Russian Ark

That would be the Hermitage, one of the largest and oldest museums in the world, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Founded by Catherine the Great in 1764, the collection consists of nearly three million items. This astounding and revolutionary film is the first to employ no edits, as the camera - piloted by Steadicam operator extraordinaire Tilman Büttner - travels two kilometers through the complex of the museum and the Winter Palace, traversing 300 years of Russian history, observing a cast of hundreds along with thousands of extras. The point is, that this incredible institution is an ark of culture floating on a sea of turmoil and constant change.

Astounding because Mr Büttner carried 77 pounds of Steadicam and camera for about 90 minutes and traversed some 30 rooms that needed to be lit. Revolutionary because it is an entire film in a single take, but the narrative takes place over such a broad period of time. Despite these aspects, and the impressive size of the production in general, non Russians are not likely to be engaged on anything other than a visual level. Snippets of dialogue with historical characters are heard throughout, but engagement does not occur. The camera is too anxious to continue on its tour of this remarkable location.

Alexander Sokurov - dir.

Tilman Büttner - dp/Steadicam; is Steadicam op for Béla Tarr's last film The Turin Horse

primarily a Russian/German co-production

contemporary art

The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art - Don Thompson, 2008, Palgrave Macmillan

An informative, and ultimately depressing book about art in the 21st century.

How does a work then come to be worth $12 million, or $140 million? This has more to do with the way the contemporary art market has become a competitive high-stakes game, fuelled by great amounts of money and ego. The value of art often has more to do with artist, dealer, or auction-house branding, and with collector ego, than it does with art. The value of one work of art compared to another is in no way related to the time or skill that went into producing it, or even whether anyone else considers it to be great art. The market is driven by high-status auctions and art fairs that become events in their own right, entertainment and public display for the ultra-rich.

Branding has become the most important element in any work's provenance - whether through a collector, a dealer, an auction house, or a museum.

Auction houses have nearly taken over the market for high end art work.

"80% of the art bought from local dealers and local art fairs will never resell for as much as the original purchase price. Never, not a decade later, not ever."

At the end of the book, Thompson, who has lectured on economics at the London School of Economics, offers a few rules:

With the work of western artists, what kind of painting will appreciate most? There are general rules. A portrait of an attractive woman or child will do better than that of an older woman or an unattractive man. An Andy Warhol Orange Marilyn brings twenty times the price of an equal-sized Richard Nixon.

Colors matter...

Bright colors do better than pale colors. Horizontal canvases do better than vertical ones. Nudity sells for more than modesty, and female nudes for much more than male...

Purebred dogs are worth more than mongrels, and racehorses more than cart horses. For paintings that include game birds, the more expensive it is to hunt the bird, the more the bird adds to the value of the painting... There is an even more specific rule, offered by New York dealer David Nash: paintings with cows never do well. Never.

A final rule was contributed by Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer. Meyer was auctioning a 1972 Bruce Nauman neon work, Run from Fear/Fun from Rear, which referred to an erotic act. When the work was brought in, a voice from the back of the room complained, "Obscenity." Meyer, not known for his use of humor on the rostrum, responded, "Obscenity sells." Often it does not, but for a superstar artist like Jeff Koons or Bruce Nauman, it does. It did.

Ricky Maynard in Virginia

A rather fascinating exhibit is currently at one of our local museums, the Kluge-Ruhe space. Here is some info about this show of photographic prints by Tasmanian native Ricky Maynard. I'm not certain that he works exclusively with a large format camera, but Ricky did tell me at the show opening that his landscape work is often done with a "5 x 4." He spoke about the difficulties of working with a bellows camera in the frequent winds off the Southern Indian Ocean. The portraits of native elders from Queensland are fabulous images of people we rarely see in these parts, despite our cosmopolitan proclivities.

Most of the images in the current Kluge-Ruhe show can be seen here.

A 2 part video about Ricky's "Portrait of a Distant Land" project can be seen here and here. Interesting to see a large format landscape photographer go about his work. Turns out, he works mostly with an 8 x 10 Ebony, and does all his printing in a wet darkroom.

a northern city, this time

Once again, I'm afraid I'm reporting old news that can't really be used by those on the east coast. Brother Roger and I did the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit at MoMA in NYC this past week. It closes on June 28, 2010, but will most likely travel elsewhere.

For a Thursday mid day in June, there were an awful lot of people in attendance, many of whom seemed to be French. New York always has a lot of French tourists, and many of them seem to attend an exhibit at MoMA during their stay in the city.

