Lynne Cohen - Camouflage

I've mentioned Lynne Cohen before, but I just got a note that Hasted Hunt Gallery in NY is having an exhibition of her earlier black and white work.

Most of this hasn't been shown much in the US, indeed outside Canada. While Cohen's later large scale colour (and some B&W) more often than not deals with similarly large scale or institutional interiors, this earlier work is on a more intimate, smaller scale. Both the subjects and the prints - which were originally 8x10 contact prints (though I'm not sure what size the exhibition prints are now).

Some of these pictures were the first work of Cohen's that I saw, years ago, in a book put together with Bill Ewing called Occupied Territory through which her work left a lasting impression on me.

From the exhibition blurb:

Cohen is dealing with the concept of camouflage ironically, as in hidden or deceptive, from camoufler to disguise. These are clear-eyed images of interior spaces, empty of people and seemingly affectless. These are familiar spaces, mostly rooms, but also offices, lobbies, and hallways. But there is always something very strange or disorienting.

Much contemporary photo-based work deals with "constructed" realities but Cohen’s settings are straightforward. They are what they are, even when they seem abstracted. This approach is closer to Ed Ruscha than Thomas Demand.

In her searching out of locations she likens herself to a performance artist, as she says, "because of what I have to do to get access. What I am looking for is something political or conceptual, something incongruous or pathetic, a certain sense of strangeness, incoherence, sadness or an asphyxiating order".

Cohen brings a subversive edge to the work, "There is usually something absurd or funny to counterbalance the critique. That is very important to me and I hope the humor enriches the work without masking the critical".

Cohen brings a subversive edge to the work, "There is usually something absurd or funny to counterbalance the critique. That is very important to me and I hope the humor enriches the work without masking the critical".

(Cohen's big monograph No Man's Land is still available. There's also a catalogue Camouflage, in French, which includes work from this show. Cohen's website also has lots of her work on it.)

A Hobby for Gentlemen (and Ladies)

There's a good review in the NY Times of a current show “Impressed by Light: British Photographs From Paper Negatives, 1840-1860”

I must say that as a child, historic photographs fascinated me. Our local library was actually in a huge old that also had a gallery in it sometimes featured old photographs from the archives - heavy industry, wool barons, tenement houses, the Crimean War, Egypt & Palestine etc and after selecting my latest Biggles or Bobby Brewster book I would wander these exhibits captivated.

Then, as I "grew up", for the longest time such historic photographs - whether vernacular or Roger Fenton and Julia Margaret Cameron - bored me to tears. But in recent years I seem to have come full circle and thoroughly enjoy all sorts of historic photography and photographers from the earliest days of the medium.

So a show such is definitely a draw for me now.

"Forget the starving 19th-century artist living in a garret. The exhibition “Impressed by Light: British Photographs From Paper Negatives, 1840-1860” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art introduces a very different artistic type: the Victorian gentleman, the eminent academic, the curious scientist, the successful businessman. Someone like Robert Henry Cheney, described on a wall label as “an accomplished artist, watercolorist and landscape gardener of his own estate (with a staff of 14).”

Photographs are the main attraction, but sociology intrudes. How many shows include art produced by someone “with extensive commercial interests in coal mines and banking”; or by a man “known as ‘the wealthiest commoner’ in Britain”; or “one of the finest lawyers in Edinburgh”; or “an army officer with the East India Company”?

Even though early photography’s images are fascinating and beautiful to behold, calling their makers artists is a bit of a stretch. Many were hobbyists trying out a new invention, one involving chemicals, hardware and skill that only the well-to-do could afford. Often the photographs were made for private albums, not public exhibition...

Daguerreotypes were detailed and precise; calotypes were softer and prone to massing light and shadows. Daguerreotypes quickly became the professional medium — they worked well for portrait-making — but even after 1851, when glass negatives, which produced a sharper image more quickly, became available, many British photographers preferred the paper negatives.

You immediately see the artistic potential of calotypes and how they served as precursors to movements like Pictorialism. The show’s first image, a salted-paper print by Talbot from 1841-42, is simply a photographic trace — a solid white image against a black background — of a sprig of wild fennel. But it calls to mind later cameraless photography experiments by Man Ray and others, just as the pair of Talbot prints next to it, negative and positive images of a haystack, taken in 1844, create a diptych that resembles a postmodernist installation: Bernd and Hilla Becher meet Monet..."

