Art & Craft Salvaged

The line separating art and craft is blurry in the best of times but every now and then someone comes along who moves so seamlessly between the two worlds one wonders why bother with demarcations in the first place.

Bill Russell is widely known and highly regarded throughout the nation for his vinegar painted furniture, most of it reclaimed and salvaged pieces he strips, paints in intricate vibrant patterns of color and varnishes to a glass-like sheen. They are dazzling tours de force of imagination and execution. No wonder he is known as the Vermeer of Vinegar. (Such is Russell's reputation, he is sought out as much for what he can teach as what he produces, having published a book on his techniques and offering ongoing workshops.)

The "other" Bill Russell was trained as a fine artist and his latest work on view at his studio in Philadelphia represents a distinct departure from the exquisite details and palette of his furniture. Russell is showing four Shields, each measuring roughly 14" wide by 60" tall. Their surfaces are "crudely" carved and the colors used are greatly muted earth tones.

The immediate impression the shields make is that they are primitive in origin, perhaps some African or Oceanic artifact. Indeed, Russell drew inspiration from the shields of the Asmat people of Papua New Guinea. However, he is hardly another sophisticate masquerading as an outsider. On the contrary, he shares something fundamental with the artists who influenced him. The Asmat shields are made from lateral roots harvested from mangrove trees in the swamps. Russell's shields are executed on reclaimed wood, white pine beams in this instance, harvested from local salvage yards. Their pre-salvage use partially explains the shields' dimensions but at the same time clearly suggested their new identities.

The designs are far more crude than the precise or trompe l'oeil ones in Russell's furniture yet they have an underlying order and rhythm to them. Though forced to use techniques diametrically opposed to those required by the furniture, Russell's shields possess a presence that invites close scrutiny and a delectation in surfaces and color...just like the furniture displayed in the rest of his studio.

Ivy-Colored Glasses

Student shows may normally be the exclusive preserve of the academies but the current exhibition at Gallery 339 of works by the 2008 graduating class of Yale's MFA program is this groups' second stop on the pro circuit outside New Haven. The previous stop -- a one week layover -- was at Danziger Projects in New York. The Philadelphia installation will run much longer (through September 6), the "perfect summer show" as principal Martin McNamara put it.

This is a rare opportunity for a wider audience to see what newly minted graduates of a prestigious program are doing. As it turns out, a few of them have already established a presence outside the walls of academe. One among the group, Sarah Stolfa, is represented by Gallery 339 where she had a one-woman show in 2006.

Apart from being classmates, one would expect these photographers to have little else in common but collectively they echo a number of prevalent tendencies. Primary among these is the mania for making big prints that look like photographs are expected to look these days. Small is out and apparently the considerable expense of making huge prints, on student budgets or those of anyone else for that matter, is no obstacle. Also on display here is a love of quotidian subject matter, found or re-concocted, in all its banal glory along with the requisite flat tone of disengagement, especially evident in the works of Ms. Stolfa, Jen Davis and Samantha Contis.

Many images in this show could be easily interchanged with thousands of other anonymous portraits of blank stares, disjointed slices of this American life, and overwrought tableaux vivants but not those of Richard Mosse.

Mosse's enormous compelling photographs of air disaster simulations challenge two canons. Despite their documentary approach, more is decidedly less: we simply don't know what is going on despite their straightforward handling. They also benefit from their size (two editions are available, the larger being 8X6 feet) because huge objects - airliners for example- and overwhelming events - engine fires and oil tank conflagrations -- are involved. In his hands these elements literally constitute an over sized experience. The rest of the show is filled with large prints because bigger is simply the new orthodoxy.

If student life is an inherently self-conscious balancing act between inculcating the lessons of the past while challenging accepted practices of the present the majority of these students have overwhelmingly opted for playing it safe by just trying to look like everyone else.

The Aristocracy's New Clothier

Lavish, indeed extravagant, words have been used to characterize the photographs of Tina Barney, whose work is currently on view at Gallery 339 in Philadelphia through October 27^th. Barney has been called a “chronicler of upper crust society,” cited as an “anthropologist,” and anointed a maker of “cultural artifacts.”

The irony here – wholly unintended on the part of the photographer – is that hers is an impoverished vision rooted in wealth.

Much has been made of Barney’s insider look at well-heeled friends and relatives, yet most of her subjects come off as ordinary and uninteresting. Apart from the stylish trappings visible in many of the images, Barney's circle are truly sphinxes without a secret. If her intention were in effect to say, look, without their clothes and their environments these people are just like you, it seems an enormous amount of effort in aid of little or no insight. If, on the other hand, her intention was to draw attention to differences, the results are literally superficial.

