Archival Projects Fall 2016

NYU Tisch Photography & Imaging, Professor Lorie Novak

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Exhibition responses

Arbus:

Since acquiring Diane Arbus’s archive in 2007, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has held images never before seen by the public, until the summer blockbuster show at the new Met Breuer, “diane arbus: in the beginning.” Titled “in the beginning,” this exhibition explores the pivotal, yet previously unseen (perhaps somewhat subtle, as connoted by the purposefully lowercase title) body of work from the start of Arbus’s career. Showing dozens of her photographs taken between the years 1956 and 1962, “diane arbus: in the beginning” shows images of New York City, from Times Square to Coney Island to Soho and all over the five boroughs. These images, in a way, give new insight into Arbus’s perspective, as her young eye carefully guides us to see New York City in the same way that she does, drawing our attentions to what she deems significant, exciting, beautiful, or simple.  

The exhibition is decidedly unconventional, displaying each photograph on its own narrow wall. These walls are placed carefully throughout the gallery’s space allowing the viewer to navigate the room in a perambulatory fashion, as if in way to mirror Arbus’s exploration throughout the city. By doing so, each image by itself allows viewers to give it their great attention, coming up close to the walls one by one. Each print has an authentic quality that shows incredible intention and care by Arbus, who printed each photograph herself. The prints are intimate in size, asking the viewer to inspect the image in great detail; ultimately, this size also inherently separates the individual subject from society, as the viewer pays attention to the small details: the poetics of light, the intimate perspective.

Take for example “Female Impersonator Holding Long Gloves, Hempstead, Long Island, 1959.” The frame shows the subject, who is identified as a female impersonator by the title, who stands gazing directly towards the camera but maintaining direct eye contact with Arbus herself. He wears long lashes, round earrings, and a carefully crafted up-do, while his chest is bare and he holds fabric in his arms. To his right is a cluttered dressing room table, equipped with mirrors and lights, as if he is getting ready to perform.

Ultimately, it is where Arbus positions herself and the camera, which provokes an intensity of experience to the viewer. We gaze into the performers eyes as Arbus did herself, and her head-on perspective gives us a connection to the viewer and his personal space. This intimacy and intense detail ultimately translates the photograph, its small print, and its individual wall to act as a new encounter between viewer and subject, creating a series of encounters both familiar and strange to the New York City residents and tourists roaming the exhibitions of the Met Breuer.

Marshall:

After perusing Arbus’ intimately curated and precisely arranged show, walking through Kerry James Marshall’s show offered me an entirely different sensory experience. Marshall’s paintings are larger-than-life, showing large portraits in intense color and beautiful paint of Black America. Each image has many layers, indicating the way Marshall sees the contemporary world in context of history. For example, his painting “De Style” from 1993 shows several individuals of color in a barbershop, perhaps alluding to a history of black-owned barbershops, run by slaves or by freedmen in the 19th century. After Emancipation, these barbershops were opened to serve black clientele, becoming sanctuaries for Americans of color, who found them a place for comfortable and welcoming discussion and communication. In “De Style,” Marshall depicts skin color in intense, opaque black, barely offering the viewer any details to the face besides the slim outline of white eyes (with dark pupils). Perhaps Marshall paints these black figure in extremis at leisure in order to offer an intense and simplified view of the way race is perceived, drawing attention to it through figurative painting.

Rist:

Walking through Pippilotti Rist’s “Pixel Forest,” unfortunately for me, the hype did not live up to the Instagram. On the third floor, thousands of lights are strung and hung throughout the gallery, as viewers navigate the floor as if each light has exploded the space. Here, the “Pixel Forest” welcomes the viewer to play the part of a pixel of a shattered screen, although in reality, the museumgoer does not become part of the sculpture itself, but rather seemed to focus on posing for their own photos. Although this might make me hypocritical (I, of course had to snap one for mysef), I found myself overwhelmed with people bumping into me, asking me to take their own photo, and was interrupted four times by security guards instructing me not to get too close to the lights. Perhaps this is a curatorial/security issue— the Saturday afternoon crowds are far more than manageable for this high-attention show. I found the second gallery, containing large projectors and silk screens (which viewers can walk through and around) to be somewhat more calming, although the same Instagram phenomenon occurred, while the third floor of the exhibition was the most uninterrupted, with viewers invited to lay down on beds and mats.

Dreamlands:

At the Dreamlands exhibition (a show with the potential to be crowded with Instagrammers), I found my experience to be completely different than Pippiloti Rist. While Rist’s immersive “Pixel Forest” allowed the crowd to become too close (too immersed in?) to the artwork to the point of security issues, “Dreamlands” did not offer the same curatorial problems. Take for example one of the black box rooms, filled only with a projector and its thin trail of white light. Here, we don’t see the same viewers obstructing the light or silhouetting themselves with it for a photograph, while the piece itself begs the viewer to wonder if the light is tangible— it takes a soft, almost touchable form that viewers are possibly intended to reach out and grab it.

