News

Obit Magazine has published an article by Phyllis Tuchman on the famed portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002), who is now the subject of a centenary exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Tuchman says:

"The term “iconic image” could have been coined to describe photographer Yousuf Karsh’s magnetic portraits of world leaders, popes and prelates, masters of the universe, matinee idols, blue chip artists, and literary giants. The men and women who posed for Karsh, a longtime resident of Ottawa, were the dynamos of their time, the kind who appear on Sunday morning broadcasts, episodes of The View and Oprah, and late-night talk shows. Remarkably, a little boy who witnessed the genocide in Turkish Armenia, where he was born on Dec. 23, 1908, later spent almost six decades making a riveting record of the powerful and creative personalities who dominated much of the 20th century. Karsh also had a thriving studio practice. By the time he died at the age of 93 in July 2002, he had amassed about 50,000 portraits and was almost as famous as the celebrated people he photographed."

More: [Obit Magazine]

Leigh Ledare's solo show at Rivington Arms (which was at Andrew Roth Gallery in a different permutation earlier this year) is comprised of photographs, video and mixed media works that are mostly related to his unusual family life. Taken from the accompanying monograph Pretend You’re Actually Alive, the Oedipally-charged work in You Are Nothing to Me. You Are Like Air. largely focuses on depictions of the artist’s mother, a ballerina turned stripper. She often appears before Ledare's lens in various states of undress, sometimes even in bed or in flagrante delicto with one of her significantly younger lovers (though never, it should be noted, with Ledare himself). Also included is a selection of somewhat less prurient self-portraits that the Ledare has produced in collaboration with older women that he has found through their personal ads.

Both in style and substance, Ledare's work will inevitably evoke comparisons to the work of Nan Goldin and Richard Billingham, as well as, to a lesser degree, Wolfgang Tillmans and Boris Mikhailov. In this regard, it should come as a surprise to no one that Ledare once worked as an assistant to Larry Clark. Knowing this, it is tempting to ensconce Clark in the vacant corner of Ledare’s Oedipal triangle (his biological father is absent from the show), though his work seems to want to usurp Clark in the mode of the sensationalist Teenage Lust or Kids rather than the more masterful Clark of Tulsa.

Precedence aside, the images are raw, occasionally beautiful, and sometimes shocking both in their honesty and their perversity. Unfortunately, the mixed media and video works, the latter which is comprised of footage from a discarded softcore spanking video project that Ledare tried to make with his mother and some family friends, seem like afterthoughts, more a product of his Columbia University MFA than of real passion. That said, it can’t be denied that the show does pack a punch, both emotionally and aesthetically.

The problem, ultimately, is how deeply—and for how long—that punch will resonate. Ledare is dealing directly with a taboo of mythic proportions, and while he does not break it as such, he does come close enough for discomfort. As shocking as this particular aspect of their mother-son dynamic is, however, the fetishistic attention to the taboo ultimately robs the work of true psychological depth. This is to say: Freud taken literally is not that interesting. The Oedipus Complex is germane to the understanding of psychological life not so much because it delimits taboos, as Ledare seems to have it, but because it traces the often destructive topographies of power and desire: our insurmountable impotence in the face of the Father, and in the face of the Mother, our unslakable desire to fill the hole left by the loss of some infinite thing.

Hasted Hunt Gallery, NYC offers a Martin Schoeller limited edition portrait of Barack Obama, 11"x14" archival pigment print, edition of 500, signed and numbered by the artist for $250 (plus $18 shipping and handling). All proceeds support the Obama for President campaign. Phone: +1 212 627 0006 or E-mail: info@hastedhunt.com

In Rockaway Redux Roe Ethridge continues to carve out his position as a kind of Paul Outerbridge for the post-modern era, creating pleasingly off-kilter photographs in a wild array of styles that refract the banal world of commercial photography to disquieting effect. None of these images go so far into the realm of the perverse as, say, Outerbridge’s Women with Claws (1937), but there is a feeling in Ethridge's images of too-pretty sunsets and his awkward nude posed in an art-historically confused studio setup that something just beneath the surface is amiss. Ethridge hints at the nature of this disturbance in the show’s press release, which takes a the form of a letter: “One of the reasons I’ve been so interested in this kind of displaced, broad scope approach is an effort to embrace the arbitrariness of the image and image making. For me serendipity and intention are both necessary. Another reason for the wild style is the dread of conclusiveness. The dread of finitude. This work is against death and finality.” But, at the last minute, he backpedals: “No, that’s too hyperbolic, let’s say it’s about working in the service of the image and getting my kicks too.” Of course, this is fitting: Ethridge’s images speak, but never unequivocally.

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY - Cyanotypes (Paula Cooper, thru Oct.11)

ROB PRUITT - iPhotos (Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, thru Oct. 11)

ABELARDO MORELL - PICTURESinPICTURES (Bonni Benrubi, thru Dec. 6)

ALLESSANDRA SANGUINETTI - The Life That Came (Yossi Milo, thru Oct. 18)

JEFF WHETSTONE - Post-Pleistocene (Julie Saul, thru Oct. 25)

MATTHEW DAY JACKSON - Drawings From Tlön (Nicole Klagsbrun, thru Oct. 18)

LORRAINE O'GRADY - Miscegenated Family Album (Alexander Gray Associates, thru Oct.11)