Artist Review 9: Tony Matelli

Significance:
As a continuation of the topic on the disturbing in art, Matelli is very straight forward in picking on fears universal for all people. The main topic of his work is loss: of life, possessions or balance. He materializes these fears in durable art materials - fiber glass, urethane foam, bronze and paint. The precise, permanent and realistic sculptures depict frozen in time ephemeral objects or setups, happenings or results of something that happened.
I may take ideas from his work as it goes beyond the unsettling. Or maybe not, sometimes he is trying too hard to be scandalous and that annoys me.
The lack of a well defined agenda in his work is a weakness too. Or maybe he has given up the very difficult and obscure task to make a difference in order to support himself as a studio artist. Tony Matelli exhibits worldwide.

Bio:
Born 1971 in Chicago, IL, lives and works in Brooklyn NY
Education:
1995 MFA Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan
1993 BFA Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Wisconsin
1991 Alliance of Independent Colleges of Art - Independent Study, NY


Quotes:

1) "...with Matelli’s art, its not enough to focus on just one work; you must employ a peripheral vision to see how he seizes on one oafish cliché after the next making them testify against their own crude sincerity, finally admitting that their one-dimensional values are in the end inconsequential. This is Matelli’s style of moralizing."
Roland Jones http://www.tonymatelli.com/Tony_Matelli/Ronald_Jones.html

2) " Lost, absurd and debased, Tony Matelli’s figures experience the complexities of life with ever-present possibility of both death and rejuvenation on the horizon. Sleepwalkers, lost boy scouts, rotting vegetables, sprouting weed, beer cans and card stacks signal the banal passing of time. As hyperrealist bronze sculptures, these scenarios instead are frozen in time, captured in visceral detail. Matelli’s often vulgar sense of humor rivals the delicacy of his tedious technical process."
Natalie Westbrook http://www.tonymatelli.com/Tony_Matelli/Natalie_Westbrook.html

Work:







Representation:
http://www.leokoenig.com/
http://www.andrehn-schiptjenko.com/site/
http://www.tatintsian.com/
http://www.stephanesimoens.com/
http://www.galeriemoser.ch/

Reviews: http://www.tonymatelli.com/Tony_Matelli/Tony_Matelli_Text.html

Web Site: http://www.tonymatelli.com

Topic 8: Disturbing

Significance:
It is important as this engages people in topics. We need both the pleasant and the disturbing and the inability to draw a definite border between can be employed in making people notice things in order to ask themselves "what am I looking at?" I have been drawn to the idea of using the disturbing as pointing to more universal political environmental economical or ethical topics. And yet, some artists tend to embrace the scandalous just for the sake of it. Wafaa Bilal addressed that in his speech, the use of the unsettling for a specific agenda versus the unsettling for just gaining audience.
Artists won't make a mistake (at least in drawing attention) if they evoke the very universal fears of: mortality, pain, loss, the unknown and rejection form society.
And yet how effective is having disturbing and engaging imagery about a greater political topic? Will it change anything? Can it be something more than imagery?

Quotes
1) "My very first project was a documentary of street people in Berkeley – Dorothea Lange or Bruce Davidson type documentary – when I was 22 years old. That’s when I first realized there was a major discrepancy between my good intentions and how the images actually functioned in the world. I had a coffee table book (Telegraph 3 am) of poor people on the street, with a show at ICP. I was very young and it raised all those problems... But does it really change the world? What really is the out come of all that?" Richard Misrach
http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/lib/artists/misrach.php

2) "Richard Misrach I take a lot of political license and I’ve been criticized roundly for that. And that’s fine. But the point is that without it then it becomes something else, it becomes a study of just the beauty of death and there’s a certain amount of that there but I definitely want to put my spin on it. People will come to it and take from it what they want. but I definitely had an agenda when I did it and I hold onto the agenda as much as I can.

John Paul Caponigro And the agenda was what?

Richard Misrach To politicize it. To basically put it into a political context as opposed to putting dead carcasses in peoples faces for fun."

http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/lib/artists/misrach.php

Interview of Richard Misrach by John Paul Caponigro

Works

Richard Misrach, the Pit (1988)

Patricia Piccinini

Artist review 8: Jill Greenberg

Significance:

The Monkey Portraits are seemingly trivial and cute, however, they could be put in the context of more complicated issues. I see them as a take on contemporary fine art photography with its quest for expressions revealing something profound. And here they are, animals doing a great job with the emotions that recent photography has adopted as a norm. Are emotions in portraiture sincere, can we trust them or take them as the focus in a body work? The answer to me is "yes" and "no".

The idea of mimicking art history in absurd way to engage people in a contemporary topic is what I tried with the Dutch Baroque still lives with plastic bags. Would that fall into the category of editorial or photo illustration? What would be a way to go beyond that?

