Sally Mann, "Was Ever Love," 2009. Gelatin silver print, 15 x 13 1/2 inches (38.1 x 34.3 cm), Ed. of 5. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

“I am not too sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamt it.  Memories quite as much as dreams arouse in me the strongest feelings of the unreality and ephemerality of the world.” — Eugene Ionesco, Past Present, Present Past

There are times when Sally Mann’s photographs seem to hover in a state between private dream and shared memory, simultaneously conveying a sense of the personal and the communal within the same pictorial field. This liminal aspect is on full display in Proud Flesh, the artist’s current exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York.  The show consists of thirty-three photographs by Mann, who has turned her photographic gaze exclusively toward her husband of four decades, Larry.

Using her signature wet-plate collodion photographic process, Mann photographed her husband over a six-year period. Shooting in close-up as he posed nude in her largely unadorned and rustic studio, the resulting images depict fragments of Larry’s naked body—and often little more—in a shallow pictorial space. The simplicity of Mann’s images is balanced by her use of the wet-plate process, which adds a warm tone to the surface of the photographs and leaves a distinctive layer of residual marks, pocks and other imperfections, all of which introduce an air of delicacy and ephemerality to these nude studies.

The outward simplicity of these photographs, however, belies a deeper complexity, for on the one hand, they are intimate studies of her husband’s naked, vulnerable body (Mann has described these images as being “like one big caress”), yet they also somehow remain familiar, accessible. What allows for these otherwise private portraits to read as familiar is, I propose, twofold.

First, Mann’s wet-plate process, and its strong associations with nineteenth-century photography, imbue her photographs of her husband’s body with a sense of a remote yet familiar past. It is as if one were regarding anonymous nineteenth-century photographic portraits in a museum or archive, where the absolute anonymity of the individuals depicted grants a certain freedom and license to the viewer’s scrutinizing gaze.

What further renders Mann’s otherwise intimate photographs readily accessible is their insistently referential, albeit elusive nature. This is to say that alongside the effects of Mann’s technical means, a sensation of vague familiarity is fostered in the photographs by the artist’s particular positioning and cropping of Larry’s naked body. The result is a series of nude studies that register as oddly familiar, referring as they do to Edward Weston’s soft-focus pictorial studies, nineteenth-century postmortem and war photography and, further, to classical tradition, specifically to the statues and statuary fragments of antiquity depicting stoic, dying figures (the titles of Mann’s photographs of her husband abound with evocative references to the antique and especially to classical myth). It is precisely these evocative associations with tradition, but yet to no one source in particular, that lends these intimate and private photographs of Mann’s husband an air of the familiar, public.

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Sally Mann, "Hephaestus" (2008), Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

• Proud Flesh is up through October 31 at Gagosian Gallery.  Sally Mann‘s (Season 1) new body of work focuses on a photographic study of her husband, taken over a period of six years. Proud Flesh “suggests a profoundly trusting relationship between woman and man, artist and model that has produced a full range of impressions – erotic, brutally frank, disarmingly tender, and more.”

• Sally Mann is also in the group exhibition Hide & Seek: Picturing Childhood at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which opens this Saturday.  The show focuses on photographs of children “as collective memories of childhood itself—a phase of life to which we can never return.”  This long history represented in Hide & Seek also includes images by Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Käsebier, Lewis Hine, Helen Levitt, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Emmet Gowin, Wendy Ewald, Sage Sohier, Julie Blackmon and Gloria Baker Feinstein. Through Feb. 21, 2010.

• The 10th Biennale of Lyon opened last week and includes projects by over 50 artists, including Art21′s Oliver Herring (Season 3) and Barry McGee (Season 1). Themed The Spectacle of the Everyday, this year’s situationist version is curated by Hou Hanru. Through January 3, 2010.

• James Turrell‘s solo show Large Holograms is up now through October 17 at Pace Wildenstein Gallery.  Fifteen unique large-scale works by the Season 1 artist explore the phenomenon of light itself, letting it become the object while capturing it’s normally fleeting qualities.

• The Guardian UK website has a great section called the Guide to Drawing in its Art and Design pages. Here’s a nice little slideshow of graphite portrait drawings by Shahzia Sikander (Season 1), and a few notes on how Jeff Koons (Season 5) articulates his ideas through draughtsmanship.

• The big 20th anniversary exhibition of the beloved Armory Center for the Arts opened this past weekend with Inside/Out.  The venerable teaching institution in Pasadena has been around since 1947, but has been programming dynamic exhibitions only in the last twenty years since moving to its current location in an old National Guard building. The anniversary show’s lineup includes artists such as Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Daniel Buren, Betye Saar, and Barry McGee.  Through December 31.