Richard Tuttle - appearance and reality

One of the joys of making the trek to our cottage is that my wife's mother was an artist. Not only are all her books still there, but there's also a whole shelf full of exhibition catalogues going back to at least the 1970's.

Two or three years ago, browsing through them, I came across an old exhibition catalogue of work by Richard Tuttle. I'd never come across his work (much of my experience of contemporary art was fairly eurocentric until a few years ago), but the catalogue really drew me in. Over time I found out more about Tuttle - who is described as a postminimalist - and his work.

I'm not exactly sure I entirely quite "get" Tuttle yet, but I'm certainly drawn in to what he does.

There is some good info with video at PBS. From which the following bio section comes. There is also a fascinating interview from Artinfo, some of which follows on.

Most interesting to me are his comments on appearances and reality, that artists work with reality. I've been interested for a long time in how photographs deal specifically in appearances - and yet ocassionally, at their best and most meanigful, are able to reveal and deal with something beyond themselves, something deeper - reality, in Tuttle's view:

Richard Tuttle was born in Rahway, New Jersey in 1941, and lives and works in New Mexico and New York. Although most of Tuttle’s prolific artistic output since he began his career in the 1960s has taken the form of three-dimensional objects, he commonly refers to his work as drawing rather than sculpture, emphasizing the diminutive scale and idea-based nature of his practice. He subverts the conventions of modernist sculptural practice (defined by grand heroic gestures, monumental scale, and the ‘macho’ materials of steel, marble, and bronze) and instead creates small, eccentrically playful objects in decidedly humble, even ‘pathetic’ materials such as paper, rope, string, cloth, wire, twigs, cardboard, bubble wrap, nails, Styrofoam, and plywood. Tuttle also manipulates the space in which his objects exist, placing them unnaturally high or oddly low on a wall, forcing viewers to reconsider and renegotiate the white-cube gallery space in relation to their own bodies. Tuttle uses directed light and shadow to further define his objects and their space. Influences on his work include calligraphy (he has a strong interest in the intrinsic power of line), poetry, and language. A lover of books and printed matter, Tuttle has created artist’s books, collaborated on the design of exhibition catalogues, and is a consummate printmaker.

(from Artinfo May 2007):

Richard, this is a beautiful show. But your work is not concerned with beauty, is it?

Eastern philosophers talk about the illusion of the world. I feel very sympathetic to that, because you know in an instant if a person is involved with appearances or reality. There’s a whole huge structure out there that gives high marks for appearances. Then there are the people who are involved with what’s real. By far the vast majority of people’s lives are involved with appearances—even most art is just appearances. People are literally swept away by appearances.

But you believe that you’re working with reality rather than appearance?

In our culture there is a job for art, because we can’t experience reality anywhere else. And the experience of reality is absolutely fundamental to human existence. My job is to give the best possible visual experience. I try to raise the bar on the visual experience so that people can enjoy their lives. I get to thinking a lot about motivation—the purest motivation should result in the best visual experience. This is the first show where I think I’ve really connected with this motivation. It takes a lifetime to achieve one’s work. Art is not an overnight career. You can’t face your own desperation until after a long time.

In my case, there’s a part of me that feels like I’m a piece of shit, and all my life I’ve tried not to feel like a piece of shit. In an exhibition like this, I actually feel that I’ve reached a new level. What can you do? The possibilities that art offers are unique...

Why do you think that most art deals with appearances rather than reality?

I think that it’s necessary to achieve art that is reality-based. In our culture, imitation-based experience dominates reality-based experience. I find this an awful thing. But there are artists who know from the bottom of their souls that art is about the experience of reality. The reason we have art is because you can’t get a real experience from the world. Philosophers can’t tell you, religion can’t tell you. So art has become hugely important.

But our culture suppresses art. In our culture, the people who need art to survive are given the message that they’re weirdos. Every day and from every corner of the world they’re getting the message that art is imitation-based, which is absolutely the opposite of the truth. You would never base your life on imitation. Even the people who are saying to do it never would. It’s fucked. It’s really fucked...

What do you think has brought this state of affairs about?

