Garry Winogrand Retrospective in The Paris Review

Winogrand

Richard Woodward reviewed the Garry Winogrand retrospective at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, writing that Winogrand would have found ample subjects to photograph at the opening:

 Looking around the opening, it was hard not to compare the people in the photographs with the crowds in the galleries. Gray-haired or balding though his friends are now, the reason for parties doesn’t change. There were still men in black tie (the ideal outfit for a photograph in monochrome) and women in slinky dresses, and the defining public gesture of the evening and our day—hunched figures of all ages staring importantly into their smart phones—suggested that, were Winogrand alive, modern America would give him plenty of material to work with.

From The Paris Review online posting on May 13, 2013.
For more information on Winogrand’s work and publications, visit his artist page.

Christian Marclay in Art Practical

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Alex Bigman reviewed the correlations between Christian Marclay’s current exhibition “Things I’ve Heard” at Fraenkel Gallery and the concurrent screening of “The Clock” at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:

By and large, Marclay’s oeuvre is marked by a penchant for creative destruction. He has broken and re-assembled vinyl records (Recycled Records, 1980–86), torn up photographs (Fourth of July, 2010), videotaped the death rattle of a Fender Stratocaster dragged along a dirt road by a truck (Guitar Drag, 2001), unfurled and flung the magnetic tape from music cassettes to make Pollock-esque photograms (Cyanotypes, 2008), and, of course, fragmented and sutured countless film narratives to make The Clock. Things I’ve Heard is interesting for the very reason that, being a straightforward collection of photos, it is in no way destructive. More than being constructive, though, it is rather suggestive, operating on a simple ontological principal of photography articulated by Jean-Pierre Criqui in his essay on Fourth of July:

A photograph can exist only on the condition that it separate itself from an out-of-frame space which it simultaneously cancels and evokes. These fragments emphasize the fact: a photograph hides as much as—if not, strictly speaking, more than—it shows.

From the Art Practical online posting in May 2013.
For more information on Marclay’s work and publications, visit his artist page.

Darius Himes Interviews Yolanda Cuomo in The Photobook Review

The Photobook Review

Fraenkel Gallery director, Darius Himes, interviewed designer Yolanda Cuomo about her first involvements with art books and the amazing stories that followed.

Darius Himes: I’d Love to talk about everything that surrounded the Diane Arbus exhibition Revelations, its accompanying catalog and The Libraries, which spun off of that endeavor. It was a massive design project.

Yolanda Cuomo: It became an eight-year project and our entire building—each floor of the two carriage houses that comprise my studio—was filled with things related to Arbus. Neil Selkirk, who shares the studio with me, was printing her work in the basement, models for the exhibition were being built on the second floor, and book design was happening on the third floor. It was an amazing time. Every Thursday for four hours Doon Arbus and I would go up to a cold-storage warehouse on the Upper West Side and look through boxes and boxes of Arbus’s contact sheets. I felt like I was living inside someone else’s head, seeing through her eyes.

From The Photobook Review Issue 003 in Fall, 2012.
To purchase The Photobook Review or subscribe to Aperture Magazine, visit their website.
For more information on Arbus’s work and publications, visit her artist page.

From the Archives: Sol Lewitt at the Indianapolis Museum of Art

This video, produced in 2012 by the Indianapolis Museum of Art for the installation of a Sol LeWitt wall drawing, interviews Lisa Freiman, the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art as well as the team involved in completing LeWitt’s instructions.

He viewed himself very much like a composer of music. It was the written instruction along with the diagram that actually was the work of art—and then subsequent artists could reinterpret and re-execute that original score.—Lisa Freiman

From the Indianapolis Museum of Art online video posting on November 15, 2012
For more information on LeWitt’s work and publications, visit his artist page.

Christian Marclay: Things I’ve Heard


Christian Marclay walked through his current exhibition, “Things I’ve Heard” and explained his process of recording the world visually and aurally:

For me photography has a lot to do with recording. It’s a different type of recording—instead of recording sound you’re recording the image, the visual part.

From the Fraenkel Gallery online video post on April 4, 2013.
To learn more about Marclay’s work and publications, please visit his artist page.

From The Archives: Christian Marclay in The New Yorker

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Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” opens today at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In this twelve page article, Daniel Zalewski explains the painstaking 3 year process that Christian Marclay went through in order to create the marathon video piece:

At first, he was merely collecting scattered files, but eventually he had enough to forge ‘hinges’ between them. The more hinges he came up with, the more inventive they got. At 10:30 P.M., Marclay realized, a shot of David Strathairn, delivering the news as Edward R. Murrow in ‘Good Night, and Good Luck,’ could slide into Dustin Hoffman, in ‘Tootsie,’ watching television. To create continuity, the Murrow dialogue was extended into the ‘Tootsie’ clip, at muffled volume. Marclay relished such sly incongruities.—Daniel Zalewski

From The New Yorker online posting on March 12, 2012.
Christian Marclay’s current exhibit, “Things I’ve Heard,” is on view from 29 March–25 May, 2013.
To learn more about Marclay and his work, please visit his artist page.

Garry Winogrand in ARTnews

Winogrand

In this article from ARTnews, Hilarie M. Sheets discusses Garry Winogrand’s first retrospective in 25 years, what it meant for Leo Rubinfien to posthumously edit the 6,600 rolls of unproccessed film and whether Winogrand would approve of the selection.

Garry Winogrand was like a hunter with his camera, ever prowling the crowded streets of New York and the roadways of the nation for the happenstance of human incident. His best-known images from the 1960s—of beautiful women, businessmen, animals, and American spectacles of all kinds—teem with ebullience, humor, and haphazardness. These were qualities shared by the gregarious man himself, who was promoted by the influential Museum of Modern Art photography curator John Szarkowski as the “central photographer of his generation.”

From the ARTnews online posting by Hilarie M. Sheets on March 27, 2013
To learn more about Winogrand and his work, please visit his artist page.

“The Unphotographable” in Interview Magazine

Marclay

Rachel Small of Interview Magazine spoke with Jeffrey Fraenkel about “The Unphotographable,” his inspiration for the exhibition, and what “unphotographable” thing he wishes he could see photographed.

A glimpse at The Unphotographable will give you an understanding, or a fair lack thereof, of its contents. “The cover is itself, with nothing on the cover,” explains editor Jeffrey Fraenkel, who curated a show of the same name at his eponymous San Francisco Gallery earlier this year. “You will know it when you don’t see it,” he concludes of the hard-to-pinpoint subject matter in the introduction.

From the Interview Magazine online posting by Rachel Small on March 25, 2013.
To learn more about “The Unphotographable” exhibition and catalog, please visit the exhibition page.

From The Archives: Garry Winogrand’s Photographs of the 1960 Democratic National Convention in The New York Times

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Last year, The New York Times posted a collection of Garry Winogrand’s photographs taken at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. Despite being surrounded by politicians and celebrities, he seemed to focus more on the crowd of admirers than the people everyone was trying to get a glimpse of.

Garry Winogrand took this iconic photograph of John F. Kennedy during his acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. Until recently, it was the only Winogrand photograph from the convention that had previously been published.—Julie Bosman 

From The New York Times online posting by Julie Bosman on April 19, 2012.
To learn more about Winogrand and his work, please visit his artist page.