candida about doing something in Philadelphia and how Philadelphia was our first [capital] city and had the most interesting old buildings. …I assured her that Philadelphia would welcome her with open arms, and I would arrange [access] for her. I did not understand how time consuming that was. …I had to jump through a number of hoops.”

The hoops included signing contracts, negotiating to get charges waived and giving the copyright for reproduction rights to Hofer. She also had to arrange for insurance–done through Slought Foundation. “Hofer had never before needed insurance!” said Shaw. Only in the United States!!! Shaw made arrangements through Slought Foundation’s insurance. There were so many details, she hired an assistant, local art photographer–and Hofer fan–Christine McMonagle, to help. “She’s thrilled to be involved.”

Shaw figured out which buildings might interest Hofer. McMonagle took some preliminary photographs to help Hofer pick. “Candida in the past photographed mostly baroque buildings. I planned a variety of very different spaces and textures for her to photograph.”

“This has been 18 months in the making.”

The discussion

The room at Slought is like a cellar, the antithesis of the soaring spaces that fill so many of Hofer’s photographs.

Slought Foundation and Penn are part of Shaw’s network; she teaches at Penn as does Aaron Levy, who’s executive director of Slought. That’s how Hofer came to speak to Levy’s art history class.

The class assembled in a circle in the vault at Slought yesterday, a low-ceilinged room that feels like a cellar. Also joining the discussion were Shaw, three MFA students from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Roberta and me. Then Hofer arrived with her two assisants–two young French women, Victoria and Alex, both sporting boots–and with McMonagle, who has the privilege of also working with the photo shoots. It made a grand total of 19 people in the small, windowless room.

I couldn’t help but laugh at the contrast between Hofer’s oeuvre of carefully lit, enormous spaces and the looming dimness of the crawl space we were occupying.

Hofer herself wore a giant-checked white and black jacket the only light spots in an otherwise all black outfit. Her hair–bangs straight across and a bob–accented her seriousness. I asked if I could take some photographs of her and she looked trapped for a moment, but then agreed.

Shaw told the story of how Hofer came to be here. When Hofer photographed City Hall, Shaw said, “I’ve never seen the people in City Hall so proud of anything,” a contrast to Philadelphia’s usual self-hating attytood.

Hofer in a closeup. (I don’t know why I bother taking my camera’s version of telephoto pictures. They are terrible. Hope springs eternal.)

Here are some highlights from Hofer’s answers to the groups’ questions:

She finds her subjects in books and the internet. And once she decides she is interested in a building, she doesn’t change her mind, at least so far.

When she takes a picture, she doesn’t necessarily take in all the details. But when she creates the big prints, “I’m more in the space than when I take the photograph.” She later said, “I don’t remember how the space looks when I do the prints. I also do them lighter than they [really] are, so they look fresher, lighter.” .

When she began, the photographs were smaller, but she said they are more real because they are bigger.

She does not see her photographs as being part of a series, but rather as individual pieces. “It doesn’t matter if I take the picture in Dublin or in Philadelphia,” she said.

She was a little opaque about why she chose what she did. “I do what I want; I do what I like.”

She shot down any idea of her pictures as a kind of cultural anthropology. “I don’t have this feeling.”

When Hofer enters a space to photograph it, her decisions are quick. “When I enter a room, I know quite soon what will be the best.” One of the assistants added that Hofer’s choices of what to shoot were intuitive. Then Hofer graciously added, “Victoria and Alex, immediately they understood what I want, what I need.” She also added that her other assistant,Ralph (not present at the talk), did the technical part and that Christine, Mari’s assistant, was helping “to arrange, bring things out.”

Hofer uses a big format camera and she works with both analog and digital. “We are getting more and more technical,” she said. She is impressed by the quality the digital cameras can give her. She and her crew immediately look at a digital picture on a lap top screen for instant feedback.

In Philadelphia, they are working with digital, partly because going through security is a problem for the film. “Sometimes it’s better analog, sometimes it’s better digital,” she said. “Don’t ask me why,” she said with a laugh.

Students listening to Hofer

Hofer has the same issues that all photographers who work with analog methods have–the disappearance of the film and the color photo labs. “I work with Kodak material…tungsten.” With its disappearance from the market, she has taken steps. “Last year I bought three big freezers, and every freezer is full with [analog] material.”

Hofer does crop her images.

McMonagle, who is accompanying the crew on the shoots, said it’s a great experience for herself, because it’s seeing familiar buildings anew, “looking at things I don’t normally think about.” Hofer added that it was quite the same for her, as when she visits the Louvre or the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles or Weimar. When it’s empty for her photography, “it looks different.”