Natalie Sereda

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Exhibition Responses

Diane Arbus Show:

Immediately after exiting the elevator, pillars upon pillars stacked in rows, shape the entirety of the room, each one featuring an image. Deciding where to start becomes unclear, as there is no direct path or order to follow within the tall and large, yet confined room. As each column stands with only one picture and its descriptive title, people start to either crowd around, or keep moving past the images. The spacing and choice not to organize the columns by subject or date lets the viewer choose their own path and direction to view the exhibition. The freedom to move around in any direction lets each user have a personal, up close and unique experience with Arbus’s work. In ways the columns look somewhat similar to a memorial—their tall and slender shape, emphasize each one of the images and the brief but notable text descriptions. The open space between the columns lets each viewer study and admire each the photograph directly in front of them, creating an intimate and careful study of Arbus’s imagery.

Kerry James Marshall, Mastry

After much anticipation seeing Kerry James Marshall’s show, Mastry, at the Met Bruer, I am happy to say that it lived up to all my expectations. The two-floor retrospective is a collection of all of his work that discusses black daily life that encompasses contemporary issues, mixed with historical reference through painting landscapes, scenes, and environmental portraits.  His life size paintings are full of details that also can be looked at as codes and symbols, adding layers of context into his work. Marshall’s bold colors, thick brushstrokes, and miniature details draw your eyes inward. It is easy to stare at his work, and come across new, revealing visual codes.

(Wrote about Pixel Forrest and Dreamlands in Response Paper)

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Pipilotti Rist + Kerry James Marshall

Pipilotti Rist’s Pixel Forest at the New Museum

Immediately when I walked into the 4(?) floor of the exhibit, I knew it was not going to be like a typical exhibit. I exited the elevator doors and was flanked on either side with neon signs reading “help me” and “trust me.” I suspect everyone in the room heard me exclaim “Oh my GOD” when I came from around the corner and was confronted with a room of beds and two huge monitors on the ceiling. Pixel Forest was an experience - there’s no other way for me to break it down and analyze it using old methods. It’s just an experience start to finish. Walking through the floor filled with hanging lights, I felt a sense of wonder, which surprised me because how do you even go about constructing a sense of wonder? Of excitement? Of dreaming? These were questions I kept asking myself during the exhibit - How are my emotional reactions elicited from very little? I’m still not quite sure.

Kerry James Marshall’s Mastry at the Met Breuer

Observing Marshall’s larger-than-life paintings within the space of the Met Breuer seemed intriguing to me - the infiltration of a cultural institution historically exclusive to society’s most elite was what drew me in and see the show’s immediate importance. However, two things struck me more powerfully as I continued through. First, I found my focus torn between the work itself, and the conversations of other observers. Because I went on a Wednesday afternoon, the crowd that was there at the time was of the older, whiter demographic. Their hushed conversations making sense of the work and its intricacies became a part of the show itself - this is not to say that I was treating them as a “show,” but their comments stemming from different lived experiences created a viewing experience that I think would have been different had I gone on a weekend or with a class. Their attempts to evaluate the works in front of them in relationship with themselves thrilled me - the power of Marshall’s work in its depictions of Black life, but also human life was able to pull people in by their desire to understand. Second, I kept thinking back to Hirsch’s writing about postmemory and its relationship to time. Here, Marshall’s work depicts time as not such a liner, nor circular entity, but rather a web as it expands and loops back and forth between connections of history and present, real life and fiction. This is an idea I’m still thinking of long after seeing the show, and one I hope to continue considering moving forward.

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The Met Breuer: Arbus

The exhibition, "Diane Arbus: In the Beginning" was an extremely unique photography gallery experience that highlighted the motif of singularity and solitary in Arbus' early works. Each of Arbus' work were hung separately from one another on columns of partition-looking panels, which was very different from what are usually seen in museum galleries, where one work leads to the next and adds a continuous flow to an exhibition.

When I looked at each photo on each panel in this exhibition, I was able to step away from all other photos in that room, as well as breaking away from the photos of Arbus that I have seen before. I thought the panels were very coherent to the motif of Arbus' style, capturing "outsider" being isolated in the society. Each photo was physically separated from the rest, which made viewers like me feel isolated as well during viewing.

Also, viewers could easily take a few second break before engaging themselves to the next piece of Arbus' photograph. This was possible because the photographs exhibited were not in any chronological orders. I was able to look at Arbus' works freely as I please, which I thought was unique because my viewing experience must have been different from that of any other viewers. I particularly liked the "break" between each panel, because I saw things in reality that were similarly "bizarre" to those subjects in Arbus' photos. I took many photos of things that appeared in my sight between the panels, and the wheelchair and a very hip older man were my favorite (shown below). These things came out behind the panels, and I wasn't expecting them, which made them feel bizarre to me. And since the panels were placed closely from each other, the gap in between them were rather small, which perfect for often allowing only one subject into the frame. When I looked at the photos that I took later on, I couldn't help but notice the similarity theme of solitary in these photos and those on the panels.

The Met Breuer: Marshall

After viewing Diane Arbus' black and white photography exhibition, not only did I find the works of the artist, Kerry James Marshall, colorfully striking, but also very evoking and provocatively colorful; It almost felt like I was hit by many paintballs after entering the exhibition. Compared to the small and intimate atmosphere in the Arbus exhibition, Marshall's exhibition was more intimidating and confronting, partly due to Marshall's large-scale paintings.