Typical is the picture Marina and Peter, 1997, featuring a sullen-looking young woman in jeans and a tank top, cigarette in hand, standing next to a glum middle-aged man dressed in a pin-striped shirt and tie and leaning on the bed in front of them. Are they father and daughter (likely) or lovers (unlikely)? Whatever their relationship, in the end the picture succeeds in only conveying the subjects’ exasperation and impatience with being photographed. Suggestions that Barney’s unique access to her subjects’ private lives permits her to penetrate their inner sanctums are really beside the point. Having arrived there, what she shows us is nothing of consequence.

The fourteen images in the Philadelphia show entitled World Stage are drawn from three distinct bodies of work: upper crust family and friends from the Northeastern United States(4); aristocratic Europeans (8); and images from Barney’s recent work in China (2). The title is yet another example of word inflation when it comes to Barney's work given how much geography is omitted here to say nothing of classes. Of the three groups, the home grown images remain Barney’s best-known works. These as well as her decade spent photographing affluent Europeans have been described as “chilly depictions” of aristocratic life, but they are so utterly lacking in depth of feeling or expression that whatever chill may have infiltrated the space is quickly taken off by the hot air of hype.

Apart from a few single environmental portraits Barney’s photographs straddle the line between staged tableaux and moments glimpsed without ever plumbing either tradition. Unlike the elaborately planned, painstakingly executed and art historically self-conscious works of Jeff Wall, with whom she is sometimes compared, Barney’s casual arrangements offer up far more aimless standing around than stagecraft. Indeed, her disengaged subjects are often stuck smack dab in the middle of the frame, awkwardly acknowledging the presence of the photographer and looking uninterested in the proceedings.

These images are far too self-consciously presented ever to be confused with snapshots, and too intellectually lazy to be compared with more thoughtful work. What they have in common with the output of many practitioners today is their enormous size, which seems to have been dictated here by the notion that large prints are possible rather than meaningful. According to the gallery’s web site, three editions measuring either 24X30, 30X40 or 48X60 inches are available for a few of the images, while the latter two sizes are available for all the rest. Naturally, the price of each varies in proportion to its measurements.

In the end, banality at any size is still banality.

Constable On A Grand Scale

It has been said a meteorologist could look at a painting by John Constable and tell us precisely what type of clouds are present. The remark is surely meant to compliment the great English landscape painter’s extraordinary attention to detail, especially as regards fleeting phenomena. Though Constable sketched the land and sky en plein air whenever possible, he almost always turned out finished paintings in the studio, making his powers of recollection perhaps even more remarkable than those of his first-hand observations.

Still, exactitude is hardly the whole story of a Constable landscape, as the current exhibition Constable’s Great Landscapes: The Six Foot Paintings, now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington through January, makes clear. Indeed, the real revelation here is his rigorously executed, full-scale preparatory oil “sketches” for these great works whose temporary reunification in Washington marks the first time eight of the twelve large paintings he ultimately produced can be viewed side-by-side with the sketches leading up to them.

Constable did not merely transcribe what he observed; he worked, reworked and then reworked again all of the elements - earth, sky, water, animals, people, buildings, farm implements and equipment - that described early 19th Century rural life in his native Suffolk. Constable’s focus, his obsession really, was the familiar landscape of his youth including the mill owned by his prosperous father, but his ultimate objective with these particular paintings was the decidedly urbane world of the Royal Academy, to whose membership he aspired.

If the Academy routinely disdained paintings of rural life in favor of those that took history as their subject, Constable set out to literally “show them” and thereby prove his worthiness by appropriating the grand scale of the pre-approved subject matter. The six foot paintings, then, would be Constable’s notice to the Academy that his passion for all things rural and parochial could literally occupy a larger, universal stage. Little did the committee know the lengths to which Constable would go to achieve their approbation.

The first of the six foot paintings Constable submitted for the Academy’s annual show was the “White Horse” (1819). The subject – a flatboat or barge bearing a draft horse on the River Stour - was familiar enough, but the scale was a real shocker to 19th Century London audiences. For 21st century audiences, however, the greater eye-opener was how Constable arrived at the final version. He would sketch the initial scene quickly, noting the passing clouds, the drifting currents and slow movement of the barge and its cargo, and then retreat to his studio in London where he would produce a full-scale six foot oil sketch, never intended for public consumption but for private investigation. One cannot overestimate the extraordinary commitment such effort required.

