“Everybody got his suntan of 30,000 watts," said Bob Holman today when he described the experience of the subjects photographed by Chuck Close. In making daguerreotypes of his artist friends, Close decided to compress the light that would normally flow into the camera with a two and a half minute exposure into one second by using intense lighting. Close was thus able to marry the highly detailed low depth-of-field black and white images of daguerreotypes with spontaneity of the subject and clarity in the photograph.

Aperture is displaying daguerreotypes, photogravures, pigment prints, and tapestries by Chuck Close through January 4, 2007. The Aperture Foundation has also put out a book A Couple of Ways of Doing Something with photographs by Chuck Close and poetry by Bob Holman.

In a packed room tonight Holman and Close spoke to Lyle Rexer who began the evening with a small presentation on the interaction between poetry and visual art over the past thousand years.

Holman’s poems that go with the images of the books are from the long tradition of praise poems. Holman described these as coming from the African oral tradition where “as long as the dinars flow so does the praise” (I quote from memory) and usually when the dinars stop flowing one sees the “other side of the poem.”

For each of the portraits featured in the exhibition Holman has a poem (and often a different sort of poem). Rexer showed this slide of one of James Siena’s works and Holman said that he had used the topology of a similar work by Siena for the concrete poem he had written to go with Close’s portrait of Siena. For the portrait of James Turrell Holman has a precise numerical poem that captures the idea of a beam of light.

Close said that his interest in daguerreotypes was partly because of their intimacy. Daguerreotypes capture the subject in a mirror image and hence the image is true only for the subject of the photograph. Because of their book like size daguerreotypes must be viewed by single viewers and are visible only from some angles, therefore there is a natural dialog with the viewer that Close said appealed to him.

The most fascinating aspect of the discussion at Aperture tonight was the extent of collaboration between Holman and Close and the subject of the portraits. Both Close and Holman knew the artists featured in the book. Holman spent time with the artists who are portrayed and was an interlocutor during the making of the picture often (as in the case of Siena and Terrell illustrated above) using the very structure of the poem and its graphic to reveal some part of the subject. Close said he doesn’t have people laughing or crying. He tries to be neutral and believes that the face carries visual indications of the lives that these people have led. In his paintings (which are also made from photographs) he has captured pores and surfaces and with his daguerreotypes now he has given us the blemishes and hair follicles of his friends and what he knows about them.

“A brilliant, sinister time..”

...is how the Metropolitan Museum describes Berlin between the two wars in its Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s. The exhibition will run until February 19, 2007. The galleries feature Otto Dix, Christian Schaad, Max Beckman, and George Grosz among others. Dix’s unflattering portraits of the many people who sat for him were so troubling that one of them, Karl Krall donated it to the Nationalegalerie in Berlin within a few months. Dix, himself handsome like some of his sitters, decided however not to view himself with same distorted vision he applied to the world in painting himself!

Part of the exhibition are two rooms of drawings including one which has several works by Dix of war victims and the horrendous mutilations they suffered. The Met provides excellent background on the period and the ravages that frame the context of the art on display. There were one hundred thousand prostitutes often widows and mothers who had to support their families and over one and a half million wounded permanently disabled soldiers returned to Germany after the war. Little wonder then that George Grosz paints himself in the corner of one of his vast paintings as a man with stumps.

Grosz’ and Dix’s engagement with the larger issues of their time is somewhat like Goya’s work after the Napoleonic invasion of France and the brutalities suffered by the population. Goya in his drawings and etchings never hesitated to show, closely and upfront the cruelties and corruptions embedded in our nature and Grosz and Dix don’t either.

Portraits by Christian Schad provide for a welcome breather. While many of these works have been shown previously at the Neue Galerie,New York in 2003 in the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition, one or two are fresh. Many of the portraits in the exhibition have common themes and common links but in their actual execution there is a breadth of style that makes this show particularly enjoyable.

Sabine Rewald the curator has done an outstanding job putting the hundred pieces of this show together and one can only hope that she will curate something soon that will bring together art from the 1800s with Romantic painters like Caspar David Friedrich or Symbolists like Arnold Böcklin.