In the NY Times article, I learned that Marshall's work was greatly influenced by the second civil rights movement, because he was just a kid when it happened. Different from Arbus' exhibition, where children were often the subjects of the artist' work, Marshall's subject portray the influence of the civil rights movement to a child and the rest of that child's perspective on life. I feel like the greater the contrast between the dark colors used on the skin tone of Marshall's subjects and bright colors used on the rest of the paintings, the more the painting reveals the impact of the civil rights movement had on the artist.  

Especially when I look at the work, "Untitled (Studio), maybe I was a bit shocked by the use of bright red and yellow after coming out of Arbus' exhibition, I really felt like the artist had been depicting his childhood emotional scars left by how the American society then treated African Americans.

The New Museum: Rist

As exotic as the artist's name, Pipilotti Rist, the exhibition Pixel Forest created an out-of-earth experience for people who went to the exhibition by evoking all of their senses. Before going to this exhibition, I have seen photos taken at this show from all of my social media, so some of its contents did not surprise me. However, the experience of physically being in the place of the exhibition completely surprised me.

Overall, the exhibition reminded me of the Museum of Feeling that was on exhibit in Brookfield Place, in which the goal of the exhibition was to evoke audiences' feelings purposefully. The Pixel Forest had LED lightings that were very similar to the Museum of Feeling. Being in the room felt like I had immerse myself to a completely extraterritorial space that cannot be found on earth. The work I was viewing or experiencing was no longer two-dimensional as in traditional museum exhibitions, but they were vividly three-dimensional. The exhibition also had areas that invited audiences like me to do things that I would never do in a traditional museum, such as lying down and watching videos on the ceiling. However, the atmosphere inside the exhibition was very free and casual: there wasn't a subject that audiences have to focus on. In fact, everything in the exhibition was a vital part of the exhibition.

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Arbus, Marshall, Rist

DIANE ARBUS, In the Beginning

Diane Arbus: In the Beginning, a show focused on the first era of Arbus’s now-reknowned photography, recently closed at the Met Bruer. A unique exhibition in the sense that there was no clear path or route to viewing the work, museum-goers had to find their own navigation and view the exhibition as more of a presentation of her vision as a beautiful, comfortable gaze onto lone strangers aware their image was being made. I read both the Cotter review and the Kennedy piece before attending the show, and the Kennedy piece in particular really informed the work for me. I was made aware of how unknown these images are, and how from the beginning of her career, “she seemed to know that the story of the outsider was her intellectual inheritance”, her subject matter and style not changing much over the years but rather becoming more refined with practice. It is wonderful to see the early work of such an admirable photographer, and getting to see the first part of her vision which always remained so clear. Leaving the exhibition, I am left with a greater sense of just how different Arbus’s gaze was at her time of photographing and images of lone strangers sharing a moment with Arbus as she finds the anomalous through her camera. As an archive, it was interesting way to see how one could approach the early work of an artist and present it in a way that suggests new ideas about their work, rather than just a chronological presentation.

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL, Mastry

The Kerry James Marshall show was an collection of color and paint, the colorful portraits of Black America, though separated in different works, all spoke to each other as an epic of history. The epicness of the paintings were due to their size and vigorous color, and after seeing the Arbus work the paintings were refreshing and made more powerful. The layering of image, history, paint and color are were all indicative of the way Marshall sees the world, a complicated jumble of the historical self and self-self, where one cannot remove themselves from their history but rather is intertwined in it and must both celebrate and reflect on it, all of the richness, beauty, and suffering. 

PIPOLOTTI RIST, Pixel Forest

The Pipolotti Rist show at the New Museum, Pixel Forest, was the most inspiring and informative for me and my work, as I have always loved Rist’s video art and installations. This is the first time I’ve gotten to see the work installed in person. The work explores earthly curiosities, immersing us in our own blood and sounds. The score elevated the work, making the experience more transformative. What I liked most about the exhibition in terms of curation is the way video is used to play on different intimacies, from enclosed spaces in the triangle viewers, to tiny images playing inside a sculpted home, to massive movie screens playing kaleidoscopic video, to finally video on the ceiling, where viewers laid in viewing beds. The viewing beds were unique in that the object and the act of lying in a bed were so intimate, but the video on the screen was far and playing evolutionary macro images, still feeling like looking at your own bedroom ceiling, counting the tiles or the glow in the dark stars. I will definitely be returning several times before the show closes. 

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Mastry, in the beginning & Pixel Forest

Kerry James Marshall’s Mastry:

Kerry James Marshall’s Mastry at the Met Breuer has been one of the year’s most anticipated shows and it has certainly lived up to the hype-not that one would need much encouragement to attend anyway. Self-curated with the assistance of two of the Met’s curators, Mastry takes the viewer through a history Marshall’s bedazzled landscapes of Black daily life interspersed with subtle historical references to the Old Masters of painting. The show sprawls over two floors of the Museum, somehow managing to gracefully reject any feeling ostentatiousness in spite of its’ literal larger-than-life scale. One of my favourite elements of Marshall’s work lies in his willingness to meld explicitly coded messages into his canvases. Alongside stately images of Black folks, there might be some text scribbled in on the side that may feel nonsensical to the uninitiated but is actually heavy with meaning, at least to Black people specifically.

