News

Aritists Wanted anounces their Exposure Photography Competition.

The panel of judges, including Photographer Lauren Greenfield, New York Times Photo Editor Maura Foley, MOMA Curator Nora Lawrence and JPG Founders Derek Powazek Heather Powazek Champ, will choose one photographer for the Grand Prize:

• $10,000 cash or 1-year FREE living at a $1.2 million apartment at The Edge in New York City
• A Manhattan Gallery Reception
• Airfare and shipping to and from New York City for the event
• International Publicity

The public will also cast their vote and the highest rated portfolio will receive the

People's Choice Award

:

• $2,000 in cash
• A Manhattan Gallery Reception
• Airfare and shipping to and from New York City for the event

This Friday, May 7, from 7-9 p.m. make the 1 3/4-hour trek on the Metro North up to New Haven for the annual MFA Photography Exhibition opening reception. It will feature the work of the 9 members of the class of 2010 in Green Hall, the School of Art, 1156 Chapel Street and 6 Edgewood Avenue

Find more info about the MFA Yale Photography Show (Facebook) and the Current Students who will be featured in the exhibition.

Make it a weekend, and stay at the new Study Hotel (or rough it next door at the Duncan, where Walker Evans used to nap on top of the sheets) for a full afternoon of Open Studios the next day, 12–6 p.m. on Saturday, May 8th. You'll be able to walk through and see the work of all the current MFA students, both years, in all media, including painting and sculpture at 1156 Chapel St., 353 Crown St. and 32 Edgewood Ave.

Also stop and see the shows at the Yale Art Gallery and the British Art Center, and while you're at it - the slightly dusty (but really pretty great) Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Photographer, Jeff Antebi, has been working on a long term essay documenting the "murder captial" city of Juárez, Mexico. Consumed by drug violence, this city, only a short drive from El Paso, has felt the loss of more than 2,000 people in the last year.

Antebi spent three days, during the month of December, photographing the law enforcement officers and the people that have been affected by this extreme violence.

His work will be featured as an exhibit in the Month of Photography Los Angeles.

Antebi's Photo Essay: Drug Violence in Juarez is also featured as a slide show, with commentary by the photographer, on PBS's The Rundown blog.

Ben Vautier, Musse d'Art Contemporain, Lyon, France

until July 11, 2010

I wrote a review for Art Papers years ago of an exhibition by Ben Vautier at the much-missed partobject gallery in Carrboro, North Carolina. Partobject, a gallery for conceptual photography, was where I discovered Ben Vautier and could spend as much time as I wanted with photographs by Cathy Opie, Man Ray, Ari Marcopolous and others and talk about them with Kathy Hudson and Diego Cortez, the sister and brother dynamic duo who ran this incredible space. That Vautier show included relatively small constructed works that incorporated photographs, text and collage elements. While small, they were still formally and poetically powerful.

Much to my delight, the Musee d'Art Contemporain in Lyon (where I am living for 6 months) has a huge, jam packed retrospective of Ben Vautier. There are 3 floors stuffed with work: sculptures; constructions; banners; found objects; Fluxus and other archival materials; post-performance objects; photographs; collages; mirrors with text; text paintings; platforms and stages for visitors to stand on to become part of the show; interactive machines like a shoe shiner that the guards come over and tell you not use it even though it is plugged in and works; a "sex room‚" that children are not allowed in but my 4 year old daughter loved it until we were kicked out. The sex room was so filled with erotic knick-knacks and kinky kitsch, funny sexy combines, photographs and more that the sex was hard to find, let alone be offended by. 

Ben Vautier is one of France's star artists. There are billboards for this show all over town that read "Strip tease is integral to Ben Vautier" (meaning he bares all artistically and emotionally) and products - cell phone covers, mousepads, t-shirts, and posters - with his signature text. He is not as serious as Christian Boltanski, but I would argue that he is just as good and important. Vautier is a: Fluxus trickster; Duchampian prankster; crazy post-Joseph Cornell and pre-Francis Alys artist; text addict; anti-egoist; relational aesthetic practitioner before the term was even coined; funny and prolific artist. That said, my American friends who visited the show didn't like it that much. They thought it was all about his ego; there should have been English translations; and that there was just too much to absorb. 

I love shows that are so big and full that I can choose what to look at and what to ignore, shows that demand a second visit. I also love art that declares. Vautier makes many declarations. My favourite one is "to change art destroy Ego." And I also love artists who employ whatever means necessary to make what it is they need to make, artists who do not prioritize painting over photography or sculpture over performance. One of my favourite pieces in the show is a photograph from the 1970s of Vautier throwing God into the river. Actually, it is of a box with the word Dieu (god) painted on it. Vautier does away with God, with precious, decorative, meaningless, slacker-pop art and instead, bombards us with automatic writing, absurd objects, post-Dada and still-Fluxus gestures, an archive of the every day.