This is a very special moment in human history, I think. We have a very clear vision right back to the foundation of our particular culture, and you can see that at the foundation of our culture, the artists worked out the theory and the practice of art. The theory is that art is reality-based, and the practice is to make something that shows that. But it’s tough. It’s hard. Every part of it is hard. The Hellenistic philosophers said things will be a lot easier if we say that art is imitation-based. They didn’t care, because they weren’t artists and they had a lot to gain from art being less than it is. So it stumbles along, year after year, without really satisfying anyone.

Every once in a while, usually in really desperate periods, when life becomes totally confused and almost unlivable, artists come back and create art that is reality-based, and everyone says, "thank you very much." But then as soon as they can, they turn back to the imitation-based art.

Can you give me an example of how art is presently conceived as imitation-based?

Well, in the "New York Times", art is treated as "entertainment." When you get tired and you want to be distracted, then there’s art. There was a recent review that said, "Don’t expect to find tickets for Richard Tuttle’s show at Ticketron!" This is not that kind of show. This is about art as a necessity. There are shows where people will stand in line for blocks, but those are not about necessity. Fortunately, most of the world is not desperate enough that they need this kind of thing. But people who still have art in their lives, they’d be dead without it, because the suppression of art is so enormous...

I think art should be a special moment. A rare moment when unusual things happen. One of my favorite pieces is this little one, "Section V, Extension F" (2007). It has a certain green. There’s a history to color — humans don’t see a color until it’s time to see it. There’s a primal relationship between us and color. For me it’s very exciting.

Finally, SFMoMA also has a pretty good little itneractive thing on Tuttle here

The cost of war

Just one more poignant reminder (among many) of the cost of war.

I knew Colin Wall long ago when he was a freshly minted Corporal. As the Company Sergeant Major of 150 Provost Company, Royal Military Police he was ambushed and killed in Basra in 2003 while working to re-establish Civilian Policing in the city. His son Alex was 11 months old.

Last week a new memorial was unveiled in Britain remembering the members of the Armed Forces killed since WWII.

In the picture above Alex Wall, now five years old, searches for his father's name on the memorial wall.

(Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Beth Dow

Jen Bekman has got her 20x200 thing up and running now. One of her current offerings caught my eye - the work of Beth Dow.

It's very beautiful work and in a way very classical (small c) in style. But it doesnt seem overly sentimental or nostalgic. It also seems to have enough quirky little touches (for want of a better phrase) that prevent it from becoming too twee. It has more life and individuality than a lot of similar work.

That said, I could also see it selling like hotcakes at say the gift shop in the Vita Sackville-West designed Sissinghurst Gardens.

You can buy "Bags" at 20x200

The Taliban

Lest anyone be mistaken, I see the subject of the Taliban images below purely in terms of the hypocrisy and failure of an oppressive regime.

It was a regime which violently suppressed both any kind of representative imagery and also homosexuality. Yet those who enforced such suppression chose to have their photographs taken in this way. It demonstrates both the hypocrisy Taliban regime and the failure of its ideology

Now if these photographs had dated from the time before the Taliban when homosexuality was openly practiced in Kandahar and warlords took (and fought over) young male lovers, that would be a different thing altogether.

The Taliban channel Gilbert and George

This is just intriguingly weird... from Slate:

The Taliban's Secret Photos
A Magnum photo essay. During his coverage of the fall of Afghanistan's Taliban regime in 2002, photographer Thomas Dworzak discovered a stash of pictures showing male Taliban members in curious, effeminate poses. (video here if the embed below doesn't work)

and from the book blurb for Taliban: "Kandahar, a city of Pashtuns noted for their gaiety, so to speak, where Mullah Omar had made his final headquarters, has traditions of men in high-heeled sandals, with make-up of kohl and painted nails like sultry silent-movie stars. They liked to have their pictures taken and, because the Taliban most certainly needed passports, their vanities were accomodated in the hole-in-the-wall photo shops that exist in downtown Kandahar. Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak, on war assignment for the New Yorker, discovered their photographs days after they had fled the city. They hung among portraits of Bruce Lee, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ahmed Shah Massoud, their faces retouched by the artful brushwork of the photographer. As exotic backdrops the subjects have chosen chalets in the Swiss Alps, where the mountains are green and Julie Andrews sings, rather than the forbidding grey and brown of their own country. Some are alone, others with a friend or a Kalashnikov, with garish colours stroked into the theme, along with flowers. They were the killers who have fled, leaving behind an absurd record of their presence."

