Martha Rosler: Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MoMA

Martha Rosler, Travelling Garage Sale, La Mamelle Gallery, SF, 1977

For her first big solo show at MoMA, opening November 17, Martha Rosler is going straight to the heart of the museum, its atrium—the very same space where, two years ago, Marina Abramovic engaged in staring contests with total strangers during her own retrospective. Ms. Rosler’s show is just as unconventional, if not more so: originally staged at the University of California, San Diego in 1973, and then in Basel, Switzerland, and elsewhere, it’s an actual garage sale hawking items donated by the artist, MoMA staff and the general public. Visitors will have a chance to haggle with Ms. Rosler, who will donate the proceeds to a charity. Donations have been solicited over the summer, though thankfully, as The New York Times notes, “Food and other perishable items, liquids, weapons and toxic or hazardous materials [were not] accepted.”
 
If you are in New York this Sunday,  head over to PS1 with your stuff, Martha will be collecting between 12 -5pm for the November MoMA Garage Sale show. You can check out the NY Art Book Fair at the same time.

NY ART BOOK FAIR, this weekend

Printed Matter presents the seventh annual NY Art Book Fair, from September 28 to 30, at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens.

Free and open to the public, the NY Art Book Fair is the world's premier event for artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines presented by 283 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, artists, and independent publishers from twenty-six countries.

Lucy Lippard and Paul Chan are the keynote speakers for this year’s Contemporary Artists’ Books Conference—a dynamic, two-day symposium on emerging practices and debates within art-book culture. The Classroom—a curated series of artist-led workshops, readings, and discussions—will engage visitors in lively conversation all weekend long. The NY Art Book Fair will also include special project rooms, screenings, book signings, and performances throughout the weekend.

Over 15,000 artists, book buyers, collectors, dealers, curators, independent publishers, and other enthusiasts attended the NY Art Book Fair in 2011.

Hours and Location
The NY Art Book Fair is free and open to the public.
 
Friday, September 28, 12–7 pm
Saturday, September 29, 11 am–9 pm
Sunday, September 30, 11 am–7 pm

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue
Long Island City, NY (map)

Art and the Zen of the floor talk..?

 
Yesterday I gave a floor talk at my exhibition - Harvey's Point -  at Auckland's Wallace Arts Centre. As you can see, the red couch proved to be irresistible. Was it Zen meditation or simply a lie down? Perhaps I had a little pre-talk psychotherapy in mind? Curator Ron Brownson,  told me he thought my show was about secrets, so I'm not telling...

TSB Bank WALLACE ARTS CENTRE

Thirteen photo-book editions at Snake Pit, Auckland

 
For those of you in Auckland, come along to the Snake Pit tomorrow night at 6pm for the launch of 13 totally new, completely different photo-books produced by UNITEC Photography and Media Arts students. The books are the result of a two day workshop conducted with Yvonne Todd, Marie Shannon, and myself.

Artists: Rachel Alford-Evans, Hayley Bethell, Erin Geurts, John Haydn, Leilani Heather, Marc McFadyen, John Mead, Alice Mitchell, Delena Nathuran, Bertie Plaatsman, Sonya Roussina and Talia Smith.

One-night Stand - Photo-book launch, Snake Pit, 33 High Street
Thursday 27th September 6-8 pm

Photographers open to new ideas...

Search: photographers who have demonstrated an openness to use new ideas in photography

Joerg Colberg has assembled the responses from those bloggers invited to look at the issue of  photographers who have demonstrated an openness to use new ideas in photography, who have taken chances with their photography and have shown an unwillingness to play it safe.

Joerg writes: As could be expected, the proposed artists were as diverse as the nominators themselves, essentially demonstrating that just into the 21st Century, photography is alive and very, very well. Find the list of nominators (in mostly alphabetical order) and artists below.

Blake Andrews: Philip Perkis
Stan Banos: Aaron Huey, Taryn Simon, Eva Leitolf, Matt Black, Brenda Ann Keneally, James Baalog, Edward Burtynsky, Bruce Haley, Daniel Shea
Harvey Benge: Paul Graham, Jason Evans, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Jens Sundheim & Bernhard Reuss, Collier Schorr, Antoine d’Agata, Martha Rosler
Peter Evans: Obara Kazuma
Bryan Formhals: Asger Carlsen, Jessica Eaton, Kate Steciw, Alec Soth, Paul Kwiatkowski, Vivian Maier
Julie Grahame: Michael Massaia
Tom Griggs: Bryan Graf, Amy Elkins, Paul Graham, Abelardo Morell, Jessica Eaton
Stella Kramer: Sophia Wallace
Mark Page: Mishka Henner, Philippe Spigolon, Craig Atkinson, Stuart Griffiths, TomRS
Colin Pantall: Mishka Henner, Lauren Simonutti, Stephen Gill, Tony Fouhse, Paul Graham, Claus Stolz, Olivier Jobard and others
Christopher Paquette: Zoe Strauss, Alec Soth
Andrew Phelps: Peter Miller
Heidi Romano: Taryn Simon
Joerg Colberg: Thomas Ruff, Katy Grannan, Erik Kessels, Geert van Kesteren’s Baghdad Calling, Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood

Paris Photo - Platform

The 16th edition of Paris Photo opens Thursday November 15 beneath the nave of the magnificent Grand Palais. There will be 151 exhibitors (128 galleries and 23 publishers)  from 22 countries, with 36 new galleries are joining the fair this year. 

