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General arts and culture posts

Bruce Nauman revisits Contrapposto at Phildelphia Museum of Art

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Video still from Bruce Nauman’s “contrapposto studies, i through vii,” 2016. Credit Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Sperone Westwater, New York

In 1968 American artist Bruce Nauman created an important early video work, Walk with Contrapposto, in which he walked down a corridor while jutting his hip out step by step, in an exaggerated and animated demonstration of the classical Greek sculptural pose contrapposto. In the past two years, Nauman returned to this subject matter in a series of seven works now featured in the exhibition “Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies, I through VII” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The museum also exhibits the original 1968 video work, and the contrast between the earlier and later works is stark.

Installation shot at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bruce Nauman, Contrapposto Studies, I through VII

Installation shot at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bruce Nauman, Study in Contrapposto, 1968

The original experiment in contrapposto is shown on a TV screen in the center of a small, darkened room. On the tiny screen, a fuzzy black-and-white image of a youthful, lithe body is seen awkwardly and methodically pacing down a tall, narrow white corridor, one hip jut at a time. The viewer observes the figure’s back as Nauman walks to the end of the corridor away from the viewer as well as from the front as he walks toward the viewer. The spectacle is simple and slow, making sculptural conventions ridiculous and exploring how video could be used by an artist to implicate the audience in uneasy relation. The viewer is not confronted as directly as in some works Nauman would make in the following immediate years, such as Live-taped Video Corridor of 1970, but the voyeurship of watching the artist and his body presented in new terms the relationship between the viewer and traditional sculpture. Using the then-new medium of video makes the relationship more circumspect than that of, say, performance. That is especially true today, when such grainy small footage reminds the contemporary viewer more of security cameras than televisions. Overall, the impression is stilted and highly focused. Tension comes from the way the body fills the narrow corridor, which directs him along the only possible path he could walk on. The performance is durational; if you watch carefully, he tires over the course of the hour–the length of video cassette tape at that time. The only sound is that of his footsteps in the otherwise empty space.

In his recent works, Nauman again walks back and forth methodically jutting out an opposing hip, step by step. In both the early and later works, the same person walks in the same way in the same nondescript outfit of white t-shirt and jeans. If his earlier body resembled that of the classical Greek sculpture, his aged body is by comparison less nimble and heavier. But the more arresting difference is the technology used: Nauman has updated to large color digital projections that he manipulates. The simple moving image of 1968 becomes compounded into several similar but competing images in the same field, projecting across from competing images, sliced through horizontally more and more while the sound of footfalls is layered to build into a cacophony. In some of the works, Nauman shows the image in color and its negative. The overall effect is a blurring of action and sounds, complicating the action of a single body in motion as if someone had made video collages from a Muybridge strip of a man walking.

Installation shot at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bruce Nauman, Contrapposto Studies, I through VII

Certainly, the works reflect the technology of their times. One could argue that these new studies as merely translating the original 1968 video into new technologies. However, the meaning of the work itself also splinters under such digital manipulation. Where before the viewer had to wait to watch Nauman pace first down the corridor, and then back, here he approaches the viewer simultaneously, rendering his movements in positive and negative, forward and backward, within a single field of vision. The relationship of the viewer to the artist is easier, somehow, because your vision is free to roam over the many iterations of Nauman’s figure rather than limited to an unending tunnel. The viewer is now immersed in the large-than-life projections, implicated in the scene by the presence of some stools scattered throughout the gallery. The change in setting from the corridor to wide room loosens the sense of constriction; in the newer work, there is a sense of freedom and play. Where the young body became tired, the aged body seems in perpetual motion of recombination. What you gain is a kind of humanity alongside the deadpan, unblinking honesty that characterizes much of Nauman’s work.

“Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies, I through VII” is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through April 16, 2017.

Marubi Studio: Early Albanian Photography at FOAM in Amsterdam

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Imagine my surprise: last month while visiting FOAM, a photography center in Amsterdam, I caught the last days of Dynasty Marubi: A Hundred Years of Albanian Studio Photography–an exhibition based on an archive in northern Albania that I happened to have visited in the summer of 2013. Curated by Kim Knoppers in collaboration with Luçjan Bedeni, Director of the Marubi National Museum of Photography in Shkoder, Albania, this exhibition is one of the first times the images have been shown so far from their hometown and the only time that the original glass negatives have left Albania. The incredible collection of over 150,000 glass plate negatives from three generations of the Marubi studio documents the social life of northern Albania from the decline of the Ottoman Empire, to independence, to the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha.

Self-portrait of Kel Marubi with his Wife in the Studio, no date, Silver gelatin dry process on glass.