Taryn Simon - An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar

I kept seeing Taryn Simon's name and references to her work, but for some reason I also kept avoiding it. I think in part the title put me off and in part the hip-hype. But eventually I gave in - mainly because of one picture initially. Now I'm waiting to look at the book An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar via the library system - so I'll see what my views are after lookign at that.

But what I've seen online is actually quite fascinating. As one review put it; "Few Signs are as bewitching as a posted warning to KEEP OUT" I find the pictures both unsettling and intriguing as well as finding myself - as a photographer - imagining the negotiations and effort it took to actually gain access to be show us some of these things.

The one piece that really caught my imagination me is the CIA art at the top here. Just the idea of the CIA decorating their halls with contemporary art, never mind what was involved to actually get and photograph it, along with the CIA's history of actively using contemporary art as a weapon of the Cold War and US cultural imperialism.

"Ms. Simon comes naturally to documenting places average citizens can’t access. For the State Department her father photographed Soviet cities during the cold war, restricted sites in Southeast Asia during the war in Vietnam and out-of-the way locations in Afghanistan, Israel and Iran in the 1970s...

Ms. Simon can work as long as a year to gain permission to photograph high-security zones like the government-regulated quarantine sites, nuclear waste storage facilities, prison death rows and C.I.A. offices on view in the show. There are also pictures with lighter themes, taken at sites with presumably fewer restrictions: the sandpit where the Grucci family tests fireworks, ski slopes being dynamited for avalanche control and the second Death Star, from “Return of the Jedi,” at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch.

What’s amazing is how many closed doors open for Ms. Simon. Interestingly, Disney did refuse her request, saying it wanted to protect the fantasies of theme park visitors. (A copy of its reply is in the catalog.)" (from the NY Times)

The pictures are also accompanied by often quite extensive captions, which confirms something of my recent change of direction about captions (I used to dislike almost all captions on displayed photography...):

The Central Intelligence Agency, ArtCIA Original Headquarters BuildingLangley, Virginia

The Fine Arts Commission of the CIA is responsible for acquiring art to display in the Agency’s buildings. Among the Commission’s curated art are two pieces (pictured) by Thomas Downing, on long-term loan from the Vincent Melzac collection. Downing was a member of the Washington Color School, a group of post World War II painters whose influence helped to establish the city as a center for arts and culture. Vincent Melzac was a private collector of abstract art and the Administrative Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.’s premiere art museum.Since the founding of the CIA in 1947, the Agency has participated in both covert and public cultural diplomacy efforts throughout the world. It is speculated that some of the CIA’s involvement in the arts was designed to counter Soviet Communism by helping to popularize what it considered pro-American thought and aesthetic sensibilities. Such involvement has raised historical questions about certain art forms or styles that may have elicited the interest of the Agency, including abstract expressionism.

"Simon uses text as few photographers do, as an integral part of the work. There are images that do not reveal their meaning until the text is read. There are (rare) instances when the text is more bizarrely interesting than the image. Cataloguing the confiscated contents of the US Customs and Border Protection Contraband Room at John F Kennedy Airport, Simon offers up a kind of surrealist fugue, an ode to forbidden fruit (and meat) that outdoes even her cornucopia of an image. For the most part, however, her images easily hold their own. The smoky, white-on-white portrait of the degree-zero cryogenic preservation pod in which the bodies of the mother and wife of the cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger are frozen is beyond spooky, speaking so eloquently of our fear of death and our dreams of immortality that few words are necessary. And in at least one instance there’s a remarkable piece of ‘found’ art. Who could have predicted that those 90 stainlesssteel capsules containing radioactive cesium and strontium submerged in a pool of water and giving off that blue radiation would so closely resemble, when photographed from above, the map of the United States of America? When a photographer comes up with an image as potently expressive as that, even a dedicated word-person such as myself is bound to concede that such a picture is worth at least a thousand words." more

There is also an interview here and you can watch her on Charlie Rose - which probably gives the best insight into her and her work (second interview)

Paris Photo 2007 - Adrian Tyler

I was just looking through Lensculture's Paris Photo 2007 Preview:120 new picks (click on the gallery views) and saw that Adrian Tyler is listed among some very illustrious names with work from his Architstructures project.