The show is paced well, each colossal painting is given its’ space to breathe and grow on the observer, allowing them enough time to study every detail of the work deeply without being distracted. The inclusion of a gallery filled with the work of Marshall’s influences would have served the show better had it been placed at its’ end, in my opinion. I do feel as if I understand his rationale for placing it at the middle though. It appears almost incidentally, like a pit stop on the way to a larger, more interesting town. I feel as if this section is too crammed but it provides a space for the museum goer to say, “Ah, I see where he got it from. Now, let’s see where he takes it.” To me, it felt like a pothole in an otherwise smooth road, an unnecessary speed bump.

Diane Arbus’ in the beginning:

The Met Breuer’s landmark Diane Arbus exhibition diane arbus: in the beginning is the first of its’ kind. Featuring more than 100 photographs from the first seven years of her career, the exhibition’s layout envelops the viewer but the subject matter itself is almost consistently isolated. Spanning the years 1956 to 1962, the images show the blossoming of Arbus’ signature style ever so slowly. Every time that you think that you have gained some sort of bearing while navigating the disorganized space, an image punctuates your viewing and puts you off kilter.

As I entered the palatial space, I could not shake the sensation of being watched while I was watching the photos directly in front of me in turn. I found this mirroring layout to be extremely successful as it allowed those imaged to return the gaze that they must have been so familiar with throughout their own lives. Through Arbus’ own eyes though, her relationship with her subjects often feels voyeuristic, as there is a noted distance between herself and the individuals being photographed, as if one of them is wearing a mask and granting only a fleeting view of their façade due to a lack of trust or a love of mystery. As I came across the image titled Kid in Blackface, NYC, 1957, I was struck by the nonchalance of the child’s body language, the tint a literal mask on his face. A hand hovers near to his shoulder but he seems unafraid of any sort of repercussion. Indeed, this image shares a contact sheet with another Arbus image titled Kid in Blackface with Friend and I can’t help but wonder what was her motivation for photographing this scene. In the late 50s when these were taken, the iconography of the minstrel as a means of exaggerating traditionally black features was well known and considering Arbus’ affinity for the strange, I theorize that it was either the sheer flippancy of the gesture in one so young that compelled her to take the photo or that she herself was laughing along. 

Pippilotti Rist’s Pixel Forest:

I viewed Pixel Forest in reverse, i.e, from the top floor down. Perhaps that was why I ceased to be highly impressed by the exhibition at large. Considered temporally, the exhibition is groundbreaking, as Rist is widely known to be one of the pioneers of feminist video art. However, I found it to be to dependent on form and not enough on function for my tastes. What is remarkable though, is the amount of ways that Rist accesses and reinterprets her older work, doing this through the medium in which it is presented or the even in the shape that the monitor (or lack thereof) takes. Laying down on the beds on the top floor and gazing at Rist swimming through a murky pond through a massive, puddle shaped monitor had me spellbound if only for a moment. The images of aquatic flora bathed in soft, warm light made me contemplate summers I never had and made me almost jealous of Rist for encapsulating so eerily this essence of youth. 

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Pixel//Painting//Portrait

Rist//

My gut reaction upon entering the second floor, submerged in the jelly fish lights, was that this was a profoundly sad landscape. But I wanted to be in it, and like so much work in the show, you can quite literally be inside this whimsical forest, underneath it, laying on top of it… My initial labeling of this show as ‘sad’ was perhaps premature, although there were sparse glimpses of a sweet, childhood-like, familiar sadness which was easily forgotten or maybe identified as something else because of the gorgeous lights, the grandness of the installations. The beds on the third floor had a childhood bedroom aesthetic, taking off your shoes was almost like leaving the adult realm and entering childhood but only as a memory of sorts, something like childhood but something that was contorted, perfected or fantasized, over time. The very act of looking up is emblematic of childhood. Everything is big. The entire show makes you feel small, but in a genuine and lovely way. Laying on the beds, looking upwards, the videos somewhat simulate being underwater, being submerged in the silence reminds me of my own childhood.

There was a small bedroom diorama, and in the midsts of the hugeness of the show, being submerged in the landscape, it was a nice break to look down into one. Still, the scale was distorted and unfamiliar. The whole show was rather disorienting, but I was nice to surrender yourself to the music, the lights, and drift among the jelly fish lights.

Marshall//

I thought Kerry James Marshall’s work was brilliant, collectively the work danced on the duality of technical mastery, within the context of art history, what does it mean to be a master?? (this facet drawing attention to his technical skill, which is quite stunning— and clever, pertaining to his paint-by-number fragments) without abandoning a social context of being black, being a master painter often intertwined with a traditional renaissance/academic style of work. I enjoyed Untitled (Studio), a painting about painting. It’s really smart, theres again this duality of acknowledging the medium itself, in the broad strokes at the bottom left and the testament to his own skill as you follow the diagonal to the upper right.

Arbus//

Such vertigo-inducing pillars…. move forward… through a room of Abrus’s contemporaries and predecessors, a room of perhaps more traditional curation held a limited edition portfolio entitled: A box of ten photographs. “A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y.” seemed to be an anomaly within the context of this collection. The portfolio seemed to be very Arbus-esque, her subjects were physically, very clearly deviations from the norm. Subjects within the collection include identical twins, a giant, a dwarf, a man in drag, and a couple in a nudist colony. An attractive couple, sunbathing in their manicured lawn, with their young boy who is playing in a pool seems to be the essence of American, suburban normalcy. I think it’s so brilliant that this piece is in A box of ten photographs, it disorients the entire collection, it has a very American Beauty fell to it, in that these people are now so clearly the most insane of them all.