Self-portrait of Kel Marubi with his wife in the studio, undated. Silver gelatin dry process on glass

Photography provided a modern form of self-fashioning that citizens of Shkoder took to with seeming abandon, perhaps surprisingly given the partially Muslim population and Islam’s prohibition on figurative images. Kel Marubi uses the photograph above to tell us about his respectable profession (the background replete with the latest technology in cameras), his marriage (his wife prominently sharing the space and mirroring his posture), and his national pride (the traditional clothing identifies them as Albanian). The couple sits in front of the painted backdrop that appears again and again in these images.

Kel Marubi, Catholic veiled women, Shkoder, c. 1890-1918

Consider the strangeness of the portrait of two women pictured above. Perhaps it would be more apt to call it a cipher of a portrait, for the women in their traditional modest dress are fully covered from head to toe, even their faces. If a portrait is usually made to capture the likeness of an individual, here all distinguishing attributes are covered. The doubling of their postures also suggests something uncanny to the modern eye. Curiosity about this lesser known part of the world among Europeans created a secondary market for the images to be reused in postcards, and a portrait like this one gained a second function documenting the traditional costume of the region. The postcard above, stamped with Kel Marubi’s name, reads “Memory of Shkoder” across the bottom.

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Three generations of technically advanced photography took place in Shkoder because Pietro Marubi fled there because of political trouble in Italy. He opened a commercial photography studio in Shkoder in 1856. Pietro originally used the collodion wet plate process that had been invented only five years before. He created commercial portraits for cartes de visites, views of the town and countryside, studies of people, and technically inventive collages. Pietro took on a local youth named Kel  as an apprentice. Kel took the surname Marubi and continued the business, and later Kel’s son Gegë would took over the business from him. On the cutting edge of photography, all three members trained in centers such as Trieste and Paris and were keen to experiment, as evidenced by the early examples of collage, stereoscopic techniques, and, later, infrared photography.

Installation view of early collages, above, and glass plate negatives in the vitrine at FOAM

Although an enormous archive of over 150,000 glass plate negatives remain, almost no original prints do–they were all sold, either to the commissioner or to a newspaper (e.g. The London Illustrated News and L’Illustration) or as a postcard. If Pietro Marubi began taking photographs in and around Shkoder during the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, which ended in 1912, first Kel and later Gegë Marubi continued his legacy into the Communist period beginning in 1946. Gegë eventually donated the archives to the state and worked on their preservation until the end of his life. The world changed dramatically during this time, but the photographs attest to continuity as well as rupture; throughout one sees the traditional regional clothing, rocky landscapes, and painted backdrops that accommodated all kinds of sitters.

Live Culture: Slavs and Tatars at Tanya Bonakdar

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Reader, I drank it. A gallery employee filed a copper tumbler with a ladle of thin white liquid topped with an airy foam he especially fished out for me from the metal cart pictured above. This is the last week to visit the exhibition “Slavs and Tatars: After Pasteur” at Tanya Bonakdar gallery, where the artists have installed a bar of drinkable Turkish yogurt in a room of playful sculptural objects (don’t sit on the cots!) lit by pink and green neon. This interview with the collective Slavs and Tatars explains its origins as a reading group in 2006 interested in historical political and cultural threads in the Balkans and Caucuses. From those activities of reading, publishing, and disseminating texts developed the method of artistic presentation for trans-cultural histories on view here: a method that is playful rather than pedantic and associative rather than analytical. At least, this is part of the context for “Afteur Pasteur,” which claims to “challenge our understanding of the self through the unlikely relationship with bacteria and the microbe, the original Other or foreigner.”

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On the upper floor of the gallery, the artists show works from two ongoing series among others. Pictured above on the left, the Kitab Kebab series offers books as a “talismanic digestive, a mashup of narratives and texts to be appreciated as much through the gut as the mind.” If it’s not clear from the image, the books have been pierced through with a skewer, brutally violating and connecting texts from different cultures in a mock up of the region’s notably violent history. So, not just a light lunch for a bookworm. Pictured above on the right, colorful plastic plaques riff off of Marcel Broodthaers’ “Poèmes industriels” in form, but do so to compare the inherent power dynamics of languages through semantically off-kilter juxtapositions and one-liners.

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With all the value there is to a more playful approach, I wonder who is getting the joke? All the objects in the exhibition are beautifully produced and cleverly described. But the jokes rely on a cross-cultural knowledge of complex regions of the world that are difficult to make sense of, even for the people living there. Thus the original book club, with its research and publications, seems very much missing from this exhibition and very needed.