“After you take a photograph, do you see [the space] differently?” Shaw wondered.

“Yes. I feel privileged that I can see it in another situation.”

Levy suggested that her works “map an idea with order.” With people, the spaces are disordered, he said. But she said that some of her photos from the past have people in them. And when a student suggested that the absence of people suggests the presence of people, Hofer was not so interested in that idea.

Besides talking about a number of buildings and projects she has photographed–from, most recently, the local Frank Lloyd Wright synagogue to the Yale Beineke rare books libary to a project to photograph the 12 casts of the Burghers of Calais. The Rodin project had previously brought her to Philadelphia. The project, about the 12 casts in 12 milieus, started her talking about how she likes to see her own work interacts with different exhibition spaces.

Candida Höfer, Biblioteca do Palacio Nacional da Ajuda Lisboa I, 2006, 66.9 x w: 59.8 in, C Print; this is one of the Portugal photographs at Sonnabend Gallery.

One of the students asked, “Do you have all your work from forever?”

“I hope so,” Hofer said. “I’m a photographer; I have to take care of my negatives.” She has an assistant to takes care of her archives and all the maintenance of her work. And the color photo lab she uses, which is in Dusseldorf, is very close to her studio/archive space. Her relationship with her lab–which she does not own, she specified–is there’s a technician there who she always works with. “The lab gives us a lot of space to work. We always work with the same technician. I can give them a phone call and they take care of it.”

Levy wondered if she was frustrated at being always identified as one of the Bechers’ many proteges, at least in English language books.

“Not for me, but for some of my colleagues,” she said. “I was one of the first of the students of the Bechers.” And through them, she came to show in the Konrad Fischer Gallerie.

She said history had nothing to do with her work, and she objected to a catalog essay from the Architecture of Absence show (that traveled her to the Institute of Contemporary Art) that suggested there was something significant about her having been born post WWII. “This was new to me,” she said of the concept. The curator “had the idea that this would be an influence on my work! And then because it was in one book, someone repeated it in other books.”

I asked if she would describe herself as a fan of architecture. She broke out in a big smile. “I am a fan.”

The timing on Hofer’s visit here coincides with her exhibit of the Portugal photos at Sonnabend Gallery, which Roberta will write about some time next week. She also will be writing about Shaw, the woman behind all of this–and lots more. Stay tuned.

Strauss’s image Daddy Tattoo. For a harrowing update on the woman in this photo, whose name is Monique, see Strauss’s blog post.WARNING: It might make you cry.

Germany meets Philadelphia at the Institute of Contemporary Art this season, with a group show about art in Cologne, and photographs by German artist Candida Höfer running up against Zoe Strauss‘ Philly-centric photography in the ICA’s ramp space.

Cabrini Green, Woman Leaning by Strauss.

It’s a fair fight. Strauss, the local favorite and Whitney Biennial star, pulls together a three-part project (slide show, wall and window
installation) that more than holds its own. Walking up the ramp and into Strauss’ little bit of Philly is a journey worthy of Dante. Moving slowly upward, face-to-face with the photographer’s images of crack smokers, prostitutes and the poor is like moving through hell with a guide. If you haven’t seen Strauss’ work in person, see it here, where the intimacy of the photographer’s loving vision is matched by the cramped intimacy of the ramp that forces you to be up close with people you might cross the street to avoid.

[Ed note: We at artblog are Strauss maniacs as you know. For more about Strauss see the index with links to other posts.

And this late-breaking news from Rob Matthews, artblog pal and Philadelphia Art Museum employee, Strauss's work is included the just-opened Philadelphia Museum of Art photography show Summer Vacation curated by PMA Photography Curator, Kate Ware. That show's in the Julien Levy (ie ramp) Gallery on the first floor. And here's confirmation on Strauss's blog where she tells us the photo in that show is the great one of a kid doing a summersault on a pile of mattresses in the street.]

Candida Hofer’s Ca’Dolfin.

As for the Germans, Candida Höfer‘s large color photos of social spaces like cafes, libraries and concert halls-all devoid of people-are theatrical, gorgeous and full of love. Höfer makes her public and semipublic spaces heroic, although there’s nothing particularly heroic about any of them. The artist conveys the idea of time with her combination of perfect, mostly symmetrical framing and a focus on repeating shapes like chairs, pillars, windows or archways.