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Response to Exhibitions

In visiting the three shows over the past couple of weeks I found a sense of wonderment and fruitfulness in every exhibition. Starting with Pipilotti Rist’s “Pixel Forest” show at the New Museum, I fell in love with her various ways of manipulating light, both in her videos and in the space itself. From the hanging wires of changing hues to the video projections on a silk like fabric, the show was immersive and appealed to so many senses and subsequent reactions. The auditory elements of the show only furthered one’s experience with the colorful images in front of them, and being able to lay or sit down and take your shoes off made you all the more aware of what was going on around you, while still producing a sense of interconnectedness and burning questions of how the environment was actually put together. 

At the Met Breuer, the works of Diane Arbus and Kerry James Marshall were also displayed in ways that manipulated ones sense of space and time. Kerry James Marshall’s huge paintings were breathtaking in his use of color and storytelling. Especially on the 4th floor, viewers are met with many of his larger works lined against each other in a huge space. Viewers are then able to take in the work from afar as well as get close enough to see the paint strokes. Many of the works spoke on topics like police brutality and the loss of black lives, and while every painting had a narrative or story behind it, Marshall beautifully portrayed some depressing and heavy concepts into works that meet the viewer’s eyes. 

On the lower level of the Met Breuer, the Diane Arbus exhibition showcasing her earliest works was quite stunning for different reasons. The show was arranged in a way that each photograph had it’s own wall or column, and there was no single way to view the photographs. This forced the viewer to spend a significant amount of time with whichever works caught their attention. Much of the work had a focus on portraiture and photographs of movie stills. I found the show to be fun to weave in and out of focus with each photograph and many of the images were highly memorable like the kids sitting on steps with halloween masks on, the wrestling match, or the still of woman and man about to kiss. 

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MET Breuer + New Museum

THE MET | DIANE ARBUS: IN THE BEGINNING Met Breuer’s exhibition Diane Arbus: In the Beginning focuses on the first decade of Arbus’s career, from 1956-1962. The choice to display prints on either sides of narrow panels spread across the gallery with no apparent route to follow is clever. Being forced to wander the space while navigating the crowd looking for a subject I’d like to inspect closer, I wondered if Arbus felt this way as she walked the streets of New York in search of her subjects. In his NY Times article, Holland Cotter said “the show as a whole is more powerful than any single thing in it” and I agree. What gives us a novel glimpse into Arbus’s practice is not the debuting photographs but the experience of walking through the main and accompanying two galleries. The room with the work of her predecessors provides the context of ‘regular’ documentary photography and makes us more aware of just how idiosyncratic and unusual her style is, especially at the time. The room with her last portfolio, ‘The box of ten photographs’ shows us the evolution and fruition of her practice. - NEW MUSEUM | PIPPILOTI RIST: PIXEL FOREST The third floor of the New Museum features the multimedia installation the exhibition is named after: Pippiloti Rist’s Pixel Forest. Over 3,0000 lights are suspended in sculptures and the museum’s artistic director described it as LED screen that has exploded in space, with each light playing the part of a pixel of the shattered screen. Countless Instagram posts of this particular installation of the show have come up on Instagram so I wasn’t surprised to notice more people photographing themselves here. He also spoke of how the gallery goer in a way becomes a part of the image when immersed in this sculpture. Interestingly enough, the images being played on the shattered LED screen become a part of these selfies. We are not only inserting ourselves into the images but also recreating them by bringing together the scattered pixels in selfies.

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New Museum / Met Breuer / Whitney

Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest

Pipilotti Rist's exhibition entitled Pixel Forest, is a three-floor multimedia installation at the New Museum. I went during opening weekend so it was extremely crowded. Upon entering each floor, every nook and cranny was filled or being explored. Still I got the sense that this was what the exhibition had been designed for. Rist's pieces throughout the exhibition invited viewers to engage and interact or make themselves at home with cushions, carpet, and even beds. This was not something to experience at a distance, but I was being invited into an environment Rist had created. I found her mirrored videos mesmerising if not a bit scattered. I found the component of movement in the exhibition intriguing—movement implied by the ever changing visuals of film, light, and color, as well my own movement through whispy curtains with video projections on them and a dense sea of pulsating lights hanging from the ceiling. I think my experience would have been much different had there been far fewer people there, however, I do believe that I did absorb some of the dreamy tones of her exploration of the world we live in. There is also the technology component. Specifically when I entered the floor with the beds and when I looked down the hallway of triangular prisms jutting out of the wall for people to stick their heads into, I thought, what a funny way to consume media.

Diane Arbus: In the Beginning

The Diane Arbus exhibition entitled In the Beginning, is a collection of images from the first seven years of her career on display at the Met Breuer. The randomization in placement of the images speaks to the oddity of Arbus and her images. In these images we her matter-of-fact attention to detail is still heavily present, seen in places, objects, and events, more than portraits. The Met Breuer contextualizes their shows with a historical lens. I felt that these early images led very nicely into the well-known images we associate with Arbus in the photo book room and the room of the ten photographs. I liked the layout of the exhibition, but I felt it made the images a little hard to digest. Everything was very solitary but close together and in no order making it feel a little claustrophobic for me instead of being able to experience them as gems of Arbus's artistry. Maybe it's just me but I found it easier to look at the exhibition in book form which they had on display in one of the following rooms.