The show asks and attempts to answer what compelled Constable to make these full-sized sketches he never intended to exhibit. The key may lie in his need for a transitional stage from the first-hand sketches by the river bank to the finished canvas submitted to the Academy. These six foot oil sketches were his working canvases, the laboratory on which he could move or remove whole clumps of trees, figures in haywains or patches of sky and clouds and literally see rather than imagine how they worked on such a large scale. In them, the paint was applied quickly, sometimes with a palette knife, the impasto and expressive strokes thickened and more energetic than in the initial sketches and, for that matter, in the finished canvases. This need to know, fundamental to the artist’s investigation, could only be realized by working at the same scale and Constable, to his credit, knew this.

Even then, we are left wondering why Constable didn’t simply paint over these full-sized sketches as artists had always done before him in making their modifications, drastic or otherwise, evidence of which abounds through the X-rays of countless works over the years. One conclusion the viewer might reach when studying these works side-by-side is that for Constable further refinement of the full-sized sketches required a new work, not a reworking; and, indeed, the final versions are substantially different not only in the character of their detail, overall atmosphere and quality of light but in their narrative and emotional implications as well.

Perhaps the enduring irony of the sketches is that though they have a much coarser, hurried look than the final pictures, they stand on their own to such a degree that following Constable’s death, the last full-sized oil sketch he produced, “Stoke-by-Nayland” (1837), was for many years regarded as the finished piece he did not live to paint.

Celebrating Rembrandt

More often than not, museums celebrate the significant anniversaries of great artists with exhibitions culled from their own holdings. Sometimes these assets are modest in number, occasionally limited to a single example - prized or otherwise - while others are truly wondrous in breadth and depth.

The latter is clearly the case with the exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York celebrating the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth.

No institution in North America boasts as impressive a collection of Rembrandt’s etchings as does the Morgan and given the understandable reluctance on the part of most institutions to loan such precious works, it isn’t an exaggeration to say audiences are unlikely to have many opportunities in the future to view a collection of such scope in one place on either side of the Atlantic. After all, these are extremely fragile as well as rare treasures. (To my amazement and delight, the level of illumination in the exhibition space was surprisingly bright given current practices of protecting works on paper from excessive exposure to light.)

All of the great favorites are present in the Morgan’s installation, sometimes represented by more than one state: The Hundred Guilders Print, Christ Crucified Between Two Thieves (“The Three Crosses”); Abraham’s Sacrifice; Christ Shown to the People; Jan Six’s Bridge; numerous self-portraits, portraits, nudes and landscapes. The self-portraits include an amusing series depicting various moods and expressions of the youthful Rembrandt as well as the more familiar unpitying ones of his old age. Also present are the only one of himself and his first wife, Saskia, and the charming Self-Portrait, Leaning on a Stone Wall, in which the 33-year old artist, entering the peak of his financial if not creative powers, strikes a dashing pose wearing an elegant cap and costume.

Rembrandt the printmaker often reworked images numerous times, sometimes taking them through as many as eight states. While museum-goers may be fortunate to attend exhibitions that announce the re-uniting of long-since separated works for the first time in memory, the Morgan possesses a number of examples of these multi-state prints within its own vaults, including rare states of more than a few.

As Rembrandt scraped and re-scraped the copper plates, the images frequently became more animated, the scratches literally being longer strokes in each successive attempt to burnish away the previous state. At the same time their mood often becomes darker, the emotions deeper, with all but the central figure(s) obscured. Figures disappeared altogether in some instances or were completely reversed in others such as a prominently-placed horse in a later state of “The Three Crosses”. Shadows, dramatic from the outset, crept over larger portions of the overall image as seen when comparing an early and late state of The Hundred Guilders Print. And as is always the case in any work by Rembrandt, the light source emanates from within the paper, the glow often becoming warmer with each successive state..

There is no predictable pattern to these re-workings nor its it always the case the overall emotion becomes more evocative with each reworking. In isolation, a single state can and does provide us with the depth of feeling and richness of human observation as well as the dramatic use of light that characterized Rembrandt’s unique vision; however, when comparing two states of The Flight into Egypt, the darker image seems to better capture the feeling of the viewer’s own shadowy observation. In other examples, a later state might revise his retelling of the narrative altogether, such as in the Christ Shown to the People, where the crowds beneath the platform on which Christ is presented, disappear entirely to replaced by two foreboding black arched windows.

The show at the Morgan Library runs through October 1.