It is interesting how the monkey images can be one thing for me: challenging uniqueness of expressions; and another for her: anti republican statement. Nevertheless these images are contradiction to her other work. The people in her commercial portraits put side by side with the monkeys gain another meaning.

Bio:

Jill Greenberg was born in Montreal, Canada in 1967. At the age of 2, her family moved to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan where Greenberg began her arts education while attending Cranbrook’s elementary school where she was in the photo darkroom in 5th grade. Many extra-curricular courses supplemented her arts education: Kingswood, Birmingham Bloomfield Art Association, and the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. Before senior year in High School, she enrolled in Rhode Island School of Design’s pre-college program in Illustration 1984. Senior year, she was the recipient of the Traub Scholarship for Art from Andover High School, which afforded her the opportunity to attend Parsons in Paris for Photography the summer before entering college in Providence at RISD.She earned a BFA with honors, RISD ‘89 Photo with a senior thesis called “The Female Object”; took a class at Brown University, in Semiotics. After graduation, Greenberg moved to New York City.

Quotes:1) "Like others at the Atlantic, I was appalled to read about the actions of Jill Greenberg, the freelance photographer who took the cover portrait that illustrates my article about John McCain. Greenberg doctored photographs of McCain she took during her Atlantic-arranged shoot, which took place last month in Las Vegas. She has posted these doctored photographs on her website, which you can go find yourself, if you must. Suffice it to say that her "art" is juvenile, and on occasion repulsive. This is not the issue, of course; the issue is that she betrayed this magazine, and disgraced her profession." Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2008/09/about-that-mccain-photo/8825/

2)"For the series “Monkey Portraits”, Greenberg has created a series of monkey portraits and asks us to consider, in another way, where we are coming from. We look into her monkey’s expressions, their faces -- their peculiar physiognomy -- and somehow see ourselves. It is frightening and disorienting and exhilarating and awesome. She mischievously shows us another type of mirror-stage, where we confront an ancient and distorted reflection, another startling spectacle, and try to make sense of who, or what we are seeing. By intentionally anthropomorphizing her monkeys, we can’t help but identify with their gaze, and be reminded of people we know, expressions that we have seen." http://kopeikingallery.com/exhibitions/view/monkey-portraits

Work:

Jill Greenberg

Jill Greenberg

Samantha Cohn

Lisa Wiseman

Hanna Witte

Amy Elkins

Jill Greenberg

Sophie Barbasch

Jill Greenberg

Dai Oinuma

Jill Greenberg

Georgi Ivanov

Review:

The Atlantic Monthly and McCain Very interesting. Did she actually achieve something besides much ado? I think she only victimized McCain by being very unprofessional and juvenile. There are other ways to make a catching, yet sophisticated image of a politician and definitely not by exploiting a situation. This might as well hurt other photographers by affecting the relation photographer - client.

Representation: www.clampart.com

Web Site: http://www.manipulator.com

Topic 7: Urgency

Significance:
The important questions: 1) what is your work about? and 2) what do you want it to do?
An example:
Sebastiao Salgado's Sahel: The End of the Road is a project he executed by sacrificing great amount of time and effort to dignify people who barely manage to survive in the aftermath of a natural disaster. His hope was to show this image in newspapers, magazines and other mass media in order to attract people's attention. The topic was extremely urgent and he hoped to make a difference. No publishers wanted to deal with so depressing matter and his effort went in vain. The outcome of his work was gallery shows: people gathered to discuss his masterful use of light, composition and capturing the right moment. Persons depicted in the photos became interesting characters rather than triggers of consciousness. Exposure is always good however that was not the exposure he wanted.


Quotes:
1) "I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation. The parks that surround some museums isolate art into objects of formal delectation. Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art . A park carries the values of the final, the absolute, and sacred. Dialectics have nothing to do with such things."
2) "A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world."
ROBERT SMITHSON: THE COLLECTED WRITINGS, 2nd Edition, edited by Jack Flam, The University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California; University of California Press, LTD. London, England; 1996

Street Art: Joshua Allen Harris
Junk art or street art or environmental installation or social protest or a spectacle. Does it mean that if it's about many things it is about nothing?

Work

Aargon Neon (neon sign company),
Untitled (abu-ghraib), 2004,
16” high by 12” wide, black acrylic,
wire, neon.

Some nice funny decoration or urgency to engage the public in contemporary issues?
Who ordered that?

Collaborative Interview part 1: Questions

Jamie Lawyer

1) Your work is about psychological trauma and coping with it. How important for you is the specificity of this trauma? Do you aim to show the source of trauma or only the outcome?
2) Are you about subtlety in images or shocking the audience? What would be your aim in the future?
3) Could you explain what is the role of scale and repetition in your work.
4) What do you aim with your work? What is the discourse you want to engage your audience in?
5) Who are the artists/writers you associate with?
6) Do you explore trauma on personal or social level and what is the reason for you emphasis?
7) As an emerging artist, what venues would be ideal for your agenda? What would be the most effective ways to reach the audience?