Photo journalism is not my thing, and coupled with the crowds it made it extremely difficult for me to engage in the material. There are many great photographs in the exhibit, but the prints are nothing special, having been printed by a number of sources over the years - or am I simply spoiled by the quality of current digital printing technology? The catalogue of the exhibit, which contains several long essays about HCB's career, also has all the photos hung on the walls. Definitely a simpler method of looking at the pictures, and I think in some cases, higher quality (some of the images are scans of negatives.)

Edward Burtynsky

 

The latest Burtynsky exhibit, Oil, is currently installed in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington D.C. Leaving the fam on the train for their long weekend in NYC, I walked across the city to the gallery to see this collection of phenomenal and extremely unsettling photographs, which is on display until December 13.

I'll admit to being hugely influenced by Burtynsky's work. Not all the images in the show are new, as they represent twelve years of his work from around the world, newly organized into a more potent theme than they have been grouped before. All his images represent massive consumption of resources, often showing the land from which the raw materials for the goods of our lives are extracted. Here there are two rooms of images from the oil fields in California west of Bakersfield around Belridge and Taft, and the oil sands of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, along with oil refineries in Houston, Texas and elsewhere.

From extraction and processing, he moves to consumption and motor culture, with mostly aerial images of highway interchanges, vast fleets of new automobiles awaiting distribution, and Las Vegas suburban sprawl stretching to the mountains at the horizon. Two fascinating landscape photos of motor culture show a motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. One is in the center of town from an elevated perspective with thousands of motorcycles stretching to the horizon. The other is later that same day, a classic landscape of the surrounding mountains on the horizon, a beautiful evening sunset lighting the sky, the foreground filled with cars and bikes in the parking lot of a Kiss concert.

The final section is what Burtynsky terms "the end of oil." It consists of images of shattered oil fields in Azerbaijan, aircraft junkyards, the Oxford, California tire pile, massive collections of recycled oil filters and metal drums, and finally the oil tanker ship breaking operations in Bangladesh.

Much of this has been seen before in Manufactured Landscapes, but it's my first exposure to the large scale prints that Burtynsky creates for his large format photographs. The amount of detail can be overwhelming, as when I stood in the corner of one gallery and surveyed the images of the tire pile and densified oil filters and oil barrels and had to catch my breath at the sheer magnitude of the consumption. In another era, it would have been our awe at the sights of the Grand Canyon. Now our feelings of the sublime are wonder and guilt, in equal measures, at the use – and disposal – of so many natural resources.

It has been objected that Burtynsky's photographs are a gee whiz wonder at an exceptional phenomena. No doubt his production budgets are substantial, and in order to make it worth his while, he endeavors to find the biggest and most extreme example of whatever resource usage he wants to document. But the fact remains that these excessive conditions do exist, and on a global level are even more extreme than Burtynsky can document.

See the exhibit if you can, or look at his books. They are an uncomfortable reminder that nothing we do on this planet is without consequences, and when aggregated on a global scale, they become profound consequences.

All works hung on walls are by Edward Burtynsky.

William Eggleston's democratic camera

The show of William Eggleston's work, a retrospective that encompasses material from 1960 through 2008, closes at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Sept. 20, 2009. You've got two more weeks to see one of photography's more influential practitioners, if you're anywhere near the nation's capital. In my book, an excellent reason to make a trip.

And so we did on a recent Sunday morning. I was at the door minutes after the 10am opening, and was one of the first visitors to the gallery for the day. Somewhat confusingly arranged, it didn't really make much difference to the impact of the show. The first gallery contains mostly prints from The Guide, all color dye transfer prints in the 11 x 14 range, matted with 8 ply white museum board, framed behind glass with a narrow white frame. It's wonderful to see these prints in person, after the varieties that can be encountered with publishing. To the left of the first gallery is a small room that contains black & white work from the early '60's. The other direction leads into a central gallery that contains four video monitors and several seats for watching a long loop of the Stranded in Canton video work that Eggleston did around the same time, and with the same sorts of people who appear in the book 5 x 7. On the walls hang large prints from the 5 x 7 series, all of them portraits of late night denizens of Denny's restaurants and bars. From this room is another large gallery divided into two sections that contains work from Eggleston's Graceland and Election Eve, and Troubled Waters and Los Alamos. Leaving the video gallery the other direction leads into another large gallery showing the most recent work from around the world, and includes lightjet prints in the 16 x 20 inch range, again matted behind glass and framed with white frames.

There is no denying Eggleston's influence. His "democratic" approach to subject matter, which leads him to find his subject matter any place he turns his gaze, with no material given priority, elevates the mundane into the realms of art. His use of color, for which he is at least as famous, is much more complex. Was it a conscious artistic decision, or that of a documentarist looking to show his material more "realistically?"