You can see more of Architstructures here

The huge international photography fair at Paris Photo is at once exhilarating, inspiring, and an epicenter for visual overload and happy exhaustion.

From November 15 to 18, 2007, visitors to Paris Photo will have the unique opportunity to see the work of some 500 international photographers and artists from every continent.

Serrano update

Amy Stein did a better job than me searching youtube.

And like her, I have reservations about publishing the link to the video because publicity is the fuel for the fire of this kind of fanaticism.

Or as Amy more eloquently put it:

I was debating whether or not to post a link to the video of the attack. I
mean, why give these fascist fucks any extra exposure, right? But, I think it
would be a mistake to hide from this video. It is important to expose this type
of extremism for the bullshit it is.

But I also think in the end it's chilling message is worth seeing. View it here

Also, apparently Serrano is now considering keeping the work open and showing the work as is, which to my mind successfully turns the work of the fascists on its head.

Swedish neo-nazi art terrorists attack Serrano photographs

Apparently, everyone's a critic - even neo-nazi thugs.

I should really credit Luis Gottardi as a Musings Correspondent. I just received an email from him about an NY Times article which describes an attack on an exhibition in sleepy Swedish University town of Lund.

It sounds for all the world like a piece of dramatic performance art though apparently - and sadly - it isn't.

Masked attackers ran the a gallery displaying and exhibit called "The History of Sex" by Andres Serrano (of "Piss Christ" frame) with crowbars and axes attacking and smashing the photographs while shouting things like "this is art? and "we don't agree with this crap", finally, leaving leaflets entitled “Against decadence and for a healthier culture.” They later posted video of the attack on youtube.

A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night.

This was no joke or acting stunt. It was what actually happened on a quiet Friday afternoon in Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden where “The History of Sex,” an exhibition of photographs by the New York artist Andres Serrano, had opened two weeks earlier.

Around 3:30, half an hour before closing, four vandals wearing black masks stormed into a space known as the Kulturen Gallery while shouting in Swedish, “We don’t support this,” plus an expletive. They pushed visitors aside, entered a darkened room where some of the photographs were displayed and began smashing the glass protecting the photographs and then hacking away at the prints. more .

Mind you, I know a good few photographers who seem to hold the same views on art as the attackers...

Chris Jordan on The Colbert Report

I've mentioned Chris Jordan's work a few times - especially his new/current massive photographic constructions.

Anyway, for those in N. America Chris just let me know that on October 10th he is supposed to be a guest on the satirical news show The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert, all other things being equal (the same show that brought us such appropriate new words as "truthiness" and "wikiality" ) .

Now, I'm not a regular viewer of the Report - I just catch it every now and then - but I think this may be the first time they have had a photographer on as a guest - especially an "art photographer". Either way, I think Chris is pretty much expecting to get his ass whooped... especially as what he does is pretty much "un-american". So it should be fun - or at least cringe-making :-)

UPDATE - I don't know if I got the dates wrong or Chris was bumped for Wes Clarke, but it now looks like he's on Thursday the 11th

Happy Thanksgiving

Yes, it's Thanksgiving Weekend in Canada and Monday is a holiday.

Thanksgiving here is a combination of old English/Anglo Saxon Harvest Festival and American Thanksgiving. Which is why you'll find old pre-Christian Horns of Plenty and corn dollies alongside churches full of wheat sheaves, along with borrowing from our neighbours from the south - so there are usually pumpkins and turkey and cranberries and sweet potato (and I did see some Pilgrim Father's stuff in Walmart a year or two ago - which was just plain weird - but then their "wet floor" signs are in english and spanish not english and french so it's not surprising).

So, I hope you can be thankful for something wherever you are this weekend.

(Pictures from The Gallery of Regrettable Food)

Errol goes to the Crimea - Fenton Pt.II

(Photograph by Eric Zimmerman)

I mentioned Errol Morris's article on the two Roger Fenton photographs (the disappearing cannonballs) last week.

Morris has now put up part two wherein he travels to the Crimea to seek out the Valley of the Shadow of Death and Fenton's tripod holes lugging around Russian cannonballs. And I love his idea of the young Artillery Lieutenant Tolstoy leaving his fingerprints on the cannonballs that landed at Fenton's feet.