• This Saturday, September 26 at 3pm, Stanford-based ecologist Gretchen Daily and artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Season 4) will share their ideas about value, ownership, biodiversity, the art world, and political economies of participation in the Conversation series at the Berkley Museum of Art. The talk is part of the Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet exhibition currently up at the museum.  Artists in Human/Nature visited remote, fragile places in the world and present their responses. Other participants include Mark Dion (Season 4), Diana Thater, Xu Bing, Dario Robleto, and Ann Hamilton (Season 1).  The show ends this Saturday, September 26.

Mary Heilmann, "Two Lane Blacktop" (below) and Tony Oursler, "Five Take Radius" (above), 2009. Courtesy of AIR, Art International Radio.

• Site-specific installations by Mary Heilmann (Season 5), Tony Oursler, Todd Eberle, and Sabina Streeter are currently on view at the Clocktower Gallery in Manhattan. This is the first group of installations at the space since it became the home of Art International Radio in January 2009. For Two Lane Blacktop, Heilmann has painted white lines down a black floor, turning a corridor of the Clocktower into “a displaced highway.” Just above her piece, Tony Oursler has lined the ceiling with eleven over-sized filament light bulbs that brighten and dim as recordings of the artist’s voice emanate from speakers overhead. The Clocktower is open to the public on Thursdays from 12pm to 5pm or by appointment.

• On the occasion of their 95th anniversary, Montclair Art Museum has mounted Out of the Vault. This year-long exhibition celebrates the Museum’s American and Native American art focus. Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in the 60 piece display.

• From August 25-November 21, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois will present Reflection, a one video per day program featuring works by five artists: Andrea Zittel (Season 1), Phyllis Baldino, Patricia Esquivias, Alex Hubbard, and Glenn Ligon. Each video is scheduled for a specific day of the week; Andrea Zittel’s Small Liberties will screen on Fridays.

• Kandors (2000), a video by Season 3 artist Mike Kelley, will be shown in Switzerland as part of the 10-day St. Moritz Art Masters contemporary art program. The festivities begin Friday, August 21. Kelley’s work will be the focus of a panel discussion on Sunday, August 23.

• A newly commissioned collaboration between Mike Kelley and Michael Smith, titled A Voyage of Growth & Discovery, will open September 13 at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens. The installation comprises a two-and-a-half hour six-channel video of Smith’s character Baby IKKI, which he has performed for over thirty years. This is the first collaboration between Kelley and Smith who have been friends since 1975.

• On September 12, Bruce Nauman (Season 1) will bring his project Untitled (Leave the Land Alone) to fruition. Between 11:30am-12:30pm, the words “Leave the Land Alone” will be written across the Pasadena, California sky. Read more about Nauman’s project in the Los Angeles Times.

• Proud Flesh, a new book by Season 1 artist Sally Mann, investigates the bonds between husband and wife. Mann’s sole subject is her husband of 39 years, Larry. This body of nude studies, photographed over a six-year period, will be on view at Gagosian Gallery in New York beginning September 15.

• The Wall Street Journal and Artinfo.com report that Polaroid’s art collection will be auctioned off by Sotheby’s. Polaroid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection late last year. Their collection includes work by William Wegman (Season 1) who, like other well-known artists, used Polaroid’s large-format, 235 pound instant camera for special projects.

Film still from Cao Fei, "RMB City," 2007. DVD, 6 minutes. Courtesy the Artist and Lombard-Freid Gallery.

• Currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, There Goes the Neighborhood explores the many aspects of community, focusing on the evolution of architecture and landscape as it is embodied within a neighborhood’s past, present, and future. The exhibition features Willie Birch, Amy Casey, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Eva Struble, Dionsio Gonzàlez, Leslie Grant, Nina Pessin-Whedbee, Catherine Yass, Kristin Bly, Matthew Kolodziej, and Season 5 artist Cao Fei. Through August 16.

• The International Center of Photography released the list of artists for the third edition of their upcoming triennial on photography and video art, thematically titled Dress Codes. Centering on fashion, the mix of 34 includes Art21 artists Cao Fei, Kimsooja, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons. The show opens October 2.

• The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women is on view at Cheim and Read. The show brushes aside the traditional “male gaze” and includes sculpture, painting, photography, installation and video by the likes of Ghada Amer, Vanessa Beecroft, Marilyn Minter, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Shirin Neshat, and Art21 artists Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Sally Mann, Collier Schorr, Cindy Sherman, and Kara Walker. Through September 19.

• Send in the clowns! Send in the critics! Send in the clown critics! Ever wondered what a bunch of real clowns talk about while watching Bruce Nauman‘s (Season 1) 1978 video installation Clown Torture?  Your prayers have been answered.

