Photography on Photography at The Met
Last September, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a new gallery on the second floor dedicated exclusively to contemporary photographs. The second exhibition in this space, Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium Since 1960, opens to the public today.
This exhibition, organized by Doug Eklund, Assistant Curator in the Met’s Department of Photographs, includes Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3), Sherrie Levine, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Prince, Thomas Ruff, Vito Acconci, Kota Ezawa, Moyra Davey, Mary Wyse, and others. Malcolm Daniel, Curator in charge of the Department says, “This new selection [from the permanent collection] takes a narrower focus, showing how photographs since Conceptual Art have reflected on the medium itself in their work. With many more works by younger artists, the installation also provides more of a snapshot of where photography is at the moment.” Photography on Photography is on view through October 19, 2008.
Photographs began to enter the Met’s collection as early as 1928. Today their photography collection alone includes more than 20,000 works. A quick search through the Met’s online collection database returns names familiar to Art21 such as Ann Hamilton, William Wegman (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco (Season 2), Robert Adams, and Laurie Simmons (both Season 4). Learn more about the Met’s photography department and its collection here.
“California Video” at the Getty features 4 Art21 artists and many others
The Getty Research Institute has amassed one of the largest institutional collections of video art in the world. California Video, on view at the Getty Center through June 18, 2008, is the first major survey of video art produced in California. With more than 50 videos and 15 installations, this exhibition combines selections from the Getty’s collection, recent works by established and emerging artists, and rarely exhibited single-channel works on loan to the Museum. Artists include Mike Kelley (Season 3), Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Bruce Nauman, William Wegman (both Season 1), John Baldessari, Brian Bress, Nancy Buchanan, Chris Burden, Jim Campbell, Meg Cranston, Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn, Allan Kaprow, Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, Martha Rosler, Jennifer Steinkamp, T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm, Diana Thater, and Bill Viola.
According to L.A. Times writer, Christopher Knight, the introduction of the Sony Portapak in 1967 was an “epochal event in image-making history, and [is] smartly signaled at the show’s entry.” Ever shrinking dimensions and greater fiscal accessibility, among other developments over the decades, has contributed to the large number of artists experimenting or working exclusively with video. Today, writes exhibition curator Glenn Phillips, “portable video is ubiquitous, but in the late 1960s and 1970s it was a new technology.”
In a video exhibition of this scale, it can be challenging (perhaps even impossible) to see everything in a single visit. The Getty seems to offer a smart solution, however‚Äîa ‚Äúvideo study room‚Äù that gives visitors the opportunity to see all of the single-channel videos in the exhibition on demand via touchscreen kiosks. Visit the Getty’s website to view excerpts from the exhibition, as well as a schedule of indoor and outdoor screenings.
William Wegman: Funney/Strange
Catch a view of more than 200 artworks by the celebrated artist William Wegman, whose exhibition entitled William Wegman: Funney/Strange, fills all the Wexner Center galleries. Wegman was featured in Season 1 of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century.
The exhibition is a comprehensive 40-year retrospective of Wegman’s wryly amusing work and on show is photography, painting, collage and video from the 1960s to the present. Together, as written in the New York Times, these pieces offer
“a total immersion in the fruits of his inquiring mind and sardonic eye. Dogs or no dogs, Mr. Wegman is one of the most important artists to emerge from the heady experiments of the 1970s.”
And Carly Berwick, bloomberg.com
“Like Dali or Duchamp, he deploys humor to put the strangeness of everyday life into relief.”
William Wegman: Funney/Strange is on view through December at
Wexner Center for the Arts
The Ohio State University
1871 North High Street
Columbus, Ohio 43210-1393
William Wegman Indoors and Outdoors in New York City
Opening tonight at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery in New York City is Wegman Outdoors, an exhibition of photographs (1981-2007) by Season 1 artist William Wegman. The exhibition will bring together classic Wegman images with rarely exhibited material and surprising new work to reveal the full range of the artist’s outdoor color photography. The show will coincide with the opening of William Wegman’s new video work commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, Around the Park, a narrative film shot entirely in the park and presented on outdoor monitors surrounding the Shake Shack.
The subject of landscape has been a constant theme in Wegman’s painting, drawing, and conceptual photographs of the 1970s. In the early 1980s, the artist’s approach to photography broadened from the posed studio shots of his canine muse, Man Ray, to outdoor photographs integrating the dog with the Maine landscape where the artist spent summers. The show includes a rare 3-panel narrative of Man Ray gazing into a pond; in another the dog, his body covered with leaves, blends seamlessly into an autumnal landscape. Landscape again appears in the chromogenic prints Wegman began to make in 2000. Set into the crevices of rock formations, sprawled on a dock at sunset, or dwarfed in large vistas of the Rangeley Lakes region, these images of the dogs are closer to the modernist photography of Edward Weston and Paul Strand than Wegman’s conceptual work of the ’70s. The exhibition also contains several new images from 2007, made with a digital camera with a Hasselblad lens attachment, which expand upon the themes of the c-prints.
The exhibition at Senior & Shopmaker runs through November 3. Read more about it here and on the artist’s website at www.wegmanworld.com. Watch a video interview with Wegman about his art installation in Madison Square Park here.
