International Center Of Photography Review- Less Exhibit Than Pinterest Board
The reopened ICPs disagreeable first depict junks art history and simply aggregates images ranging from Cindy Sherman to Kim Kardashian selfies
Is photography simply a recording apparatus, or is it an art? Does the camera record truthfully, or does it deceive? Merely a few decades ago those were the questions that animated Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and “the worlds largest” thinkers about photographs and photographers. How dated they seem now. Photography has become something new a ubiquitous thing, a duller thing, a thing we snap a hundred times a day on a device with a hundred other functions.
The International Center of Photography in New York, founded in 1974, was at the vanguard of those earlier debates about the situation of women the camera arts. It now reopens in a new home on the Bowery once a tumbledown street , now home to ever more galleries and shops and with, it seems, a new orientation. The new ICP wants to look beyond art photography and photojournalism to drone visions, Snapchat effluvia, and all kinds of images attained with a lens and illumination. If it does so thoughtfully, ICP could become a new kind of museum. But wow, does it have a route to go to get there.
ICP was first housed in a Fifth Avenue townhouse, where its founder, the Magnum photographer Cornell Capa, advocated for photojournalism with a humanistic bent.( His brother, Robert Capa, shot one of the best-known and most disputed war photographs of all time: a soldier fighting for the Republican during the Spanish civil war, limbs thrust back at hes fatally shot .) Later, in 2001, the museum endeavoured to Midtown, where it grew more engaged with photography as a fine art; ICP also opened a school, enrolling thousands of students a year.
The lease on the Midtown space operated out, and now ICP has taken up in the ground floor and basement of a condominium designed by the architects Skidmore, Owings& Merrill. At 11,000 sq feet, it is technically larger than the previous space, but careless design stimulates it seem unwelcoming. The ground-floor space, with a panoramic window onto the Bowery, is wasted on an oversized vestibule and a twee caf. Worse are the disciplinary basement galleries, harshly illuminate and hung with Ikea-style drop curtain, and in several cases saddled with low-slung drop ceilings. Disconcertingly, ICP has set aside no space at all for its substantial permanent collection of more than 150,000 photograph. They are housed, instead, in a facility across the river in New Jersey.
So the new build is a frustration. But the first show is even more of one. Public, Private, Secret, organized by the curator Charlotte Cotton, purports to be a cross-disciplinary investigation of how we present ourselves through images. It yokes together artists and straight photographers, from Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andy Warhol to Martha Roslerand Sophie Calle, with iffier contemporary offerings, plus mugshots, paparazzi snaps, and YouTube uploads. Many of the images are obliging, but the show itself is disagreeable and methodologically vacant, junking art history and putting nothing in its place.
Instead of thinking about images via juxtapositions and visual debate, the show merely aggregates. Art works and reproductions, considered imagery and throwaway snaps, are thrown together pell-mell. What few pairings are in evidence often feel shallow. One of Cindy Shermans untitled movie stills, in which the artist seems smoking in the bushes like a surprised ingnue, hangs next to a video of Kim Kardashian selfies.( The Sherman is not a vintage print, but a reprint from a decade after she made the work in 1979.) This is an exhibition that should have remained a Pinterest board.
There are some strong contributions from younger artists such as Jill Magid and Martine Syms, but also too many works that do little more than remind us that the internet is full of wacky videos and narcissists. Jon Rafmans 2014 video Mainsqueeze is little more than a clip reel of fetishistic videos of the sort youll find on 4chan: a woman crushing a crayfish with her foot, or a guy in a frog costume and rope bondage. The video, along with three others, is projected in poor illuminating conditions, and would have seemed better on screens. Elsewhere the hang is careless to the point of antagonism. Mirrored walls offer a jejune allusion to our selfie preoccupation. Laurel Nakadates well-worn photos of herself in tears are hung, strangely, at knee height. Obligating portraits of women during the Algerian war are misused when hung against a printed mural of unrelated mugshots.
Worst of all are custom screens, in the now obligatory square format of Instagram, that do nothing more than rub social networks for recently posted images. I suppose, if you have never clicked a hashtag before, you may be surprised to discover that a lot of people take selfies or post pictures of other people. One screen has been programmed to feature images tagged #hotness; it hangs next to photos by Larry Clark of kids in flagrante. Another presents a stream of people whove been missing, tagged trying this person or trying to identify. One amalgamates the search terms transgender( I watched Caitlyn Jenner) with plastic surgery and weight loss offensively implying that asserting ones gender identity is nothing weightier than a makeover.
Social media imagery could have a place in the museum, if it formed part of a thoughtful argument. But these screens do nothing but assert in the most literal style possible that we live in a world with plenties and lots of images. It may be telling that this frivolity was conceived not by an artist or a photography curator, but by a corporate veteran named Mark Ghuneim whose branding startup was acquired by Twitter.( In a bizarre interview, Cotton calls: I cant think of another human being other than you that could have made this happen, Mark! No other human beingcould have programmed a bot to scrape some hashtagged JPEGs ?)
If ICP wants to turn its back on art history( and its own collection ), and conceive of all images as equally valid elements of one giant image stream, thats its prerogative. But then do something with that vision; dont junk art history only to reproduction the web! The role of a 21 st-century photography museum should be to analyze, synthesize, and historicize our understanding of todays dispensation of images, rather than just to replicate the products of the search engine and the hashtag. A museum, this museum, must be so much more than an aggregator more than a collect of JPEGs to be fleetingly contemplated before we swipe past.
Read more: www.theguardian.com
International Center Of Photography Review- Less Exhibit Than Pinterest Board
International Center Of Photography Review- Less Exhibit Than Pinterest Board
International Center Of Photography Review- Less Exhibit Than Pinterest Board
International Center Of Photography Review- Less Exhibit Than Pinterest Board
International Center Of Photography Review- Less Exhibit Than Pinterest Board