• The Whitney Museum of American Art announced that it will open a retrospective of Roni Horn‘s works on November 6, integrating three decades of the Season 3 artist’s sculpture, photography, installations, drawings, and books.

• A retrospective of John Baldessari’s prints are on view now until Novermber 8th at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor. Over 100 prints are included in the exhibition that spans the four decades of the Season 5 artist’s post-painting period, 1970s to the present. Through November 8.

Pipilotti Rist, "Open My Glade", 2000. Courtesy UNstudio. Photo: © Katrien Franken.

• Curators Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos/UNstudio have invited 12 artists to exhibit work at Fort Asperen, a 19th century defense tower in the Netherlands. “Retreat” is the central theme of the exhibition. Season 1 artist Andrea Zittel participates along with artists Pipilotti Rist, Tobias Rehberger, Frank Havermans, Ann Lislegaard, Absalon, A.P. Komen/Karen Murphy, Jerszy Seymour and others. On view through September 6. Read more here.

• Through September 6, you can see work by Sally Man (Season 1) in By Way of These Eyes: The Sublime, Exotic and Familiar at the New Britain Museum of American Art.  The exhibition, drawn entirely from collector Christopher Hyland’s private holdings, also includes photographs by Herb Ritts, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edward Weston, John Dugdale and Edward Steichen.

• “The master of transforming incidental gestures into art worth thinking about is Richard Tuttle,” writes David Pagel for the LA Times. Read what else Pagel had to say about the Season 3 artist in his review of Thunk, a group exhibition at Khastoo Gallery.

A teaser image for the exhibition "Blood of Two: Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton." Courtesy of Deste Foundation.

• Matthew Barney (Season 2) and Elizabeth Peyton have collaborated on a site-specific installation for the Deste Foundation in Hydra, Greece. Blood of Two is on view through September 30 in the foundation’s new project space, which used to be the local slaughterhouse. Read The Moment to learn more.

• Tonight at 7pm, Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh will lecture at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.

• Sally Mann (Season 1), Kara Walker, Collier Schorr, Louise Bourgeois (all Season 2), Ellen Gallagher, Roni Horn (both Season 3), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in a mega display of works by women artists at Cheim & Read. The Female Gaze: Women Looking at Women opens June 25.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Josiah McElheny (Season 3) are on view in the exhibition Universal Code at The Power Plant in Toronto. Timed to coincide with the International Year of Astronomy, the exhibition presents artists responses to cosmology and ideas of the universal in the current age of information. Continues through August 30, 2009.

• The Art Newspaper reports that nearly twenty bronze sculptures in the Tasting Garden (1998), a public art project by Season 4 artist Mark Dion, have been stolen. The garden was created for the inaugural Artranspennine exhibition organized by Tate Liverpool and the Henry Moore Institute.

• Art critic Christopher Knight of the LA Times has reviewed Hipnostasis, a collaborative video and multi-screen installation by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) and Yoshua Okon at Armory Center for Arts in Southern California.

• Read Deborah Sontag’s extensive New York Times article about Yinka Shonibare (Season 5), poetically titled Headless Bodies From a Bottomless Imagination.

Josiah McElheny, "Chromatic Modernism (Blue, Red, Yellow)," 2008. Courtesy Donald Young Gallery.

• The Art of Caring: A Look at Life through Photography opened this past weekend at the New Orleans Museum of Art.  The show is comprised of over 200 photographs covering seven thematic components: Children and Family, Love, Wellness, Disaster, Caregiving and Healing, Aging, and Remembering. Among the many artists are Tina Barney, Nan Goldin, Chester Higgins, Nicholas Nixon, and  Season 1‘s Sally Mann and William Wegman.

• Also opening this past weekend at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona is Time as Matter. The presentation of new acquisitions from the MACBA Collection covers the last fifty years in the history of art through installations, paintings, sculptures, photographs, collages, models, books, etc.  The show focuses on notions of time and life and play, and includes work from Franz Kline, Dieter Roth, Lawrence Weiner, Joan Jonas, Nancy Spero (Season 4), and more.

• The summer group show season is starting a little early this year.  At the Donald Young Gallery in Chicago is a selection of work from ten artists represented by the gallery including Rodney Graham, Josiah McElheny, Bruce Nauman, and Martin Puryear. Through August 15.

• As part of Le French May Arts Festival, an exhibition entitled A Passion for Creation at the Hong Kong Museum of Art cuils together a selection of large scale works from the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Creation. The show reflects on “an urban and energetic culture, leading to fictional landscapes, somewhere between dream and adventure.” Exhibiting artists include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paul Chan, Cao-Fei, Pierre Huyghe (Season 4), Christian Marclay and others.