If photographs are always a reference to death, to a moment gone, then so are dolls with their heads cut off, birdcages filled with suspended mirrors scrawled with "ego," and pieces of wood painted with slogans such as "everything is art." Vautier breaks down superficial distinctions so that the tired and boring question of whether or not photography is art, is finally put to rest. Even the supposed separation between art and life is false. Art is life. Life is art. Photography is one tool, photographs one residue, of all that we observe and experience.

You might have only heard of Jerry L. Thompson from reading his Walker Evans at Work or the 1997 book, The Last Years of Walker Evans. That’s the book with a grizzly-bearded Evans on the cover, complete with pictures of a mangled bicycle find mounted on the wall of their apartment, and his beer tab and bottle cap collection practically mosaic-ing (a word?) the bathroom sink.I have always loved this book, and was able to meet the writer a few years ago. It turns out he was Evans’ student at Yale in the nascent years of the MFA program, his roommate in the Park Street apartment building where I frequent the dentist downstairs, and his friend in those last few years, the beginning of the Seventies. So, when I visited the Art of the Book Room collection at the Haas Arts Library with my class a few years ago, I asked if we could see Thompson’s master’s thesis, from the class of 1973, the year of my birth. While I was developing my fingers and toes, Evans was taking Polaroids up and down Chapel Street, and Thompson was hauling his 8x10 camera out to Coney Island, making pictures of a subculture of teenagers and carnival people, mostly Latino and African-American, and many of them 1970’s gang members. The pictures are amazing, and I show them off every semester now. There is a girl posed against minimalist-looking fields of shapes and tones, her star jewelry matching a star on the wall. There’s a guy with his fly down with a sort of nastily-illustrated patch that says, “Right On!” There is a black girl in a towel turban posed against a badly-drawn landscape, wearing a polyester tank and slacks. There’s a hippie-ish carnival barker almost Christ-like against a glossy painted metal wall of an amusement park. He’s wearing an Iron Cross necklace, and has a tattoo between his eyebrows. Is it a star, or is it an anarchist’s A? . The pictures have even more a sense of urgency now, with today’s Coney Island changing faster than you can catch when you turn your head away for a moment. The ones taken with flash at night also remind me a little of William Eggleston’s 5x7 series.

There is a very inexpensive book of this work available at PhotoEye Books, published by the University at Buffalo’s Center Working Papers. Unfortunately, the reproductions are not nearly up to par, and do not do justice to these large-format gems. It does come with a tipped-in inkjet print, though, possibly the photographer’s way of showing us what his work should really look like. The print alone is worth more than the price of the book, so I didn’t feel too badly when I saw the rest of the pages. The essay is also well worth a read to learn more about Coney history, and about the way Thompson thinks about photography and about the work he made 30 years prior to the 2006 publication. In it you learn that he was actually quite shy, which is not what you think from the photographs at all. He would see someone he wanted to shoot, but was paralyzed and unable to approach him or her. So, he’d just hang out right next to the group of kids that person was in, and just, well, wait. He had this crazy-looking camera contraption there, and it was just a matter of time before one of the more outgoing teens in the group would say, something like, “Hey, Mister, take my picture!.” And so he would, and could go around the circle, photographing each one of them, even though he hadn’t really been interested in the others. It would come to the One, and he could just been in total control, and un-shy, and say, and I paraphrase, “You, you’re next.” This tact has to be one of my favorite stories in Photography. There is no way an Upstate guy like him would ever, in the course of normal doings, have contact and conversation with kids wearing “Glory Stompers” bike gang colors, but the practice of photography makes such interaction possible.

From the book’s back cover:“We stood facing each other at close range for a brief moment, and then that light flashed, stunning my eyes and temporarily blinding theirs. Most times, by the time my vision cleared my subject was gone, off to seek another of the many amusements… Our separate otherwise disconnected causalities crossed, for an instant, in that place we were each drawn to, and the camera made their primping, preparation, and partying, the whole rich texture and sad history of each unique mysterious life have, for a brief moment, something in common, something shared… By chance, I was there. I saw those faces, and they became my pictures.”

I later was able to get a look at the other 8x10 work he made in the Eighties in the Village, both East and West, the streets and sidewalks of a young Madonna, perhaps. The pictures are also of young people who are very much a part of, and a product of, the specific time and place they both found themselves in. Later work continues to be an exploration of New York City, somewhat in the same vein as Mitch Epstein’s book, The City, though with a heavier insistence on the portrait, bearing a nod to August Sander. The work is very hard to find online, but a book off all his photographs are in a book that I heard is in the works by Steidl, In the Street (previously entitled, Sixty Years.) It is due out in late 2010, and I can’t wait. For the book preview page: http://www.steidlville.com/books/981-In-the-Street.html