William Eggleston, "Untitled," c. 1975
Whether he's shooting landscape, portraits or still lives, the photos of Memphis-born William Eggleston have a sense of place, and are often labeled with the city they were taken -- "Untitled New Orleans," "Untitled Nashville," etc. He visited New York, meeting contemporaries like Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand, but unlike them he never shot the streets. His is a rural roadside milieu. Born into wealth, he has carried himself like a dandy, affecting capes, driving cars like a Ferrari and a Rolls Royce. In the 70s, he embarked on long road trips, sometimes joined by Dennis Hopper, drinking and shooting photos as they went.
There is a bit of, for lack of a better word, slumming going on: His subjects are mundane in the American vernacular -- drive-ins, grocery stores, strip malls, living rooms. The shots have the casual intimacy of the snapshot, yet there is always something alien or off. He is drawn towards messiness and decay -- exemplified by an early black & white image of a car with one working headlight.
His eye -- and that of his editors (he never culls his own images) -- is drawn toward the freakish in the familiar: the empty stare of the scruffy tie-dye-wearing man sitting in the backseat of a car with a license plate beside him; the old man wearing a suit, sitting on a bed loosely holding a pistol; and the naked man on a sofa, gun rack on the wall. These made me think of Thoreaux's "lives of quiet desperation."
The moments Eggleston captures can be tacky, but without being camp of judgmental: an old woman sitting on a sofa in her untended backyard, her bold dress clashing with bold patterned sofa; the big man with a greased pompadour playing pinball; a young woman wearing a puppy dog t-shirt straddles a fire hydrant, her face contorted, apparently in some kind of religious ecstasy.
This sense of heightened reality also comes from the juxtaposition of bleak scenes with bold color. He was one of the first art photographers to use a dye-transfer printing -- an expensive process theretofore mainly used in advertising that could selectively intensify colors to eye-searing results. This can especially be seen in still lives like a blood red ceiling crisscrossed with a tangle of white electric cords, an open oven door in sickly metallic green and a half-empty bottle of cherry pop on the hood of a car (the latter, a perfect 20th Century American take on the classic still life arrangement).
Eggleston's last major showing in New York, his 1976 debut at the MoMA, launched his career, and kicked opened the door for color photography as serious art -- despite the show getting panned.
In the mid-70s, he experimented with video, modifying a Sony Portapak with infrared tube and documenting the colorful demimonde he encountered in Memphis and on the road. An edited version of this footage called "Stranded in Canton" is included in the retrospective, nicely presented on four CRT monitors paired with stools. There is much drinking, culminating in one scene where a man bites the head off a live chicken. While the video experiments were short-lived, Eggleston's aesthetic has been influential to filmmakers like David Lynch, David Byrne ("True Stories"), Gus Van Sant and Sofia Coppola.
Since the 1980s, Eggleston has been shooting fewer people. The bad news is that his newer work, all tightly-cropped still lives, is suffocating and charmless. The good news is that everything else is sings. At his height, Eggleston had a unique ability to capture the uncanny in the ordinary.
Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Dec. 14)
Giorgio Morandi is thought by many to be the greatest Italian painter of the 20th Century. This is a bit odd considering Morandi's known for contemplative still lives. Brash like Picasso or Pollack, he wasn’t -- on canvas or in his life. Born in Bologna, the shy artist lived with his two sisters for most of his life, rarely traveling outside the city. His style emerged through a friendship with Giorgio de Chirico, and Morandi's early paintings share the metaphysical artist’s proto-surrealist style, down to the bare mannequins. The exhilarating Met survey includes several lovely Cézanne-influenced landscapes and a couple of early self-portraits, but the main attraction is his renderings of objects on a table. He did some traditional arrangements of roses, shells and such, but Morandi's breakthrough idea was fashioning semi-abstracted forms -- bottle, box and cylinder -- painted-over Platonic objects that he grouped as models in his studio and painted. The results often have the deliberately imperfect look of Japanese
wabi-sabi ceramics with wavy outlines. The palate is muted, mostly limited to grays and browns. This flattens the image. There is just enough tonal variation and highlights to keep the illusion of three dimensionality and volume. The paintings must be seen in person -- reproductions just don't do them justice. Morandi followed this formula for decades, creating a monomaniacal fugue of still lives. The variations evolved towards abstraction until his final paintings look like Rothkos (although his true artistic beneficiary is
Wayne Thiebaud).theanyspacewhatever at the Guggenheim Museum (-Jan. 7)
Relational aesthetics seems like a good idea -- an arts movement about tweaking the relationship between artist and viewer and even rethinking places like museums, galleries, biennials, etc. Rirkrit Tiravanija was one of its original instigators, best known for cooking meals for gallery goers. Now he's one of 10 artist-friend-collaborators in what is the Gugg's confoundedly awful "anyspacewhatever" show. His main contribution? An Illy-branded coffee stand that resides somewhere near the top of the spiral. The caffeine does little to overcome all the half-baked tackiness. The most memorable object is a rotating bed, which could be reserved at luxe hotel rates for overnights at the museum (a couple critics, including Jerry Saltz, took the bait). Most representative, however, is a tedious video of Tiravanija and his friends, including a few other art luminaries such as Elizabeth Peyton, as they hang out and shoot the shit. Did I metion you have to remove you shoes and sit on pillows to watch? Whatever is right.