This year the Paris Photo Platform features four days of conferences directed by Roxana Marcoci, Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, with the special contribution of Paul Holdengräber, Director of "LIVE from The New York Public Library."

Structured as an experimental platform for critical discussions, the Paris Photo Platform engages in dynamic and robust debates about the expanded field and perspectives of photography. Participants feature an international roster of leading artists, architects, filmmakers, cultural historians, and theorists in the field exchanging ideas on the relational contexts in which photography operates today.
Participants included Hilla Becher, Rem Koolhaas, David Lynch, Martin Parr, Thomas Ruff...
The complete program can be found HERE.

Photographers open to new ideas, take chances and unwilling to play it safe, Part 2

1. Collier Schorr has been returning to Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany, for nearly two decades. The artist’s ongoing relationship with this provincial southern town comprises sometimes staged, sometimes documentary images that explore the intimacies of daily life with an aesthetic that can be at once bucolic, political, sentimental, and erotic. With work that is both edgy and ambiguous, Schorr generates a sense of place and a cultural inheritance that is both observed and manipulated, presenting history as both concrete and constructed. 

Opium - 2005

Smoke Ring - 1999

2. Antoine d'Agata's personal domain is the night where his dual role is that of observer and participant. With his attraction to depravity, pain, and abuse, d'Agata's images of prostitutes, junkies and outcasts deal with fear of the unknown and the basic instinct of survival that defines human existence. The work is a vortex to the heart of sensual experience with a fragile balance between intelligence and madness, rage and love, beauty and horror. D'Agata's practice is in direct opposition to much contemporary art which he sees as impregnated with the ideologies of capitalist production.

3. Martha Rosler,  since the late 1960s, has produced seminal works in the fields of photography, performance, video, installation, critical writing, and theory. Committed to an art that engages a public beyond the confines of the art world, Rosler investigates how socio-economic realities and political ideologies dominate ordinary life. With a focus on the public sphere as well as daily life, the work often addresses women's experience. Rosler explores the relationships between individual consciousness, family life, and the culture of monopoly capitalism.

Paul Graham in conversation with Thomas Weski

Last Saturday at Le Bal Paris, curator Thomas Weski talked with Paul Graham. You can see the video HERE, it is well worth a look.

Chris Corson-Scott at Auckland's Snake Pit

Cleared Land - 2012

I don't often write about the photography I see here in Auckland, simply because so much of what I see here isn't worth a second look and further, although most of my blog posting is done in New Zealand, only 10% of this blog's readers are from this country. 

Occasionally I do see shows here that do warrant a look and Chris Corson-Scott's substantial exhibition at the lively artist run space the Snake Pit is certainly one well worth looking at. Corson-Scott works in the difficult, now old fashioned medium of 10x8 film. His prints are large, finely detailed, deceptively simple yet loaded. Well seen and composed too. His subject matter is mostly the streets within walking distance of his home in Auckland's Mount Eden. These landscapes, all made in 2012, are expansive and so is his concept. The open-minded viewer is sucked into an engagement with these works where the big picture offers familiarity, and details trigger memory and distant recollections. I'm left wondering what might have happened here and what might be about to. Despite appearing that nothing much is happening in these pictures, everything is. For the lazy thirty second looker these photographs are easy to walk away from and be dismissed, but for those prepared to invest more in the act of looking and understanding, the works offer much. 
It is clear too that Corson-Scott knows the history of the medium and fully realizes the significance of how each and every picture made owes its allegiance to those gone before. This is intelligent picture making for the informed intelligent viewer.

Subject matter apart, these works could have been made anywhere and are not rubber- stamped with the ever popular New Zealand vernacular icons. For those used to images of Maori Hei-tiki and plaster penguins this work will likely be over their heads and under the radar. That is a great pity because this work is impressive picture making that deserves to be widely seen, collected and enjoyed.