There is also a nice little bit on Fenton's "style":

"RICHARD PARE: Fenton always had a taste for the abstract and the geometrically formal in image making. There’s this strange collapsing of perspective that he gets because of the footpath that’s trodden into the left hand side of the road that connects up in the further distance to the main track as it disappears over the horizon. They have a parallel width that causes the thing to flip-flop in a way, visually condenses it into a kind of uneasy restlessness. He was very satisfied with the two pictures he made – in getting two negatives – and left it at that. The way it fits into the whole of his output is interesting."



An interesting and fun, if extensive, read (hopefully it won't reach 800+ comments to scroll through this time...)

"Olga led us first to the Woronzoff Ravine, marked on contemporary maps as lying to the east of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I was adamant. “No, no! This is the Woronzoff Ravine. This is not the Valley of the Shadow of Death.” There is always difficulty when you try to tell local guides their business, but we retraced our steps back to Sebastopol and took a different road, which took us up to a ridge to the west of the Woronzoff Ravine. At last we were able to look down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Miraculously, the area is still undeveloped. You can still see the remnants of trenches on the hill facing the Great Redan. The old Chapman Batteries. The cannonballs are gone but the ground is littered with very tiny snail shells on what is called Shell Hill in many accounts from the Crimean War. I don’t know why, but the snails made me feel connected to history...

Olga seemed amused. I am not a great believer in certainty, but I am pretty certain the Duke of Edinburgh never asked to go to the Panorama Museum to borrow a Crimean War cannonball...

...After some confusion, we were brought upstairs to meet the curator and some of the staff. (I told them I’d won an Oscar.) After a desultory conversation – as desultory as a conversation can be when none of the parties understand each other or have a clear idea of what is going on – I asked for a cannonball. There were additional translation difficulties. I remember Olga gesticulating wildly.

Successful, we returned to the Valley of the Shadow of Death with one cannonball and took various pictures.

(pictures by Bob Chappell.)

...“The demon is cruel and firm,” “he acquires a strange nimbleness…a new and baneful power,” “a tiger intent on the throat of a camel.” The soulless, inanimate world of the iron cannonball comes alive. Literally with a vengeance. Not only does the cannonball have intent – it plans, it connives… it is hopelessly devious, maybe even deviant.

Photographs are no different. We look at them. They are nothing more than silver halide crystals arranged on paper or with digital photography, nothing more than a concatenation of 1’s and 0’s resident on a hard-drive. Yet we believe they have captured something of our essence – something of the stuff that is in our heads.

I, too, look at the two Fenton photographs and try to imagine what Fenton’s intentions might have been. It’s unavoidable. We have been programmed to do so by natural selection – to project ourselves into the world – and to imagine his world as we imagine ours. I try to figure out which photograph was taken first and to develop theories about Fenton’s motivations, but these are just theories, nothing more."

But Pt.III (and presumably the film?) to come soon

Photoeye and Amazon

Interesting news - the excellent photography bookshop Photoeye has now affiliated/integrated with Amazon see here

Hopefully this is a good thing?

Paul Muldoon

I enjoy modern (i.e. contemporary) poetry, but I don't exactly "follow" it. So it wasn't a suprise when I read that Paul Muldoon had been appointed poetry editor of the New Yorker and I realised I' d never heard of him.

So more fool me - because his poetry is great stuff!

Muldoon is a Northern Irishman like his senior elder statesman Seamus Heaney (whose poetry I enjoy immensely). He has been Professor of Poetry at Oxford and more latterly Professor of the Humanities and Creative Writing at Princeton University.

I got a couple of his books out of the library - the Pulitzer Prize winning Moy Sand & Gravel and the more recent Horse Latitudes. The poems are great fun, challenging, harsh and beautiful (though it helps to reads them with that hard/soft Armagh accent in your mind as well).




I'll be interested to see how it effects to poetry at the New Yorker - this article on Muldoon makes mention of "is there really such a thing as a New Yorker poem" -In 1990, Muldoon published a mischievous poem called Capercaillies (in Madoc: A Mystery), in which the first letters of each line spelt out, in acrostic, Is This a New Yorker Poem Or What? (The New Yorker maintains that it rejected the poem.) But is there really such a thing as a "New Yorker poem"? - and I think there is - unfortuantely often somewhat insipid, although with some notable exceptions.