• Season 4 artist Judy Pfaff‘s solo exhibition Constructed Paper is on view now at the Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinatti.

• An exhibition of selected photographs by Mike Kelley (Season 3) produced for Patrick Painter Editions is on view through July 11 at the Los Angeles space. The collection includes the series Timeless/Authorless, The Poetry of Form, and Photo Show Portrays the Familiar 1-26.

• The Big Sad, Barry McGee‘s exhibition with Clare Rojas, just closed at the Riverside Art Museum.  But here is an interview from the exhibition with McGee (Season 1) on Current TV.

• At Triple Candie in Harlem is Selections from the Museo de Reproducciones Fotograficas. The quirky collection comprises 1,200 high-quality photographic reproductions cut from books on the visual arts, crafts, design, and architecture. Among other traits, the reproductions’ cataloguing records are incomplete and based exclusively on the objects’ original credit lines. The collection includes works by Laylah Ali (Season 3), Chris Ofili, Richard Prince, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra (Season 1), Lisa Yuskavage, and others. Through June 7.

• Jessica Stockholder‘s solo exhibition Swiss Cheese Field is currently on view at Senior and Shopmaker. The show includes new monoprint constructions that coincide with both Flooded Chambers Maid, the Season 3 artist’s first major outdoor installation in the U.S. presented by Madison Square Park, and Sail Cloth Tears, a concurrent solo exhibition of new sculpture at Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery.

Art21 is collaborating with the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) on a public program series titled Art:21 at SAAM. The film series presents episodes from the award winning television program that include artists in the museum’s collection. Place (Season 1) will be shown on Wednesday, January 14 and features artists Laurie Anderson, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Sally Mann, Pepón Osorio, and Richard Serra. To whet your appetite, below is a clip from the episode.

Mark your calendars!

Art:21 at SAAM Films
Place, Season 1,  Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century
Wednesday, January 14 – 6:00 pm
McEvoy Auditorium, Lower Level
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Stories, Season 2,  Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century
Thursday, February 12– 6:00 pm
McEvoy Auditorium, Lower Level
Smithsonian American Art Museum

For more information on this and other programs at SAAM, visit AmericanArt.si.edu/calendar. Questions about this series should be directed to saamprograms[at]si.edu or (202)-633-8490. Dates for the spring series will be announced later this winter. Stay tuned!

I had the good fortune of being in Roanoke, Virginia and seeing the impressive new Taubman Museum of Art (formerly the Art Museum of Western Virginia).

A welcome addition to the skyline of this friendly Virginian city, the Taubman is known for its collections of 18th- to 20th-century American art, which features fine works by John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Robert Henri, Childe Hassam, Petah Coyne , Robert Motherwell, Thomas Hart Benton, Sally Mann (Season 1), as well as folk art objects.

If you have the privilege of traveling to Roanoke, be sure to check out one of the exhibitions that will open the museum entitled Rethinking Landscape: Contemporary Photography from the Allen G. Thomas, Jr. Collection. The show opens tomorrow (and runs until March 1, 2009) and will features works by Taj Forer, Andreas Gefeller, Anthony Goicolea, Bill Hensen, Sarah Ann Johnson, Chris Jordon, Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, Sze Tsung Leong, Sally Mann, Andrew Moore, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Martina Mullaney, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Sarah Pickering, Kahn and Selesnick, Kerry Skarbakka and Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3).

Below are some street views of the structure designed by Randall Stout Architects.

Many teachers I met over the summer had some connection to teaching photography or working with a variety of students who are photographers (for example, in an AP Studio Art class). During a few conversations the subject of Art21′s developing collection of featured photographers came up, so the purpose of this week’s TWCA column is to highlight various Art21 artists that allow students both traditional and non-traditional approaches to taking pictures.

Some photographers, like Robert Adams and Gabriel Orozco walking with his camera, give students the chance to see photographers who inform their work through discovery and re-discovery  of the landscape, be it beautiful, surprising or desolate. Others like Laurie Simmons (who clearly says she is an artist who uses the camera simply as a tool) and Eleanor Antin meticulously set up their photographs, arranging the compositions and designing the space in particular ways with models, props and even stagehands. Then there are portrait photographers, to use the term loosely, such as Oliver Herring and Sally Mann, who create more than a representation of the person photographed through particular interaction with the model(s).

Juxtaposing these pairings, or across these pairings, can give student photographers a chance to look into how a camera in the hands of an artist with a patient and experimental eye can stretch common themes and subject matter- making viewers look again.

Have any of these artists, or other Art21 artists who use photography in their art, influenced your work or the work of your students? Please share with us by posting a comment and even links to images…

Have a good start to the new school year!