OPEN SPACE

……………………………………………………………"That bottle keeps its blink on its side red from horizon." Clark Coolidge………………………………..

Taking inspiration from Robert Frank, Damaso Reyes has spent the last few years documenting social changes in the European Union for his project, The Europeans. Reyes is an artist and photojournalist who studied photography at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, honing his craft as a reporter for the New York Amsterdam News and other major news publications. The son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Reyes grew up in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

As a Spanish-speaking, first generation American and a black man, Reyes, like Frank, grew up feeling he was both part of and outside of his community. That ability to be both insider and outsider is what allows him to move freely with his camera through worlds most people never see. As immigrants, Reyes’ parents were able to find a sense of civic belonging in the United States which, he has observed, continues to elude immigrants to the European Union. For this reason, he has chosen to photograph asylum seekers, whose dignity and humanity he tries to bring across in his images. Reyes’ inability to speak local languages has also helped him, much as Frank’s poor English helped him, to gain access to places such as closed-door EU government meetings, where he photographs as a fly on the wall.

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“I am always on the outside, trying to look inside, trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there. And what’s out there is constantly changing.” –Robert Frank

Two photography shows currently on view at SFMOMA provide an intriguing point of departure from which to consider the roles of insider and outsider. Robert Frank is an iconic example of the artist as outsider, looking in on society, as expressed by the quote above. His subjects are the everyday people whose lives comprise the American experience of the 1950s. Frank seeks out sites of exclusion in the culture he portrays. He looks most closely at poor people, white and black, whose circumstances give the lie to the promise of prosperity. A German Jew and Holocaust survivor, Frank understands America in the way only an immigrant, studiously engaged in a performance of belonging, can do. His influence is so widely felt that this work has come to represent ourselves to us – a record of our collective memories of a turbulent period.

I’ll consider Frank in greater depth with a special guest later this week, but for now, let’s turn to Richard Avedon. At first glance, Avedon would seem to be photography’s consummate insider. Glamour shots of Suzy Parker and Marilyn Monroe are his calling-card. His subjects include the powerful – Henry Kissinger, George HW Bush – and the famous – Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis. But Avedon’s camera has an equalizing power.
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I admit that one of things I love to look at most around the museum is this kind of backstage view. Like many of us, I have a passion for loading docks, pallets on casters, worktables, crates, drills, drywall, nails, screws, frames; I like seeing things taken apart, or just about to get put together… At any rate, this shot was taken last weekend, in the middle of Frida closing-day frenzy. That we can’t see here what was in the crates that Sunday is appropriate: the objects so carefully transported would have been pictures for a new photo exhibition opening this Saturday, Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900. The show looks at “photographs of things invisible to the naked eye: faraway stars, microscopic creatures, electricity, motion, the inside of the body” and is the special project of associate curator of photography Corey Keller. I’m a huge fan of Corey’s, not least because she’s incredibly down-to-earth, direct, and funny. And I’m looking forward to the exhibition, which she’s been working on for FOUR YEARS, a substantial investment of time and devotion. I understand too that some of the pictures we’ll see are ‘thought portraits’ (did I get that right?), images taken of people’s foreheads that claimed to expose what was on their minds at the time (and I am really glad that’s a science that never developed).

One of the pictures from the SFMOMA collection that will be included in the exhibition turned up in a “Collection Rotation” here on the blog a few weeks back (scroll down a bit, Maximilian Wolf’s The Milky Way) and is the back cover for the exhibition catalogue, very beautifully designed by James Williams, SFMOMA senior graphic designer. It’s exciting we’ll get to see that picture now in person.

[In what will become a regular feature, we'll invite a local writer, artist, visitor, or observer to respond in whatever manner they choose (given the limits of blog-hosting technology) to an exhibition, public program, film, or object on view. In this first installment, poet Eleni Stecopoulos reflects on the An-My Lê exhibition, Small Wars, on view now through May 4.]

SMALL WARS: THE AMERICAN CHRONOTOPE

Eleni Stecopoulos

An-My Lê; 29 Palms: Mechanized Assault, 2003-04; Courtesy Murray Guy Gallery, New York

American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line…this perennial rebirth…this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.

- Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History

War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography. - Ambrose Bierce

At the 5th anniversary, the war in Iraq remains “over there”—an abstraction for many Americans, despite the deaths of more than 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands, if not over one million, Iraqis. Americans have had the luxury of regarding war as something that takes place in other people’s countries.

By documenting large-scale exercises in artifice that uncannily relocate foreign wars to American landscapes, An-My Lê’s Small Wars and 29 Palms pose imaginative provocation to this illusion. Pine forests in Virginia stand in for the jungles of Vietnam. The Mojave stands in for the desert outside Baghdad or Basra or Kandahar. Lê turns her gaze on two American regions, the South and the West, perhaps the most mythologized in the nation, which themselves hold historical battlefields and spaces of conflict.

Much of Small Wars was shot in Virginia, home to Manassas, Appomattox, and more battles than any other state in the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history. The Civil War was the first major American war to be photographed and covered by the media on a large scale. It was a war that took place at home, where families combed the battlefields to recover the bodies of loved ones. Although the legacies of the Civil War remain grossly evident throughout the nation—in race relations, politics, and culture wars—only the South actively remembers it.

On the ground of the world’s “first modern war,” Virginians reenact what became known as “America’s longest war.” In an artist’s talk, Lê confirmed that these men often begin as Civil War reenactors before “moving on” to World War II and then Vietnam. Their reenactments take place on land that bears the memory of its own war, land revered as hallowed ground.

The South holds a space of memory, preservation, resistance to change. It plays the past in American mythology. And across from it stands the West, a space of invention and self-invention, the infinite possibilities of the future.

“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America,” wrote the poet Charles Olson. (more…)