Whitney: the pulse of American Art

There is nothing better to shake off New York’s sudden chill and disagreeable gray than a visit to see Kiki Smith’s blacks, whites, grays, papers, jars, and sculpted forms at the Whitney. There is something here for those who seek the conceptual in art and just as much for those who yearn for figurative expressions and myths of yore. Beasts, body parts, chimeras, bodily fluids… Smith has them all. The Virgin Mary is exposed to us minus her layer of skin, like a Body Worlds exhibit, the musculature of the deltoids prominent. Just a few feet away is Mary Magdalene in bronze covered with satyr-hair looking rapturously up at the sky. All around are women and girls, the female of the species, in different stages of development, in moments of exchange and confrontation with other life forms (often animal) and other lives (their own). These women and girls are haunting and beautiful, sometimes damaged, at other moments on the verge of damage. They emerge and regress and recoil. They seek and mourn.

There are all sorts of filters: art history, religion, environmental issues, myth… one can use to interpret Smith’s work. But I found myself looking at the pieces, drawn in by them, responding to them without the clutter introduced by over-thinking. In the different moods they evoke, their beauty and ugliness, their suspension above the air, their textures, their fragility and solidness, I found myself in a one to one dialog with the work itself. So many of these works exist. That is to say, not just as the objects they are but with the full force of life one usually associates with living creatures. The magic of Kiki Smith is that despite (and not because of) the multiplicity of ideas and influences, materials, media, and techniques she uses, she does not lose sight of what lies at the heart of art, life, or things.

Smith is able to use physical matter to do all sorts of work for her. In Pietà her self-portrait with a dead cat, we don’t need the knowledge that this is a self-portrait nor the historical tradition starting all the way from Michelangelo to fully and utterly engage with the emotions of the piece. Smith’s light-handed lines and the surface of the paper (somewhat crumpled) give us an immediate sense of the ephemeral.

Art is always subject to individual interpretation, there is no experience of it outside of the human mind, each viewer’s mind—his particular histories, knowledge, ideas, and moods. Smith approaches the viewer with a check-mate, she comes in at you at all sorts of visual, conceptual, tactile, conscious and sub-conscious levels to draw you out and regardless of the frequency at which you are humming chances are she’s in tune with one of them. She does this over and over again with paper and sculpture, glass and thread, bronze and wax, grey and black and white and silver. Indeed paper itself is no longer paper in her hands, it has dimensionality, sensuality, form. There in lies her genius.

Recent articles on this show appeared in the New York Times and the New Yorker. You can also see some short video clips on PBS of Smith and her work.

Stranger than ficti(*)n

There are so many different layers at which one can choose to relate to the confrontations and connections thrown up in Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction that I want to begin with Autobiography of a Yogi where Paramhansa Yogananda emphasizes the power of the spoken word and our ability to make truth from intention. The novelist Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson) in Forster’s film has killed the protagonist in each of her previous novels. She is now writing about an IRS officer Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) who happens to exist, who is living the life she is describing, and who begins to hear a third person omniscient narrator in the sky deconstruct his days and describe his inner thoughts.

Which of course takes us to something rather more mundane in our own lives: being able to see ourselves for exactly what we are from the outside. In Crick’s case, the novelist’s voice describes how many times he brushes each of his thirty-two teeth but this voice tumbles out of the typed pages of her manuscript into Crick’s ear. For those of you who have seen the film, my question is: Would Crick have seen his life for what it was—somewhat devoid of real pleasure—without this third person narrator telling him exactly what she saw? In other words, did she manage to save him even as she decided to damn him?

Now Kay Eiffel has writer’s block and doesn’t quite know how to finish off her character or her book. In order to get some inspiration she sits around in soggy cold rain, stands at the end of the kitchen table to imagine Crick leaping off a building, visits the ICU of a hospital dissatisfied that the patients are not yet in the throes of death pangs. As the movie unfolds she will come up with the idea of the perfect ending to Harold Crick and therefore potentially produce her best work to date.

Since the omniscient narrator does not stop, Crick sees a psychiatrist (Linda Hunt) who dryly diagnosis schizophrenia but adds that he could see a literary expert. Enter Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman). The professor assiduously makes lists of questions to ascertain which book Crick is playing a part in. The voice has already warned Crick of “his imminent death.” And Crick must now find the author and convince her not to finish him off before she types up her last pages.

Professor Hilbert opines that Crick should choose to die since he must do so one day and by choosing his death now in a book he will be part of a story that will live on forever. Kay Eiffel, meanwhile, is smoking a gazillion cigarettes a day and weeping at how many people she has earlier sent off to an early end. Crick himself is trying to excavate the important things he must do to live his life to the fullest before his time comes.

Well played with many inspired moments this film is a mediation on poetry in our lives and the sometimes inevitable confrontation between life and art. To live more fully we must choose art but for those involved in its creation and consumption there is a real-life price involved. One possibly worth paying…