The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Feb. 1)
The Met’s farewell to Philippe de Montebello is a microcosm of the museum itself, stuffed with exquisite objects of the most diverse kind. Celebrating the treasures acquired during the museum director's 31-year tenure, the show features remarkable juxtapositions. For instance, Baroque statuary with a Francis Bacon, a Balthus lolita with
Guercino's "Sampson Captured by the Philistines," or 15th Century playing cards and a Rothko. The show also reveals visitors' own favorites. With some guilt, I skimmed over much of the non-European objects, although there are amazing examples from the Americas, Asia, Africa and on. My overall favorites were Thomas P. Anshutz's handsome 1907 John Singer Sargent-style oil portrait "A Rose," and Joachim Wtewael's fleshy dayglow "The Golden Age" (see image at left) and Rubens' oil of the painter with his wife and child -- one of de Montibello's favorites. While remarkably inclusive, the show also reveals some gaps in the museum’s collection, particularly the scarcity of any art other than photos from the last 50 years, the Bacon excepted. Thinking about this show, I'm reminded of all the times I've visited the museum, beginning sometime in the mid-70s. While I've never met the man, I have to wonder, how much as my taste been influenced by Philippe de Montebello?
Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (-Jan. 7)
I had always thought of Catherine Opie as a lesbian Mapplethorpe who documents and celebrates the gay, transgender and s&m cultures. One of her best known works is a self-portrait with the word “pervert” carved raw into her chest. But as this seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim shows, she is so much more. Even her most sexually provocative images exude a warmth and vitality missing in Mapplethrope’s brutal black and white formalism. This difference becomes more pronounced in her newer work. Adjacent to the “pervert” photo, is a more recent matching shot of Opie breastfeeding her son. The scar from the self-inflicted wound can still be seen, but the focus is motherhood and domesticity. Her photos documents her family life -- such as with one of her son in a pink tutu (see image at right) -- and other lesbian households with and without kids. My favorite series in her diverse body of work are landscapes that have nothing to do with sexual preference -- such as black & whites of lovely curving highway overpasses and on-ramps. Best of all are her recent images of surfers and ice fishing shacks. Brilliantly installed on opposite walls, the images illustrate how communities pull individuals together.
New York, N. Why?: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937–1940 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Jan. 4)
In 1940, Swiss photographer Rudy Burckhardt and his pal, poet Edwin Denby collaborated on a book celebrating the city where they lived -- New York. The work was created on aimless walks, which they sometimes took with their Chelsea neighbor Willem de Kooning. I didn’t have much patience for Denby’s poetry or for Burckhardt’s dogs-eye-view photos of pedestrian legs, fire hydrants and so on.
George Tooker: A Retrospective at the National Academy Museum (-Jan. 4)
George Tooker was trained at the Art Student’s League by social realist Reginald Marsh, where he developed a style known as American Magical Realism. Taking the psychologically tinted real-life representations of Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, he adds a hallucinogenic and cartoonish quality that is heightened by bright colors of egg tempera painting method of Piero della Francesca. Tooker's work of the 50s and 60s has an element of social critique, taking on broad subjects like alienation. One of his more famous works, which is owned by the Whitney, portrays the fear of a woman on her own in a subway station. Another conveys the bureaucratic oppression of waiting in line for what might be the DMV. A third, a menacing grid of office cubicles with no way out. Tooker's art also increasingly takes on non-political themes. A 1940s painting depicts a group of young men and women under a Coney Island boardwalk that references traditional imagery of Christ's crucifixion (see image at right). Tooker also made paintings of his Puerto Rican and African-American neighbors -- mainly homoerotic images of shirtless men in their windows. While there's nothing earth-shattering about this work, there is something refreshing about his allegiance to representation, like a gay Norman Rockwell.
"The Combat of Love and Chastity" by Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora (Florentine, 1444/45-1497), Probably 1480s, Tempera on panel, The National Gallery of Art, London
"It promises romance, desire, youthful beauty, ritual, expensive gift items and possible sex in the land of Romeo and Juliet. It delivers on all counts. But the exhibition, at the Metropolitan Museum, is not an unbroken string of masterpieces. It has its ups and downs, both visual and emotional. It mixes happy endings and cautionary tales and, toward its finish, throws in some Renaissance pornography. ... The works here reveal the ease with which Christian and neo-classical motifs mingled in secular arts during the Renaissance; the centrality of painting as both record and decoration; and the extent to which weddings were big business for artists who found themselves between religious commissions." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes
"It's in the decorative and printed arts that this exhibit surprises, coming alive with a gossipy, almost Boccaccio-like love of the commonplace." -Dan Bischoff/Star-Ledger 