Candida Hofer’s Museo Civico

But it’s time stopped, not time moving. The works are pregnant with expectation, and that sense of tension lifts Hofer’s photos from mere descriptions of architectural space to creations of spaces as characters themselves. They’re like movie stars in glam shots. Höfer loves these spaces, and while many of them would be outstanding rooms to stand in (like the Campo Santo Pisa or the Museo Civico Vicenza), somehow I think if I go to any one of them I’ll be let down, as I probably would be if I saw Madonna on a street corner with a shopping bag on her arm.

Höfer was a student of famed photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, known for their taxonomic photographs of abandoned industrial sites like coke and coal processing plants. Höfer-and Strauss too-is making taxonomies as well. But unlike the Bechers, Höfer’s and Strauss’ works don’t brood. The photos are like a lover’s embrace, full of emotion and warmth.

Martin Kippenberger drawing on a hotel restaurant receipt from the Cologne show. Actually the Kippenberger drawings in the case are copies of the originals which are too fragile to travel.

You won’t find much warmth in “Make Your Own Life: Artists in and out of Cologne,” a group exhibit with works by 29-plus artists from Cologne and elsewhere. It’s a patchwork show with only passing visual interest. But the catalog musings about Cologne in the 1980s and early ’90s (a hedonistic scene in which the cult of the artist reigned, yet little art was produced) raise an important issue: art stardom. There’s definitely value in thinking about artists as art stars, and how dangerous that is when played out as it was in Cologne. Cologne burned out, and its artists dispersed or died. Regionalism is over, the market dominates, and in a post-9/11 global art world, even an art star has to take their shoes off to pass through airport security. So much for stardom-let’s make some work.

Candida Höfer: “Architecture of Absence”; Zoe Strauss: “Ramp Project”; “Make Your Own Life: Artists in and out of Cologne”
Through July 30. Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St. 215.898.5911.

Image is a Stephan Balkenhol carving and a Candida Hofer photograph from Pier 90 at the Armory Show. The small figure seeming to look at the big picture is kind of how I felt when I walked around the huge international show.

We went to the Armory Show Thursday afternoon. And for four hours we marched up and down Pier 92 and Pier 90 on the Hudson River looking at work in 154 booths by exhibitors from around the world. What struck me most (apart from the weariness factor of being bombarded visually by all that stuff) was the sheer volume of museum-class work for sale.

Alex Katz seemed to have paintings in numerous galleries on both piers, a hint at how the secondary market works. Buy it here, sell it there, make some dough.

Rodney Graham lightbox. One of my favorites in the show.

Not all the work by the museum-certified artists was uniformly wonderful. We saw a great Alice Neel painting, and a not so fabulous one.

Libby and I got most excited when we saw excellent things that were new to us. That didn’t happen so often in the Armory. (But it did in the Pulse Contemporary Art Show (and more on that in another post).

Ugo Rondinone drawing on linen, Armory show. $13,000, probably sold immediately.

Two conversations I overheard clued me in to how fast things sell. Three small Ugo Rondinone drawings were up at Matthew Marks’ booth and a collector was asking the price. $13,000. They were brand new according to the gallery assistant who said the artist had just delivered them the previous evening. The drawings looked like pencil on gessoed linen, very small, and were architectural, describing a window or two, a set of stairs — mere suggestions of building facades.

The collector probed the gallery attendant “Which one do you like? Which one do you think is best?” Questions whose subtext was more about money than taste methinks. The collector said he’d be back in a half hour. I’m sure those little works got sold immediately — to him or to some other collector.

I was happy when I saw familiar work by artists I like: Stephan Balkenhol, Gabriel Orozco, Tony Oursler, Candida Hofer, some 2006 Biennial hotshots like Mark Bradford.

Many artists whom we’ve seen in shows like the Carnegie International were represented: Katarzyna Kozyra, Omer Fast, Kutlag Ataman.

Omer Fast’s drawing of a colonial type. The words are about an imagined conversation/encounter between him and the person.

Fast had a wonderful set of drawings of historical-types (a colonial woman, a cowboy etc). Each one was accompanied by a hand-pencilled story in which the artist attempts to converse across time, space and culture, with the stereotyped character. The stories were wry and wonderful and the drawings were great.

James Morrison’s multi-panel painting, detail.

Occasionally there was actually something new and exciting and that was fun. Like when we saw work by Australian artist James Morrison in Darren Knight’s Gallery booth. The artist had a two-wall-spanning panel painting that told a mythic story and mixed western drawing styles with Aboriginal motifs. Very nice.