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry

The Kerry James Marshall exhibition entitled Mastry, is a retrospective spanning the artist's 35-year career. The exhibition brought to light many of the visual and artistic influences Marshall has used in creating his work as well as expose many facets of racially charged topics, issues, trends, and historical figures and events. Upon arriving at the exhibition, I was amazed but the sheer amount of work. Marshall provides a wide array of work exploring black history and identity. I was particularly interested in Marshall's attention to color, for example, in his black on black painting as well as in the black and blue photo in the photograph section, "Black Artist (Studio View)" 2002, speaking to a reclamation of blackness and an embrace of skin tone both visually and emotionally.

Bonus Dreamlands exhibition @ the Whitney

Dreamlands was comprised of a number of different kinds of video installations, the ones I was most drawn to were the more immersive ones, including Hito Steyerl’s "Factory of the Sun," where viewers sit on lounge chairs in a gridded, Tron-like space to watch an engaging disco-science-fiction parody of a video game and Ben Coonley’s 3-D 360-degree video "Trading Futures," projected on the inside of a geodesic dome.

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Pixel Forest

I imagine that the New Museum is marketing their showing of Pixel Forest towards the millennials in hopes that their use of social media will be free marketing. I imagine I also must have missed it, because I was totally unprepared for the sheer amount of people and selfies I would experience at the

I liked what I could experience of the exhibit, and thought the installation was really quite amazing. The immersiveness of the environments from the full room installations all the way to the individual cubbies were certainly effective at transporting the audience. What detracted significantly, however, were the amount of peoples ONLY using the exhibit for the taking of and engaging in social media content. People would stand in the way of projectors to take pictures of their shadows for literally minutes, so there were several instances where I waited to see any piece for minutes at a time and had to give up.

Had there been a more singular way to experience this piece, I would have gotten more out of it, but it was incredibly hard for me to have any reaction when the main input was the sounds and sights of other audience members, and not the work itself. If I have time, I will go back, as I thoroughly enjoyed what I could.

Diane Arbus

I have been familiar with Arbus for some time, and she is one of my favorites. Her work speaks very vividly to me, and she never fails to evoke a rather visceral response from me, no matter what form of emotion that may take. 

That being said, I found the curation choices a little strange. I appreciate the attempt to let each photograph stand on their own, because they truly do in both visual and storytelling manners. However, letting the average museum-goer wander around any exhibit without any sense of direction is a chaotic traffic mess waiting to happen. In an attempt to not hover over or crowd people, I would often go out of order, which was perfectly fine except that I wouldn’t be able to tell which photographs I had skipped after a certain point.

Arbus’ series of 10 photographs were by far my favorite. However, while I understand the intent with the type of reveal they tried to pull off with the 10th photograph (see above), because of the audience having to travel thru the room of her contemporaries and back into the main exhibition room (which was visually busy to begin with), its effectiveness was diminished and lackluster. In my opinion, the curatorial choices were not as strong as the content and didn’t even give much support to them.

Kerry James Marshall

The above of Marshall’s was my favorite, but I think it is because the work that inspired a more visceral response out of me (and because I do have a soft spot for large format works such as this), due to its lack of inherent need for context. While I think Marshall’s work is incredibly important and necessary, and I understand it on an intellectual level, I also think I lack a fundamental visceral understanding of Marshall’s work due to not having lived through the Civil Rights era. While there are obvious and comparable situations happening in today’s society, the Civil Rights era is historically defining for so many reasons, and unlike today’s society, I did not live while these specific events and tensions occurred. So while I can appreciate Marshall’s work, I don’t think I can ever fully understand it in the way that he is trying to communicate. I can come close to an idea, in part because of his work, but I will never be able to fully appreciate it the way I would like. 

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Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest, Diane Arbus: in the beginning, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry

Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest 

Pixel Forest is a mesmerizing and compelling attraction in New York City right now. Just from my Snapchat and Instagram followers alone, I would call this the most social media heavy exhibit I have ever seen. This is an exhibit unlike the usual; it does not only attract the typical museum-goer who knows a thing or two about art and art history, rather Rist’s exhibit engages all people from every age and background. Her attempt was to “transform architectural spaces into massive dreamlike environments enhanced by hypnotic musical scores”. (http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/pipilotti-rist-pixel-forest)

Beginning on the top floor of the museum, I entered the black space and found myself staring at people in bed. Not only were visitors lying down to watch the video clips projected on the ceiling, the visitors were snuggling, snap-chatting, and even napping. On the next level down, I was confronted with a “forest” of 3,000 LED lights. Changing colors and patterns of these lights allowed me to feel as if I were in an otherworldly environment; and I certainly did not miss out on Snap-chatting this environment for my own followers.

Rist creates an atmosphere that is not only transcendent from its installations, but is also special in its ability to create a new kind of museum environment. No longer do visitors have to be quite, put their phones away, and stand two feet away from the art work; now people can engage, whether that's with social media or physically lying down on the work, and they can feel apart of the setting that Rist wants us to experience.