Democratic Views

I am not so naïve as to believe that keen interest in the work of minor photographers, even those with artistic ambitions, is not in large measure the product of clever and relentless marketing. However, the current competition (no other word would do in this instance) to sell the work of Mike Disfarmer, a portrait photographer from Heber, Arkansas, takes such strategies to a new heights or depths depending on your point of view.

Two exhibitions of this early to mid-20th century photographer opened the fall season in New York in September, at the Edwynn Houk Gallery and the Steven Kasher Gallery. Two books were also being published in conjunction with the shows.

The fascination with and further beatification of Disfarmer, who died in 1959, focuses on a tried and true critical assessment, that his work is both fundamentally authentic and unabashedly vernacular. But all of this canonization let alone salesmanship wouldn’t have been possible were there not literally thousands of his images, vintage ones at that, newly available to the enterprising dealers involved. Without an ample supply of artifacts, the renewed drive to promote Disfarmer both critically and commercially would have failed from the outset for sheer lack of opportunity.

Prior to this latest rediscovery, Disfarmer’s work was already relatively well-known and celebrated, having been the subject of previous exhibitions and publications as early as 1976. Indeed, Steven Kasher, one of the two collectors responsible for the renewed interest and market, once worked at a gallery that still sells Disfarmer’s prints, but not vintage ones. The Howard Greenberg Gallery owns some of Disfarmer’s glass negatives and has had contemporary prints made from them, but the new trove was made by the photographer himself, always a significant difference both aesthetically and economically.

When news of vintage Disfarmer prints became known to Mr. Kasher and Michael Mattis, another New York collector, the race was on to acquire as many outstanding examples as possible. As it turned out, there were thousands of them to be had because Disfarmer made multiple examples of many of his images of ordinary folk so that several members of their extended families could each own a copy.

The daunting task Mssrs. Kasher and Mattis faced was how to find these pictures, assess their physical condition, and acquire as many of them as they could. As Philip Gefter wrote in the New York Times, to do so Mattis went about it in a particularly imaginative and unique way. He hired local people on the assumption local subjects and owners would be more receptive to their inquiries than those from an outsider, particularly one from the Big City. “He found some scouts by searching for the Heber Springs ZIP codes on eBay, others by word of mouth,” Gefter wrote. These agents required training but soon became quite adept, knowing when to make an offer or pass.

In the end the two dealers acquired roughly 3400 vintage prints, all about the size of postcards. Gefter points out Kasher and Mattis even traded images between them, adding “friendly” to the competition.

The two current exhibitions were culled from these news acquisitions.

What, then, are we to make of the enthusiasms Disfarmer’s work engenders? All of his images are of unimportant people in the grand scheme of things, complete strangers from a strange land that no longer exists, at least not as reflected here, who stare out at us from mostly unassuming poses. Heber, a town of roughly 2000 in Disfarmer’s day, was surrounded by farms. Most current gallery goers will have little if any acquaintance with small town America, especially one in a sparsely settled state. There is nothing quaint about Heber or its residents but there is a quality to them that taps into the current vogue for all things democratic and nostalgic. Physiognomy has literally changed since mid-20th century. Faces today are not nearly as drawn as many seen here; bodies are neither as short nor as slender. Though some subjects mug for the camera, most stand primly, shyly or matter-of-factly, the opposite of today’s more likely in-your-face approach by both subject and photographer.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a culture such as ours, inundated by reality shows of one sort or another, is starved for artifacts and expressions that were not contrived. And yet the experience of going to a portrait studio is always fraught, at least for the subjects. Ultimately, what gives these images their power is not our expectations of them but the subjects’ conviction that the capturing of their likeness will matter, if not to us, certainly to them and their kin.

Disfarmer, on the other hand, had his own ambitions. According to accounts from some of his subjects he fretted over the lighting, almost always natural, in his bare studio, sometimes taking as long as an hour to position his subjects to his liking. There was little if any small talk or attempt to put his subjects at ease. His focus was squarely on the ground glass under the black hood. Most if not all of his customers were used to such treatment from a man they viewed as eccentric.

Mike Disfarmer, nee Mike Meyer, went so far as to change his name in a move seen as more than a little unusual as far as the local populace was concerned. Surrounded by real farmers, Disfarmer’s nom de guerre was more than ironic. If nothing else, it confirmed what everyone already knew about him; he was sui generis.

Below are links to various sites offering samples of Mike Disfarmer’s work:

http://www.disfarmer.com/

http://www.stevenkasher.com/html/artistresults.asp?artist=149

Aspiring Artist

Irving Penn: Platinum Prints, currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington until October 2, 2005, is a surprisingly impoverished show despite its literal use of precious metals.

