And Now Bunnies!

Hiroh Kikai. "A woman who lives alone with her pet." 1974

Sometimes it's just serendipity. I went over to 535 West 22nd to catch up with some of my favorite galleries and guess what? Bunnies!

First stop was the Yancey Richardson gallery where they were getting ready to hang their Hiroh Kikai show, opening later this week. I showed a couple of Kikai's pictures in my "Sander's Children" show and like many photo people was relatively new to the work of this Japanese photographer who has been making deadpan and slightly odd street portraits since the 1970s. You can read and see more about the show here. While it's not in any way typical, I really liked the picture above as well as its title. (All Kikai's titles have that slightly strange Japanese to English idiosyncrasy.)

Photo by Laurel Nakadate

Photo by Laurel Nakadate

Next stop was Leslie Tonkonow and a new show of work by Laurel Nakadate. Mixing video and photography, I was particularly struck by
a pair of shadow pictures of which the above was one, as well as the coincidence of the bunny theme. There is also one extraordinary six minute video of the artist dancing in the desert to the strains of a Bruce Springsteen song. Beautifully filmed in the fading light of day, and with a sense that the artist is dancing herself into a trance, it has the visceral quality that makes good video/performance stand out from so much of the dreck that's foisted on us in the name of art.

Andrew Bush. From "Vector Portraits"

Sadly, no bunnies at Julie Saul where there is a strong new show of Andrew Bush's photos taken along Southern Californian highways in the 90s. I wrote about the work a while ago so you can read about it here.

And for a sneak preview of the Kikai show, here's a picture (below) of the work waiting to be hung. If you click on the picture you can just make out some of the images.

Thank You!

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - a lifelong supporter of photography. (For context read last paragraph below.)

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I truly appreciate the feedback as well as the opportunity to visit many of your blogs. And as you can see it was also a reminder to myself to leave more comments on other people’s blogs.

I’ve been a relatively early adopter of all things web (I started my first blog – so boring it put me to sleep - in 1999) but I’ve always felt that the blogosphere is one of the most genuine and creative forms of expression on the web. It's a community I'm happy to be part of and as I’ve mentioned before, what brought me back was a combination of getting to know The Sartorialist and the much lamented demise of the photographer Alec Soth’s terrific blog.

What I figured out between 1999 when I was doing a general cultural commentary and 2007 when I started to focus on photography was that nobody really cared what I thought about American Idol but they were interested in what I had to say about photography – my field of specialty. You have to speak from the core - at which point you can digress.

And so speaking of American Idol and digressing – this weekend I went to see “Every Little Step”, a documentary currently packing them in Manhattan, that follows the casting of the recent Broadway revival of “A Chorus Line” and interweaves the story of the creation of the original play with the actual winnowing down of the dancers hoping to be cast in the revival. It’s part American Idol goes to Broadway, part exploration of the emotional and physical toll of a dancer’s life, and part the backstory of what was clearly a seminal and transcendant work of American theater. Don’t miss it.

On another subject, if weekend shopping is anything to go by, the recession is roaring to a close. I went with my wife and daughter to buy one of her best friends a bat mitzvah present and wherever we went there were huge lines at the checkout desk. It’s also interesting to see how various stores use photography. Ralph Lauren was a pioneer in this. But the photograph above of Jackie Kennedy came from J. Crew. I only had my iPhone so I apologize for the poor quality snap. You just never know where a great picture is going to pop up!

Weekend Video - The Mentalists

Showing how much it's possible to do with an iPhone, British band
The Mentalists play "Kids" by MGMT on their iPhones and iPod Touches, using only apps downloaded from the Apple Store. (Apps used include Ocarina, Retro Synth, miniSynth, and DigiDrummer Lite.)

Listen Up!

From CuteOverload.com

Sorry, but I had to do something to get your attention!

The question is why are people not leaving comments these days? Or maybe the request is: please leave comments whenever you feel even the slightest bit moved to. They are really what keeps a blogger going. I would have thought that this week there would have been more than one comment on the Gursky photo or more than two comments on the amazing Narduzzi picture of the Byblos Art Hotel.

Maybe it's the weather...

Location

For decorum's sake I held off a week before writing about my new show, but it's one I'm very happy with. The idea for the show was inspired by the photograph above - the interior of The Byblos Art Hotel near Verona photographed by Alberto Narduzzi - which I saw in Wallpaper Magazine a number of years ago and had pinned up on my board ever since.

Frequent attempts to communicate with the photographer were fruitless and then about 6 months ago Narduzzi finally replied to an e-mail. The idea of "Location" had been floating around in my head for a while - the difference between a location photograph and a landscape, the degree to which what I defined as a location shot was a conceptual act - and I was quickly able to pull together pictures and specific sub-themes that seemed to make it work. I won't go on here, but for more details and to see the individual images you can click here to the Danziger Projects website.

There always seem to be points of serendipity in a show like this. In this case it turned out that Esteban Mauchi of Laumont (who made the Narduzzi print) had also printed the Vanessa Beecroft pictures that ring the top of the lobby interior!

Other than that, Melanie Schiff, who I'd been blogging about several times and who I'd met only recently, had just taken a series of pictures of a hidden skate pipe outside of Los Angeles so that gave us the perfect opportunity to do something together. And lastly, Susan Derges, who I once represented but hadn't seen for many years, just happened to be in town from England as we were getting ready to hang the show, and so we got a chance to catch up.

Other than the weather, it's been the perfect start to the month of May.

On the Block

Do you want something cool, chic, imposing, modern, prescient, and sexy? Do you have a spare $200,000 - $300,000? If the answers to both questions are yes, then this 53" x 90" Andreas Gursky, "Untitled IX. 1998", coming up at Phillips Contemporary Art Sale on May 14 might be for you!

In the mid to late 1990s, Gursky turned his attention to the intersection of art and consumer culture with a series of huge color pictures of interior details of various Prada stores. Both Prada and Gursky were cresting waves of re-invention - Prada of its brand and Gursky of contemporary color photography - and the Gursky/Prada photographs are an observation and a commentary of the minimalist fetishism and artistic ambition of high fashion: underwear as expensive as jewelry being displayed like fine art in a store designed to look like a cutting edge museum.

At the time I didn't quite get the pictures - on one level they were a threat to the more classical school of photography I was associated with - but 10 years later, at which point they have already become period pieces, I think they're pretty impressive.

A few more Gursky Prada pictures below, but none as good to my mind as "Untitled IX":

Weekend Video

Like many of you, I loved the movie “Once” which introduced me to the music of Glen Hansard. NPR recently broadcast a concert of Hansard and his co-star and now girlfriend Marketa Iglova on their "Live from the Artists' Den" series and I happened to catch the last half including what I gather is a regular routine where they insert a segment of “Pure Imagination” from "Willy Wonka" into their song “Star Star”!

Unfortunately I couldn’t find that clip but my YouTube search did come up with this tribute performance by 7 year old Ethan as well as the Gene Wilder original and a visually shaky but audio clear Hansard concert clip from littlexwingx07. At 1:40 into the clip you will hear them break into “Pure Imagination”.