Diane Arbus: in the beginning

Diane Arbus: in the beginning displays photographs from her first seven years of work and most are never before seen images. This exhibit represents what Arbus saw when she first began to photograph the world, the simple subjects of the streets of New York and her magic in making these subjects almost monumental. “She seemed to know that the story of the outsider was her intellectual inheritance. And she had the uncanny ability, in a city as crowded as New York, to isolate even those who thought they belonged, to find them almost alone on a sidewalk, their eyes searching hers — later ours — fiercely and uncertainly through the camera” (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/29/arts/design/diane-arbus-photos-unseen.html).

What first amazed me was her ability to idealize figures by almost removing them from their backgrounds. It is clear in her photograph Man in a hat, trunks, socks and shoes, Coney Island, N.Y. 1960 which shows a man at Coney Island Beach completely surrounded by a haze, looking straight at the camera. The fog and choice of Arbus’s focus settings, detach this man from the rest of the beach-goers and activity around him, emphasizing that Arbus was fascinated with ordinary things. This simple man is transformed into a monumental figure and becomes the most important man on the beach. Another thing that stuck out to me was her focus on the era she was photographing in and her ability to emphasize certain troubles or nuances of the 60s. Blonde receptionist behind a picture window, N.Y.C 1962 presents a blonde woman, at her desk, with papers in front of her, looking like a Barbie doll. Her desk is positioned towards the floor to ceiling window overlooking the street for all who pass by to view her. She is on display. Unlike many of Arbus’s images, the receptionist does not look at the camera, however I think this emphasizes even more the point that she is just a display in a window, almost unable to look at the world outside.

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry

In another exhibit at the Met Breuer, the audience is confronted with large-scale works by Kerry James Marshall. “Born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1955,” meant that he was just a child during the Civil Rights movement, “but kids take in a lot.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/arts/design/kerry-james-marshalls-paintings-show-what-it-means-to-be-black-in-america.html) There is no doubt that this childhood experience resonates in his work and he is able to reveal the story through his paintings.

Marshall uses imagery that reflects certain stereotypes of blacks from history in order “to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society and reassert the place of the black figure within the canon of Western painting.” (http://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2016/kerry-james-marshall). It is interesting how effective it can be to use stereotypical imagery in order to remove those stereotypes, and it certainly works in Marshall’s paintings. It is also said that “such images represent a conscious effort on Mr. Marshall’s part to rescue the image of black life from a default air of pessimism.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/arts/design/kerry-james-marshalls-paintings-show-what-it-means-to-be-black-in-america.html).

The thing I enjoyed most in Marshall’s exhibit was his use of various materials in his works from 1992 and his almost collage-esque peices from later. Campfire Girls from 1995 displays two young girls engulfed in blankets around a campfire. Next to them is a red cross that looks almost placed on the top of the canvas, and it sits at the entrance of their tent. Above the girls, in the sky, is the words “HERE I AM”. These letters also look cut-out and glued on, providing a sense of depth and also perhaps referring to graffiti art. The image of these scared, cold girls allows the viewer to create a story around them, however, by using the his usual stereotypical imagery, Marshall clearly guides us in the story he wants us to hear.

-Andrea Edelman

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Carrie Mae Weems

WNYC has a story about Carrie’s show at Jack Shainman Galleries

Carrie Mae Weems Artist page

Watch the Video on Art 21 we started in class I also highly recommend the segment on DORIS SALCEDO

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“What’s Wrong With This Picture?” and  “The Generation of Post Memory”- Andrea Edelman

Marianne Hirsch & Leo Spitzer “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” 

This reading got me thinking a lot about my own memories, ones that have been passed on from my grandparents to parents and then me, or even memories that I think I have happened to me but when I look back at images, I realize are not necessarily how I remembered them to have happened. Being a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I have no doubt that photographs play an important roll in tracing family histories. Hirsch and Spitzer talk about images as “evidence”, an item we use now to remember something from the past. However, they also note that photographs are both “limited and flawed historical documents, as well as powerful “points of memory” linking past and present” (237). In my grandparents house, there is a hallway of family images from before and after the war. It has always confused me that this hallway encourages me and my cousins to see the family members that did not survive, but when we ask about them, we don’t always get answers. In reading this, I think I have realized that this is possibly because my grandparents don’t have the answers. Photographs can only tell us so much—these pictures provide proof that there were others but the photograph does not present to us their stories from before and after that moment in the image. 

Another point that stuck out to me was the idea that you don’t always read more into images unless you have a previous conception about them. Roland Barthes writes, “If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I… look at it, I scrutinize it” (235). I guess that if I chose to push and ask more questions about these family members that are unspoken about, it would be only because I know that there was a war that forced them to stay behind and I know that they did not survive. 

The last point that intrigued me was the story of Helmut in Seifert’s novel The Dark Room. Helmut photographed a moment of terror during the war, however, he threw out the images because “the medium is simply inadequate, wrong” (239). He feel that the images could not do justice to the feeling that he felt and the things that he saw. So, even though images can be evidence to us, we cant always trust that what we are seeing is a true depiction of what was happening in that moment that the picture was taken.

