Exhibition responses
Arbus:
Since acquiring Diane Arbusâs 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, âdiane arbus: in the beginning.â Titled âin the beginning,â 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 Arbusâs career. Showing dozens of her photographs taken between the years 1956 and 1962, âdiane arbus: in the beginningâ 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 Arbusâs 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. Â
The exhibition is decidedly unconventional, displaying each photograph on its own narrow wall. These walls are placed carefully throughout the galleryâs space allowing the viewer to navigate the room in a perambulatory fashion, as if in way to mirror Arbusâs 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 âFemale Impersonator Holding Long Gloves, Hempstead, Long Island, 1959.â 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 Arbusâ intimately curated and precisely arranged show, walking through Kerry James Marshallâs show offered me an entirely different sensory experience. Marshallâs 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 âDe Styleâ 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 âDe Style,â 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 Ristâs âPixel Forest,â 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 âPixel Forestâ 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 issueâ 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 Ristâs immersive âPixel Forestâ allowed the crowd to become too close (too immersed in?) to the artwork to the point of security issues, âDreamlandsâ 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 donât 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 tangibleâ it takes a soft, almost touchable form that viewers are possibly intended to reach out and grab it.
Natalie Sereda