Jon Philip Sheridan

1) Are your works about representing ideas or delivering sensations?
2) Formulated concept or formal exploration: which is more essential when you begin a new work and why?
3) Considering the Inflection installation, what emphasis do you put on process? Is the end result the goal or the process itself that becomes essential?
4) What is the subject matter of your work? Is it about aesthetics, political topics, social phenomena, human nature, existentialism?
5) How does your work connect to the specific exhibition space, does it respond or conform to it?
6) Do you aim at galleries or public spaces? Could you explain why?
7) How do you want to influence your public? What do you want to make them think about?

Studio visit: Julika Rudelius

I only presented the Vacation Industry series, and yet 30 minutes was not enough. I am really glad she spent effort to get into that work - the images as well as the exhibit installation. She talked how my work fits in contemporary photo practices, more precisely documentary, what qualities it has and what it lacks. It seemed that her immediate, detailed and very opinionated response came from similarities in our work. First, Julika has been working as a photojournalist, no idea if she has been doing documentary projects on her own (documentary does not exclude conceptual work using the medium as a vehicle to convey meaning). So she has been not only practicing but making a living of photography. And second, her work is exclusively on political end social topics.

Her main point was - go back and re-photograph... easier said than done. That was my greatest concern, the fact that my work is an exploration. I tried to plan in advance but of course that is possible to an extent. I needed to look at the images I have and pick only a piece from the whole story and then focus on that one aspect of the whole. I got pretty good ideas only after I finished the project. These were focusing on details characteristic of the problem rather than exposing the entire problem. Julika's evaluation:
1) don't mix types of images or styles if you are not fluent in all of them. Some photos are weak and that stands out compared to others.
2) make sure to know exactly what it is about. She did not like the beach images because they were taken in mid day, worst light. Eventually she appreciated them greatly because of the reason to photograph at that time - to show that the beach is empty during the day. That does not make much sense with the other photos unfortunately.
3) Displaying is hard and I did not make a good job. The salon style arrangement does not go with the formally presented works. Look into details.
4) She agreed with me that it is hard to find consistency while photographing. It is difficult to go with an idea and see that it does not translate in images well. In my case some places are full, other empty, some working well, others are a disaster and so on. In her word, that was the reason to stop doing photography, too hard to show something if that something is not so simple and still be honest and true. And the presentation as well, that was the other reason.
5) again, what it is about? waste of land? blunt consumerism and decay? transformation of the landscape? social injustice? environmental problems? economical problems?

How am I going to proceed from now? The meeting coincided with my recent thoughts about documentary - I don't have resources. If one shoot takes me weeks to set up only to find out that my transportation failed me... it is not only discouraging but irrational. I have enough to show people for now and what needs to happen is applying for grants or residencies in order to do my work. I'd better put off that type of work for another time (without forgetting it) and focus on what I can be most productive for now.

Artist Review 7: Caleb Charland

Significance: I really appreciate his photographic, sculptural and kinetic explorations that bring the images beyond the process and the demonstration of it. I see the scientific not as the focus but as a vehicle to explore balance, fragility and time, maybe one can see the topic as existential. Yet, I was disappointed by the way Charland and others describe his work - it is just an experiment, curiosity. OK, and what about the breath amplifier by Scott Snibbe, who states plainly that his work is NOT about technology. What about Christopher Bucklow's famous silhouettes, they are not about process at all, however, remind of the more recent works by Charland. It is interesting to see in what context people put their work in. Can Charland's work be more than experiment if he presents it in another way or includes social, psychological or political hints?

Bio: Caleb Charland graduated in 2004 with a BFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. His work has been included in juried exhibitions throughout the United States, and he is represented by Susan Maasch Art, Portland, Maine. Charland may be reached at calebcharland@hotmail.com.

Quotes:
1) "Using the laws of physics as a springboard, Caleb Charland puts elements such as fire, water, and man-made compounds to the artistic test in his series Demonstrations. In these alchemic images, he captures scientific phenomena in moments of still life as well as full-tilt action, calling to mind such forebears as Edgerton and his freeze-frame milk droplets." http://www.aperture.org/apertureprize/w2007-3.php

2) "Carefully planned and meticulously executed, his Demonstration images consist of precisely controlled, yet decidedly low-tech, sets of actions performed for the camera. ... playful use of allusion and illusion appears regularly throughout his projects."
http://mazzeogallery.blogspot.com/2010/04/caleb-charland.html

Work:

one of his 4x5 "bacteriographic" negatives

Interview: School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Representation: http://www.michaelmazzeo.com/

Web Site: http://www.calebcharland.com/