Penn is best known for his work for fashion magazines such as Vogue, some of which is included here, but this exhibition makes it clear he wasn’t satisfied solely with a reputation in the trades; having spent many a season in commerce, he was determined to be recognized as an artist as well. Despite these loftier ambitions, however, Penn’s work fails to excite the imagination, and, surprisingly, neither does his technique, laboriously executed and dutifully recorded in some of his notebooks that accompany the work.

Walking around this exhibition one finds numerous clues as to the identities of those artists, not just photographers, who inspired Penn. Diane Arbus and August Sander clearly made an impression as did Nadar, Cecil Beaton and Bill Brandt; but so, too, did nearly the entire Surrealist and Dada entourage as well as the great still life painter Giorgio Morandi. Despite these rich and varied sources, the flatterer fails to measure up to the objects of his desire in nearly every instance. In one particularly feeble example, a clumsy still life entitled Composition with Skull and Pear, we even find the “chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and umbrella” played out by proxies including a typewriter, skull and other objects. Unlike the image evoked by the Comte de Lautréamont, Penn’s work falls flat in every regard, vainly substituting clutter for profundity.

Some time in the 1970’s Penn turned his camera toward found objects, more residue from his Dadaist leanings. The results were huge platinum prints of cigarette butts and other urban detritus, lifted as were the originals, literally from the gutter and displaced into a context where one expected to see art. But Penn, seemingly insecure, felt compelled to intervene and fiddle endlessly with the objects themselves (judging by the notes describing his experimentation with the platinum process), turning them into prints of enormous preciousness if not subtlety, unsure whether or not they could stand or their own or, more likely, afraid his own role would go under-appreciated were he to allow them to do so.

Nowhere are Penn’s artistic aspirations more forcefully and unsuccessfully announced than in his regrettable decision, years after the fact, to take the test prints he originally made to learn how to control the platinum process as well as conserve resources (platinum is, after all, expensive) and assemble them as new collages. Why he felt the need to share these fragments, simple by-products of the process, remains unclear. If these were intended to evoke unconscious associations they fail, monumentally, instead underscoring another self-conscious attempt to force new readings where none existed, like some sphinx without a riddle.

The Penn with artistic pretensions is perhaps best known for his portraits of ordinary folk including Hells Angels, the citizens of Cuzco, Peru, and tribesmen from New Guinea. The Peruvian portraits include one of his most famous pictures from the period, that of a very young brother and sister standing in a barren studio consisting of a stone floor and drapery and leaning on a pedestal more than half their size. The visitor to the exhibition is informed that Penn had been in Peru on another matter, traveled to Cuzco and discovered a local portrait studio there. He promptly paid the owner to take a vacation for a few days and leave the studio to him. Once established in his new temporary quarters, Penn turned the tables on the local subjects who ventured in for a session by paying them to pose rather than the other way around. With the exception of the portrait of the two siblings, which derives its notoriety from the dislocating scale, austerity of the surroundings and poses by children that seem at once far more mature than their actual years and much more expressive than those of any of their compatriots, the portraits from Peru lack the vernacular authenticity one would expect the titular owner of the studio no doubt achieved on a regular basis. Penn remains a tourist, fittingly one with money to spend.

What would a Penn exhibition be without true celebrity portraits? These are well-represented here with photographs of Colette, Saul Steinberg, Edmund Wilson, Picasso, and Woody Allen (dressed as Chaplin) among others. But no matter who the photographer, celebrity portraits often present us with little more than an “Ah-ha”experience, affirming previously held perceptions rather than offering fresh perspectives, and Penn’s certainly are no exception to that tradition. His portrait of Alberto Giacometti, carefully composed and scrupulously considered, is nevertheless dull and surprising lifeless, especially when compared to one of the same subject by Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose off-handed, spontaneous approach, succeeds in startling us by seeing Giacometti precisely as one of his own tall, striding stick-like figures.

Penn’s portraits of workers and tradesmen are also dim reminders of those who came before him and were passionate if not consumed by the cataloging impulse. August Sander’s ambitious undertaking to photograph the entire German nation might have resulted in stereotypes of the worst sort were he not fascinated by and intimately familiar with the individuals in front of his lens, not just the categories they represented. Penn’s portraits, on the other hand, are mere shells; the people inhabiting the outfits and lugging the implements of their trades to his studio were merely mannequins on which to hang their props. Come to think of it, in this regard at least he finally if unwittingly closed the gap between his own competing identities.