The Neighbors' Garden - 2012

Fraser at Oakley Creek - 2012

Lauren and Chris by Reservoir - 2012

 More at Chris Corson-Scott's site HERE

Snake Pit, 33 High Street, Auckland, Wed to Sat, 11 - 5pm. Until September 29th

Ofer Wolberger - A New Day at Printed Matter, NYC

Fractures Window by Ofer Wolberger

A New Day, the final chapter in Ofer Wolberger's series of 12 Books, brings together a collection of seemingly disparate pictures and text culled from multiple and far reaching sources. Presented as a selection of postcards and bound together using peel away glue like a notepad, A New Day is designed to be disassembled.

12 Books is a publishing project initiated by Ofer Wolberger in 2009. The original idea was to produce an artist book for every month throughout a single year. The publishing schedule failed miserably but the series is now complete. The books are wide-ranging. Overall they deal with notions of authorship and originality while also exploring the power of the repetitive image, the re-contextualization of the photographic image as well as the poetic use of found text as image. Finally, the book form itself is rigorously questioned and reconfigured throughout the series.

There is a release party for Ofer Wolberger's A New Day this Friday night, 6 - 8pm at Printed Matter, 195 Tenth Avenue New York, NY 10011.

A New Day retails for $25 and can be found on the Printed Matter website HERE.

Lise Sarfati and Quentin Bajac at jeu de paume, Paris

If you are fortunate enough to be in Paris this Thursday night you can attend the book signing at jeu de paume of She, Lise Sarfati's new bookwork with text by Quentin Bajac chief photography curator Musée d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou.

Quentin writes: A family album preserves only carefully selected photographs. Out of an entire life, it stores only handpicked moments, privileging special occasions, happy ones usually, and consigning the rest to oblivion: happy faces, relaxed moments, places of leisure rather than work. It tends to underline a group’s social links and affective relations, to highlight an identity, a communal spirit, a shared life and destiny. The portrait of the couple or group, with all its attendant conventions, is one of its inescapable figures. The family album tries to register the evolution of a particular human community, to write its story and scan the passage of time with each succeeding page. None of this figures in She: instead of a chronology, time is stopped, it appears to stammer and bite its own tail. There is no group photo or desire to stage a collective destiny, but only isolated models and individuals who do not seem to communicate amongst themselves, or only barely; no happy moments or picturesque places, only indifferent moments in ordinary places; no strong gesture, none of the conventional poses, and no complicity with the photographer. The models pose, but reservedly, more often than not without looking into the camera. And even when we do see their faces, we don’t really seem to see them. They are here, but they are always also there, elsewhere. When we close the book and think a bit about it, we cannot but see She as the anti-family album par excellence.

jeu de paume, 1 place de la Concorde, 75008 Paris

Twin Palms Publishers

 

John Gossage shoots...

... this I really like! Nice to see John is back in the B&W saddle.

Photographers who are open to new ideas, take chances and are unwilling to play it safe...

Colin Pantall and Joerg Colberg write:  To celebrate new ideas in photography, we are asking fellow photography bloggers to nominate up to five photographers who have demonstrated an openness to use new ideas in photography, who have taken chances with their photography and have shown an unwillingness to play it safe. These three categories can be interpreted in any way. 
We ask that nominations are posted starting Monday, September 17th, with a short text and a key image....

My take on this is quite simple. It's really a question of the photographers taking something and doing something with it, as opposed to taking something and doing nothing. Or worse, thinking that they have.Then factor in authenticity and work made for the right reasons. And you have it.

Here are my choices, photographers whose practices in my view push forward.

1. Paul Graham
When I knew that Paul Graham was shooting new work in New York I couldn't imagine that anything fresh could be done in a territory that had been so raked over in the past. Graham has done it. His work, The Present appears simple and with great finesse deals with questions of awareness, impermanence and the flowing continuum of life. Graham's previous work American Night (2003) and a shimmer of possibilty (2007) were equally groundbreaking.

Paul Graham - The Present

2. Jason Evans
British photographer Evans is a prolific observer of the passage of everyday life. He is a brilliant exponent of what I call "stream of consciousness" photography. Pointed, profound and with an enthusiasm for looking and being. In the words of William Eggleston, he is at war with the obvious. He publishes a new photograph everyday on his blog The Daily Nice.

Jason Evans - Todays Daily Nice

 3. Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin 
With a clear political agenda these London based artists continue to scrutinise the photographic medium, questioning the documentary traditions of photography, leading viewers through convoluted history lessons employing a combination of found images, rescued artifacts and a muddle of fact and fantasy. With six books to their name the expectation is to expect the unexpected. 

Broomberg and Chanarin - Afterlife 1, 2009

4. Jens Sundheim and Bernhard Reuss
Jens and Bernhard are The Travellers. Jens Sundheim travels from webcam to webcam, so far over 10 years to 400 webcam locations in 15 countries. On location, he is photographed by the cam. Back in Germany photographer Bernhard Reuss records the image, saves the transferred data, and selected images are presented as large-format photographs. Obsessive and amazing.