The myth goes (recounted in another useful article) that "The first meeting between Seamus Heaney and the 17-year-old Paul Muldoon has bred a number of apocryphal tales. Muldoon was said to have sent some poems to Heaney, asking, "What's wrong with these?", to which the future Nobel Laureate apparently replied, "Nothing". In another account, Heaney is alleged to have said: "Muldoon has nothing to learn from me; I may have something to learn from him." "

There's also a NY Times article here.



Pineapples and Pomegranates
Paul Muldoon

In Memory of Yehuda Amichai


To think that, as a boy of thirteen, I would grapple
with my first pineapple,
its exposed breast
setting itself as another test
of my will-power, knowing in my bones
that it stood for something other than itself alone
while having absolutely no sense
of its being a world-wide symbol of munificence.
Munificence - right? Not munitions, if you understand
where I'm coming from. As if the open hand
might, for once, put paid
to the hand-grenade
in one corner of the planet.
I'm talking about pineapples - right? - not pomegranates.


-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-


One Last Draw of the Pipe


Heard a piece of Roscommon folklore the other night. At some village or other, they lay pipes full of tobacco on the graves of the new buried in case they may like a draw of the pipe. A wild American indian kind of buisness [sic] it seems.
--A letter from W. B. Yeats to Douglas Hyde, October 1889


Even though it happened as long ago as the late fifties, I could still draw
you a picture of the place. A little draw

through which we were helping a neighbor draw
green hay when we would suddenly draw

level with a freshly dug hole. He must have been torn between one last
draw

of the pipe and hurriedly trying to draw

a veil of thatch and pine boughs over the hole before having to withdraw,
that ghost who may even now draw

a bead on me. On the day Sitting Bull was shot, his old trick pony (once
such a draw

in Buffalo Bill's circus because he was given to dance

attendance
when he heard a volley of shots) would automatically draw

himself up and raise one hoof.
Even now I hear it coming down. I hear it coming down on my yew-bough
roof.




(photo: Eamonn McCabe)

Administrative Typologies Pt.II - Paul Shambroom

This was going to be my original post on this topic - the work of Paul Shambroom in his Meetings series.

Much of what I said yesterday also applies to these. To look at them on a gallery wall (or in Paul's book) I would find myself going back and forth between pictures, comparing settings and faces and little incidentals.

Paul also makes good use of captions with this work; in this case often the minutes of the meeting (such as for the picture above):

(Sedgwick, Arkansas (population 112) City Council, May 13, 2002 (L to R): Wilma Britton (Recorder/Treasurer), Stanley Debow, Frankie Britton (Mayor), Clara Manus (citizen), Beverly Fowler, Ezra Pierce (city policeman), Homer Harper, Charles Petty, Tommie Pierce (citizen))

Sedgwick City Council Meeting May 13-02

Meeting was called to order at 7:00 P.M

Present Mayor Bud Britton, Rec. Treas. Wilma Britton, Councilmen Present Beverley Fowler, Stanley Debaw, Charles Petty, Homer Harper, absent Blake Burvis. Visitors Edd Pierce, Tommie Pierce, Claire Manus, Tammy Wielier, Jeff Moskop, Paul Shambroom was there taking pictures of the meeting.

Minutes of last month meeting was read and financial report given. Motion to accept by Stanley Debaw, second by Homer Harper. All Councilmen voted yea.

Bud said he would check with Atlas to why they are not starting work on the street. If they can't start on it he will give job to A-State if they can start on it. Talked about Walk was not sure where to put it.

Meeting adjourned at 7:45 P.M.

Mayor
Rec Treas. Wilma Britton

I would guess that for many, sitting through seemingly endless small meetings such as these - town council, school board, parish council or whatever is a common experience - either as participants or audience. In part, it's certainly mine, and when the meetings do begin to drag, the mind wanders and focuses on small, odd details: "huh, I never noticed in that photo of the old mayor on the wall one side of his moustache is longer than the other"; "what was Mrs. Lukowski thinking wearing that lime green striped dress"; "hmm, the police chief could do with losing some weight"; "I just noticed the roof joists aren't straight"....

This work highlights the small - often quirky - sometimes humorous - differences between these seemingly similar scenes and events.