Koto Ezawa light box showing the surveillance footage from the Patti Hearst/SLA armed robbery in the 1970s. Ezawa, who alters source material from television to make political points, had a great piece at Vox Populi a while back. That one wasbased on the OJ Simpson trial and showed OJ with shifty eyes looking back and forth as the not guilty verdict is read.

Here’s the conversation I overheard about some smaller works by Morrison. A collector who must have been a dealer too (she had a website)was looking for a discount since she wanted more than one piece. She asked for 20%. He said 10%. She countered 15% and he stuck with 10%, saying, “They’re not that expensive.” He got the last word as she agreed. He said he’d take care of her and that he’d send the works to her from Australia.

Russell Crotty, ciphers drawiing. Crotty made those wonderful enormous books of drawings of the night sky that appeared in MoMA’s Drawing Now exhibit some years back.

I will close this post here and come back with some more pictures. And here’s the link to my flickr set which has some 120 pix from the Armory. Here’s Libby’s set.

If I had more of an mba mindset I would have gotten more into the commerce of art which is of course what this is all about. I look forward to reading the business-savvy accounts to tell me what I missed.

If you’re not buying, selling or researching the sales, the Armory is like window shopping at Nieman Marcus — a mildly frustrating experience not to be done too often.

So I found myself interested in Jane and Louise Wilson‘s five-screen video installation “Erewhon” at 303Gallery until Nov. 6, even though it is somewhat repetitive. (“Erewhon” is the title of Samuel Butler’s satirical novel of a young Brit colonial who builds a new life in the isolation of New Zealand.)

The installation shows long, old-fashioned, oppressive institutional hallways; dormitory-like rooms with old bed springs; empty landscapes; and young women in a soaring modern space wearing First World War-era athletic gear and posing as if exercising.

The idea of shooting creepy, abandoned spaces is classic Wilsoniana, although the angles and perspectives here are less original than the previous work, “Gamma,” that I’d seen from the twin sisters at the previous Carnegie International: “Gamma” (video still left) was filmed at Greenham Common, an American military base and cruise missile storage facility in England that was decommissioned in 1992.

But what makes this newer video interesting is the young women holding exercise poses in a chorus-line (based on archival photos of ladies exercise classes from 1910).

Turns out the source material for all this had to do with a eugenics ferver that swept through New Zealand (where the two British artists had been on a residency) after the death of so many of its young men in World War I. A fit young woman was deemed an appropriate vessel for the regeneration of the population. So exercise for women became a government program.

What interests me here, besides the held poses and the pleasing geometrics of chorus lines in Edwardian exercise gear, is the scary effectiveness of government in promoting its loopy, pre-Nazi concepts. The videos portray the women’s fitness platoons with a touch of cheesecake, which cements traditional ideas about women and their roles as sex-objects and then child-bearers.

People’s lives were disrupted, redirected, controlled by some government theory. The empty, dreary sanatoriums and hospitals brings to my mind author Pat Barker’s trilogy (“The Eye in the Door,” “Regeneration” and “The Ghost Road”) of the shell-shocked veterans from the war and horrors perpetrated by the era’s pschologists.

It also brings to mind our current delusion that if you exercise, you will be virtuous and healthy as well as fit. I see the armies of virtuous joggers in my neighborhood out ruining their knees as they slap their feet on the concrete. Anyway, I thought the work was worth a look. (Please don’t email me about how wonderful running makes you feel. You’d only be proving my point.)

Video from India

Work from Indian artist Nalini Malani, at Bose Pacia gallery until Oct. 23, has quite a different take on video. Her “Game Pieces” (left) include shadow images from Indian myth projected over richly colored video backdrops. The simplicity of using a sort of magic lantern to cast shadows of hand-painted figures over juicy, richly colored video was seductive, indeed. The figures appropriately enough are done in the lower-tech medium, the lanterns, but their message is about the modern world, hence the video.

The repetition of the shadows as they circled around suggested the eternal truths of the myths and stories Malani evokes.

Another video installation, “Unity in Diversity” (image, video still, right), set in a red room with red velvet chairs, layers death and violence, based on the 2002 attacks against Muslims in Gujarat, India, with an 1893 painting that promoted pluralism in India. The piece is a plea for more rational times, and a sad commentary on how our thinking has gotten more primitive over time.

Malani also showed several paintings (left) that also blend old myths and storytelling with modern cultural values. Her paintings, like her video “Game Pieces,” offered rich colors and a blend of past and present.