Sundheim and Reuss - New York 2002

Harvey's Point at Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre

Paul Graham - Donegal, July 2012

My show, Harvey's Point, opens this coming Monday night, 6pm at the Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre here in Auckland.

You may well ask what is Harvey's Point. For me this is a question I continually ask. Here is a little about the exhibition.

'The title of this exhibition occurred to me after I recently received an image sent by Paul Graham, New York based British camera artist. I had been with Paul in New York only some days previously, and as he was now in Ireland and I back in Auckland ideas of place, time and universality came to mind.
Harvey’s Point has opened up for me questions regarding the nature of perception, and temporality, how we evaluate the underlying meaning of images that confront us, and those we attempt to read. This is the purpose of this show. I present some images that ostensibly oppose one another and others that appear banally neutral. I’m asking you - and myself - exactly what is Harvey’s point?' 

Harvey Benge - Auckland, December 2007

TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, The Pah Homestead, 72 Hillsborough Rd, Hillsborough, Auckland

Stephan Zaubitzer - Cinema project, only hours left to get it off the ground!

 

Stephan Zaubitzer is a Paris based photographer whose work I really like. His photographs are very good. For ten years Stephan has been traveling the world making pictures of cinemas in locations as diverse as Morocco, Madagascar, Romania, USA, United Kingdom, India, Egypt, Dominican Republic, and Cuba. This work is particularly important right now as the cinema industry is at a critical time of change with new technologies emerging faster than 48 fps. 

Stephan is looking to fund the next phase of his work through the crowd-funding site KissKiss BankBank. This funding opportunity and support for Stephan runs out in a matter of hours. He is within 90% of target, so every $ counts!
I cannot think of a photographer or a project more deserving of support.

You can go to Stephan's page at KissKiss BankBank HERE to find out more about the project and how you might be able to help.

Here are some of Stephan's images. 

 

Cologne, PIMP the TIMP - Vol 11, CHINA STORIES

Harvey Benge - Sian 2007

Curated by Cologne gallerist Tina Schelhorn, with work from 45 international photographers, PIMP the TIMP Volume 11 - CHINA STORIES, opens in Cologne this Friday. 

China is a country of contrasts. It is one of the oldest advanced civilizations, and one of the most populous countries in the world on its way to become politically and economically a world power. Communist-ruled, but characterized by an unrestrained capitalism, rich in natural beauty, but with rampant environmental degradation, a growing class of privileged  millionaires and abject poverty, China represents the dualism of extremes. The images and stories are countless as the myriad of lights of the big cities. International photographers show different perspectives on modern China, document the changes and reminisce about spirits and shamans. The pictures in this exhibition deal with large landscapes and intimate scenes of everyday life. The speed of change and the extremes in a surreal society are reflected in the work.

You can go to the PIMP the TIMP site HERE.

Wang Qingsong

Wolfgang Zurborn

...and now some pictures from Friday's vernissage...

Tate Modern presents William Klein + Daido Moriyama

This is the first exhibition to look at the relationship between the work of influential photographer and filmmaker Klein, and that of Moriyama, the most celebrated photographer to emerge from the Japanese Provoke movement of the 1960s.

With work from the 1950s to the present day, the exhibition demonstrates the visual affinity between their urgent, blurred and grainy style of photography and also their shared desire to convey street life - New York and Tokyo - and political protest, from anti-war demonstrations and gay pride marches to the effects of globalisation and urban deprivation.
The exhibition also considers the medium and dissemination of photography itself, exploring the central role of the photo-book in avant-garde photography and the pioneering use of graphic design within these publications. As well the issues of Provoke magazine in which Moriyama and his contemporaries showcased their work, the exhibition will include fashion photography from Klein’s work with Vogue and installations relating to his satirical films Mister Freedom and Who Are You Polly Maggoo?

William Klein + Daido Moriyama, Tate Modern
10 October 2012 – 20 January 2013

Related events:

Conference

Urban Encounters 

Saturday 6 October 2012, 10.00 – 18.00

Talks and lectures 

Artist’s talk: Daido Moriyama 

Tuesday 9 October 2012, 18.30 – 20.30

British Sign Language talk: William Klein + Daido Moriyama

Friday 2 November 2012, 19.00 – 20.00

Déjà vu at the University of Brighton, UK

The fifteen strong group of photography MA students at the University of Brighton will be holding their Degree show, Déjà Vu, from the 15-21 September at the Universities gallery in the Grand Parade.

If you can't get to the show you can see the work online HERE. It's well worth a look.

Here are some images.

VIRGILIO FERREIRA

KRISTIN HOELL

CHLOE LELLIOTT

MARK PURDOM

KAT WILLIAMS