These are also pictures where making them big makes sense to my mind. They were photographed using panoramic medium format and then printed nice and large - 5 1/2 feet or so.

BTW, Paul also has some other interesting work on his site. His Security series and Nuclear Weapons series are worth looking at.

(1987 Toyota Celica, 500 lbs ANFO explosive. (Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center (EMRTC), New Mexico Tech, Socorro, NM))

Administrative Typologies - Jan Banning

Pt I. in a two part series (I was just going to do the one post tomorrow, and then I serendipitously came across these today via woods_s_lot).

While it's very easy to step over the line into monotonous repetition with the "typologies" approach to photography (something you could never accuse August Sander of), especially in it's more contemporary grid form, one thing I like about them when I work is what I call "the comparison game"

I found myself playing with Jan Banning's bureaucracy photographs - The Office. Even with the online version I find myself going back and froth between them. If they were in, say, linear form at an exhibition I would no doubt be scuttling back and forth along the wall looking from one to another.

I like getting drawn into the details - the differing facial expression between people behind similar desks in different countries (or vice versa). Or comparing what one has on his bookshelves with another, or what pictures they have on their wall, or drawn to the similar endless piles of papers in different photographs.

And even though for most of us living in N. America or Europe there's something of a slightly "exotic" tinge to most of these, that's more than overridden by the shared experience of bureaucracy and shuffling paperwork.

"Bureaucracy is an everyday form of state power with which citizens are confronted everywhere. Jan Banning has done portraits of bureaucrats at all levels, from village clerks to governors. Although the bureaucrats pose, their desk is the real subject. That is the permanent expression of their status and power. The person behind it is interchangeable, during his working hours assuming the role of immigration officer or revenue agent. That is emphasized by the pose in which he is photographed: as an actor playing himself. THE OFFICE (India/Indonesia, 2004-2006) is a work in progress, eventually to include bureaucrats in ten countries. The series on Bihar, a state in the world's largest democracy, India, is completed; the series on Indonesia has just begun."

I also like Bannig's use of extended captions with these images as well, such as: "Rp Yadav (born 7-8-1970), trained as history teacher, since 3-1-2002 he is sub-inspector of police in Maner Block (125.000 people), Patna district, Bihar. "I would rather have become a history teacher. But look at the unemployment here: I am happy to have a job." Yadav is in charge of 14 policemen. His salary: 10.000 rupees (200 euro) a month. He also has an official residence and car. behind him a plaque with his predecessors' names, to the right the local crime statistics since 1992." (below)

"The loo roll that says I love you"

I posted a while back on Stephen Gill's work and his new books.

One other book on the lists of his I had seen is Anonymous Origami, but I hadn't paid too much attention to it (I've never been terribly enamoured of the whole origami thing).

But the other day I came across this from the Guardian - and apparently it's photographs of those fancy folded little ends to the loo (toilet) roll you get in hotels.

Now, part of me thinks that's a brilliant idea and part of me is going "no way am I buying a photo book about bog paper"...

In the hands of your cookie cutter MFA (post) conceptual artists, this might easily have become deadly, but in the end, although Gill may still not quite have hooked me, the idea still makes me smile:

I was sitting on a hotel toilet one day when I noticed that the corners of the toilet roll had been carefully folded to make a neat, symmetrical point. I realised that it wasn't the first time I had seen this. I'd found toilet paper meticulously folded in hotels and B&Bs the world over, as if to some international standard.

It was a depressing thought. All over the planet, there must be thousands of people - chambermaids and cleaners, I imagine - folding toilet paper for guests. But it also struck me as a remarkable detail: a finishing touch, like a sprig of herbs on a dish, or a cherry on top of a cake...

Over the next three years, I carefully ripped off and collected the folded papers I found in all the hotels I stayed in, from Spain to Canada, New York City to Japan, Britain to Romania. I'd place them between the pages of a book (taking care to preserve the folded edge), carry them back to my London studio and keep them in a box. Then I laid them out on a sheet of dark-grey card, and took photographs, using the same camera and light source each time. Each picture is almost exactly the same, but that very uniformity seems to emphasise the subtle differences between them...

I hope some people will find them interesting, even funny. Others may just see folded bits of toilet roll. But I look at them and see the people sat there in hotel rooms around the world, folding the thin paper into shapes, creating symbols of love, even if no love was actually there... more