Marianne Hirsch “The Generation of Post Memory” 

This reading made a lot of similar points to Hirsch’s “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” but goes more in depth on the idea that memories and feelings can be passed on through generations. I think that growing up around memories or stories of the war has definitely resonated with me. Hirsch says that for “young children during the war… the past is located in objects, images, and documents, in fragments and traces” (41). In reading this I remembered two stories: the first, of my grandfather who escaped from Belarus at the age of 3, and second, a moment between my mother and I just a few years ago. My grandfather escaped Belarus with his older sister when they were just 3 and 8. There are, I believe, no pictures of them during their escape, but there are documents. Sitting with my grandfather and great aunt one day, we were discussing something about their travel documents but, when my grandfather began to tell a story about something they had been through my great aunt began to correct him and we realized that he had a completely wrong memory of that day for them. Even though there were documents to prove things for them, they are read differently by my grandfather and my great aunt. The second story that came to mind was of my mother correcting me when I told a story about a birthday party I had. I don’t remember the exact fight but in order to prove herself right, she pulled down the photo album, and sure enough, I had remembered it incorrectly.

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10/27 Readings

What’s wrong with this picture?

I found this reading and its points interesting to when also thinking about the “slow reading” of documents and archival content. How do we read images? Hirsch writes about what may draw us to an image and what informs our reading of it. In a sense we are looking for what we know, we need to care about an image to really look at it. 

She also speaks of context, details changing the meaning of the image presented to us. In the example of the Jewish star, a small speck to be interpreted as one thing over another completely alters its meaning, implications, and history. Bringing all these details together, bonding the fragments, the framing, the opacity of the image, allows us to have a conversation with the photo, to question it, and impose new meaning. A photo is not static.

Postmemory

This reading prompted the questioning of what is a “real” memory? Memories are closely tied to our emotions and how we experienced them. There is an act of re-framing as we re-explore and revisit the past.

This felt particularly curious to me because in the context of my upbringing and the projects I’m working on I question what happens when you can’t remember? What happens when there is no account to question, compare, or draw from? I have thought about my biological family throughout my life, but we as a family never existed. What about a memory of something that never was?

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Thoughts on “What’s Wrong With This Picture?”

In the reconstruction of the photograph of Carl and Lotte Hirsch, specifically the enlargement of the dust spot on Carl’s lapel, I question whether this identification of this spot as a Yellow Star is a result of Hirsch/Spitzer’s intent to find something. The author resisted this image questioning is truth in rendering the atmosphere of 1942 Herrengasse in Cerna ̆ut,it. He was looking for something more honest than “relatively lucky circumstances” of “youth and young love.” Perhaps in this search for what the author insists is a truthful rendering of the time, though he was not their himself, constructing this concept of honesty from other photographs of Jews in Warsaw or Lódx streets. Perhaps the reconstruction is false. Hirsch admits, “our deter- mination to magnify and enhance the picture––to zoom in, blow-up, sharpen––reveals more about our own projections and appropriations than about life in wartime Greater Romania”

I found the point of embedding images into new narratives interesting. Specifically in the context of Hasbun’s work— cropping and reframing the images, a distortion from the original medium to perhaps parallel the uncertainty of memory and the falsities that shape it. The article refers to this as an obscurity, a means to “transcend generational amnesia.” I’m not sure if this is a transcendence between the generations or a commentary of the amnesia, the forgetting in acknowledging the distortion of memory.

On “The Generation of Postmemory”

In the context of Artie in Maus, Hirsch asks, “Do children of survivors have “memories” of their parents suffering?”  He speaks to the claim to other peoples memories, but also a shared and collective memory. Remembering a memory, the second generation is handed down a stylized version of the truth, perfected in its story telling, perfected in its context against historical accuracy. I don’t particularly understand the distinction between communicative memory and cultural memory. Communicative is defined as being a factual, which fundamentally is troubling became memory is never exactly ‘fact’. This, Hirsch states, carries across three generations— how is something like this definitively measured? Political and cultural memory is not intergenerational but transgenerational. Does the difference lie in interpretation of memory?

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What’s wrong with this picture? Do children of survivors have memories of their parents suffering?

In their essay “What’s Wrong With This Picture?”, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer write, “Pervasive in the personal, scholarly and artistic work of postmemory, photographic documents bring the contradictions of the archives we have inherited into the open. Invariably, archival photographic images appear in postmemorial texts in altered form: they are cropped, enlarged, projected unto other images; they are reframed and de-or re-contextualized; they are embedded in new narratives, new texts; they are surrounded by new frames.” Here, the authors are arguing that archives possess the ability to create a new context for images and ultimately, hold the power to create “new narratives.” In regards to my project, this observation is helpful given that I need some sort of organized way to create my new “context”— in this case, the groups of images I choose to display together. I have decided that my project calls for separate groups or files to create a system of sorts— I will create albums for “family vacations,” “birthday parties,” “holidays,” etc., all of which are events that are frequently photographed. Ultimately, this process is will “project meaning unto new images” and “reframe” them, as Hirsch and Spitzer write about. In Hirsch’s other essay, “Generation of Postmemory,” she asks the question: “Do children of survivors have memories of their parents suffering?” I definitely identify with this question as well, as I have little to no written past of my biological parents, and know that “literal memories” can be translated and rewritten via the archive. Ultimately, she writes that “one person’s lived memories cannot be transformed into another.” In my project, I will be faced with the task to transform no person’s memory (a nonexistent one) into a false one (the archive).