Big whimsy and boy toys

I want to mention some sculptures by Johannes Girardoni until Nov. 2 at Stephen Haller Gallery. The intensely colored what-is-its of beeswax, pigment and wood (image right, “Stacked.1-Nickel Green,” 18.5″ tall) remind me of giant version of David Goerk’s quirky, 3- or 4-inch sculptures that show at Larry Becker(see Roberta’s post). Girardoni’s pieces, because of their scale, suggest furniture, too. The intense jelly bean colors suggest a voluptuousness and joy in the material world; the rough wood is aescetic, the cross to bear.

Also, Max Protetch is showing Oliver Herring until Nov. 6. Known previously for sculptures knit from Mylar, Herring’s new work is boyish in the extreme. There’s a video, “Trucks,” of dump trucks and backhoes leveling dirt on an arena floor. From the perspective of the camera they are toy size, and the almost fast-forward pacing makes it all seem rather dancy. Charming but thin.

Figure sculptures realistically shaped and than collaged with bits from thousands of photographs of the model are amazingly realistic and life-sized (image, “Gloria” above left, 72″). Ten for the successful trick, four for the content.

Herring also created a kind of topographic map of a photo of a drapey guy that turned him into an amphitheater (not quite successful, but interesting). Both of these works raise questions about the difference between 2-D and 3-D, machine (camera) generation of imagery and human generation (image right, “Birdseye View of the Theatre Below”).

In addition, Herring has a newspaper-like folio of photos of no news at all. It’s documentation of two (adult) brothers playing in mud. This and two series of unframed photos telling a story of two people in his home reminded me of “Trucks,” with its boys-at-play affect. Not so interesting.

And while we’re on photos, Sonnabend has another of the Becher’s progeny–Candida Hofer–taking big, empty public spaces like libraries and palaces full of swell detail–antecedents to Thomas Struth, but not quite as loaded. Nonetheless, there’s still plenty to look at. It’s open until Oct. 30 (image left, “Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek Wien VIII”).

Stitchery

I’ve seen a lot of stitchery lately–Laura Owens at the Fabric Workshop, , Xiang Yang at Spector Gallery–so I tuned in at Christine Blair‘s stitched prints at George Billis. In contrast to Owens’ oversized pieces, Blair’s stitched monoprints were the right scale, 9 5/8″ x 9″. The work was rich with detail, color and texture, and it pulled me right in. Also at Billis, Daniel Schottenfeld’s gouache iconic consumer goods were charming, even if a little expected. And Nicholas Evans-Cato’s pleasant landscapes made me feel like I’d never left Philadelphia. Up until Oct. 30 (image right, Blair’s “Configuration No. 3,” 2004, print monotype on fabric with hand embroidery).

Already gone from the Cue Art Foundation were two wonderful bodies of work, one by cartoonist Jerry Moriarty and one by artist Stephan Andrews.

Andrews’ works, curated by filmmaker Atom Egoyan, were crayon rubbings on parchment of deadly incidents in the Iraq war, based on photos and video clips. The rubbings came across as pixillated, the colors separated, the imagery dissolving into the medium. The work is beautiful at the same time that the incidents depicted are horrifying (image left, “Friendly Fire (a BBC cameraman also received minor injuries but continued to film with his blood dripping on the lens),” 14″ x 16″).

Unlike Seurat, Andrews’ goal is not to make the colors come together but rather to fall apart. There’s a conversation going on here between photographs and the drawings, between direct video and recreated video, between the impersonal images of war and Andrews’ personal images. The shift from camera and reportage to hand work and time expended only adds to the sadness, the feeling of lives disappearing.

The show included a video and a wall of serial images for the video, based on a real video clip from the war. The action of the video gets caught and dissolves at the same time. This was great work, and a reminder of what’s being lost on both sides on a daily basis in that faraway place.

Jerry Moriarty’s large oil and acrylic paintings use comic book serial frames to tell brief, mordant stories, some of them clearly about his life. This one is “Sally’s Surprise–Tree Pee” (60″ x 46″), but others include the artist (loved his gray pony tail) in incidents (real or dreamed?) with his father (who looks younger).

After a day of pounding the pavement, I went with Judy Gelles to a book publication party for her friend, Martha Cooper, who just published “Hip Hop Files,” a photographic history of hip hop’s early years. The crowd included a DJ behind multiple turntables and lots of hip-hoppy looking men and women, many not so young, chronicled in the photographs. Here’s Martha autographing a book for one of her subjects.

We drove home to the drone of the final debate on the radio. We had to imagine Bush’s jaw clenching.