Leon Bakst

Leon Baskt's costume designs showcase his artistic versatility.

Sokurov and Friedrich

In recent weeks I've delved deeper into the world of Caspar David Friedrich, while putting the final touches on a paper about Russian auteur Aleksander Sokurov. The connection between Friedrich's Romantic landscapes and Sokurov's hypnotic films seemed obvious, and today Botz-Bornstein's Film and Dreams filled in the gaps by examining Friedrich's direct influence on both Sokurov and his sometime mentor Tarkovsky.

Africa

The World Cup saw a burst of interest in all things African. CNN reports that the influx of foreigners stimulated South African art galleries and museums, rather than the local prostitution scene (surprising some). Zwelethu Mthethwa is a photographer who's gaining some worthy attention.

Ron Cronin pt. 1

Every now and then, an artist notices what I've written and gets in touch. I was particularly excited to receive an email from Ron Cronin, whose photographs I featured back in March. D.K. Row's 2008 article is a good introduction to Ron's life and work, and the Augen Gallery features a good selection of his photographs.

A Vietnam vet who claims to "hide behind the bamboo," Ron continues to use his large format camera to capture detailed images of nature. Images like South Falcon Cove Beach (above) demonstrate the richness of his prints, uncovering landscapes that repay long study. Despite his self-proclaimed status as "a sort of hermit homesteader" who grows his own food and still shoots in 8 x 10, his interest in large scale prints has lead him to embrace aspects of digital technology. Enthusing about the potential of Photoshop, he admits that he uses "about 1%" of the computer's capacity.

He's claimed not to study his photographic peers, preferring to draw influence from poets like Yeats or C.E.S. Wood. Nevertheless, he shared his interest in painters from a variety of periods. "Pollock, it seemed to me, made perfect compositions which really had no meaning--just amazing visual fireworks and a definite muscular rhythm." Rejecting conscious imitation, determined to find his own "style of ambiguity," he nevertheless saw Pollock in geology and Constable and Turner in atmospheric storms.

The best artists transcend the aesthetic boundaries of the visual, and someway into our discussion Ron noted that he'd forgotten to mention the relationship between his photographs and the music of Brahms and Beethoven, Schoenberg and Thelonious Monk. He recalled a scene from Ken Russell's film Mahler, where the composer's inspiration strikes in a cabin in the woods. Beyond the literal parallels - the photographer making visual magic on the Pacific coast - Mahler's 'heavy romanticism' speaks to the unfashionable themes of grand ideas and (preciously) fragile dreams. I can't help but notice a touch of the same in Ron's photographs.

Most interesting to me, he recalled the impact Louis Bunce and Carl Morris (above) made on his work. Like Morris or the California painter Edward Corbett (above), Ron's photographs work the complex forms and textures of nature into productively ambiguous images. Remembering the uproar Bunce's airport mural caused in the 50's, Ron describes his abstract geological photographs as an "intentional homage" to the abstract expressionists. I found them 'quietly subversive,' and Ron agrees. "I hope that these are more subversive, in challenging the viewer to see the beauty of what many people think of as threatening--storms and cloudy scenes far removed from what are more familiar views of nature stylistically."

With thanks to Ron for sharing his time and views, I'll leave off with another of his photographs; A Tidepool on Submarine Rock, Ecola. A second installment about our conversation will follow in the next few days.

Hockney and sunshine

It's hot. Real hot. What better way to enjoy the heat than with one of David Hockney's too-cool-for-school pool scenes?

Links

• Conscientious on the 'invisible world' of non-Western photography.
• Roberta Smith on Jakub Julian Ziolkowski's first U.S. show.

David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt has been getting plenty of press lately, as the most sophisticated and best-established photographer chronicling an Africa in flux (the photographic press has been uncriticially singing the praises of anyone fortunate enough to use a camera south of Cairo). Goldblatt has produced a rich and sensitive body of work over the years, which is well worth investigating.

Intriguing...

The Detroit Institute of Art will auction off Custer's flag. The museum's press release:

In 1895, the flag fit in with the wide range of artifacts collected and displayed at that time. It remains, without doubt, an important historical treasure, but has long since ceased to meet current criteria as a work of art. It makes sense for us to sell it for the benefit of the collection.

Interesting to see a museum de-accessioning because an item no longer fits the "criteria as a work of art." DIA seems to be intent on re-defining the role of the 'responsible' institution; either that or it's stretching even further for excuses to turn art into cash.

Deborah Luster

Deborah Luster's photographs of prisoners gain a layer from the backstory behind their creation.

A minor frustration

Critics and bloggers rightly take institutions to task for 'fluffing' trustees and major collectors. Tyler Green often leads the charge, recently skewering the Smithsonian's Rockwell show. As Tyler has written before,

It is always disappointing when art museums with the capability to present art in thoughtful contexts choose not to and instead simply hang art because one person bought it. It’s especially disappointing when a contemporary art museum does it.

On the other hand, I'm always intrigued to see a collection on display. Critical evalations of historic collections have become widely accepted. That aside, I hope that critics like Tyler can judge the Rockwell show on it's own merits, as well as decrying how it came into being.

New living

BLDGBLOG has a great post about floating cities and their potential manifestations (image above from Anthony Lau's student project on a flooded London) and sums up three typical responses to the advancing ocean:

retreating from the coast, defending what we've built there, and attacking the incoming waters with aggressive engineering.

Tomas Saraceno's Lighter than Air exhibition at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston begs to differ. A trained architect, Saraceno uses works like Biosphere 06 (below) to suggest the possibility of engineered co-existence. The audacity of his work (artistic ephemera as a serious engineering proposal flies in the face of the aggressively bureacratic skepticism that continues to cut arts funding) is inspiring. It reminds me of an anthropology class I took ('Ethnography of the Image') where my professor told me that our curriculum had effectively been duplicated at West Point. Aestheticians and radical surrealists like Bataille and Callois are now the philosophical touchstones for the military's urban warfare theorists. Perhaps an encouragement to take Saraceno seriously?

Mark Tansey

Mark Tansey drank deep at the well of Postmodernism and made painting relevant when it had no right to be. Derrida Queries De Man (above) quotes Sidney Piaget's illustration from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's popular Sherlock Holmes stories. Tansey's diversity of sources (high and low art, critical theorists, advertisements) portrays the artist as a kid in a candy store turned curator.