When the exhibition catalogue that I've ordered arrives, I'll be able to compare the printing quality to the recent reprint of The Guide. By all means, see this show if it is available.

final day for Frank

This scan is from the dust jacket of the most recent edition of the famous book first published in 1958 in France. The first US edition was published by Grove Press in 1959, and it's never really been out of print since.

Under the "better late than never" theory, some mention should be made of last week end's trip to Washington to see the exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of this landmark book. Being only 6 at the time of publication, and not interested in photography books until 2001, I have to accept the opinions of the experts that The Americans truly was something radical for its day. The exhibit doesn't dwell on that aspect of the book, merely mentioning here and there the reception. What is examined in great detail is the process that Robert Frank went through to produce the book: his earlier photography in Peru, Wales, London; his grant application for a Guggenheim Fellowship (which took advantage of his friendship with Walker Evans who edited his application, reviewed it as one of the grant committee, and recommended his acceptance as same); letters to Evans while on the road; recreation of many work prints to give the impression of his editing chores; a display of all the contact sheets from the travels; and two large galleries devoted to the prints selected for the book.

Having exhibition size prints to evaluate the photographs is obviously a big help. None of the prints in the Steidl edition of the book are larger than 7.75 x 5.125 in - not large enough to get more than an impression. The show presents them in a manner which really honors the photographs. The book is more about sequence and context and groupings. The exhibit allows one to appreciate the individual images, while also making some of the sequencing more obvious when prints are directly beside one another on the wall, rather than on following pages of a book. (The most obvious for me was "Belle Isle - Detroit" with an open black car driving left to right followed by "Detroit" of a closed white car driving right to left. They're certainly heading for a collision, which came twelve years later.)

For those who don't have a copy of the book and are interested in all of the material in the exhibit, the catalogue contains much of it, including all the contact sheets, and all the images in the original book. BTW, the sequence is the same, but images are printed in facing pages, whereas Frank's design of the book has each image on its own page facing a blank page with caption.

Today is the final day to see the exhibit in Washington. Sorry this isn't much warning. Alas, the show travels to San Francisco and New York later in 2009. Go see it. The images are still powerful fifty years later.

Thanks to Roger Wiley for making the trip and meeting me in Washington.

Charleston - South Carolina by Robert Frank

an appropriation or an homage? Pt. 5

click 'er for bigger

Jeff Wall's The Storyteller may have been the photograph that got me thinking several years ago about the problem of the "pretty picture." Others have articulated it far better in words than I am able, but it comes down to being truthful about the state of the world today. Which this entire site, devoted to the Man Made Wilderness, is all about.

I see that William Eggleston's "democratic" photographs are on display at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York and will travel next year. His influence is everywhere, is profound. Without it, would digital cameras have bothered to come into existence? His vision is that nothing in the landscape is more worthy of being photographed than anything else.

While I still find it difficult to let go of the ideal view of the landscape, Eggleston's viewpoint is much more obvious to me as I look around at my world and try to find a wilderness that we can live in.

to the city, pt.1

Nighthawks, 1942, The Art Institute of Chicago

The family trip to Washington was focused on a stop at the National Gallery of Art, where several shows of some distinction continue through most of January. The first exhibit we attended was a fairly large collection of paintings and watercolors of American artist Edward Hopper. A grand showing of work from one of this nation's greatest painters of the 20th century, heavily attended on a midweek afternoon between Christmas and New Year's.

I've never studied his work before, so it was illuminating to see the depth of his modernism. While he turned his back on both the work of the French Impressionists and other Modernists early in the century, and then again in the middle of the century when Abstract Expressionists ruled the Art World, his compositions and subject matter predate the coming tidal wave of photographic images later in the century. Many of his images have become truly iconic in the pop culture of the present day, Nighthawks being the best known. Years earlier he showed his interest in capturing the color of light falling on the geometric planes of rural farmhouses and barns from Massachusetts and Maine. He would go to seaside resorts that often attracted other painters, and instead of showing ships and the harbor, he concentrated on simple buildings and the land they sat on. Always a realist, Hopper never idealized his landscapes: power poles and other signs of the modern world appear in nearly all these paintings. He was always able to show the beauty in the commonplace, directing our gaze towards  scenes of mystery in everyday life.

Hopper is better known to many of us for his city scapes, such as Nighthawks and New York Movie, Office at Night, Morning Sun, and Chop Suey. Despite the apparent loneliness of his paintings, there is a strong universality to the common stares into space by the silent individuals. It is a recognition that despite the noise and busyness of the urban environment, everyone is ultimately alone with their self and their thoughts. Towards the end of his life, Hopper showed it clearly when he dispensed with the human element and simply painted light on the walls in Sun in an Empty Room.