Robert Frank
“Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
September 22 – January 3, 2009
If time has made any impact on The Americans since its initial release 50 years ago, it has been to reinforce the perceptive genius of Robert Frank. In and era when America was content to exist in a passive-aggressive state of denial about its racial issues and confused cultural identity, Frank’s camera found the moments that articulated both so completely that the images still resonate. Today, however, despite their often charged nature, they represent a nostalgic America: artifacts from another age, ripe for reevaluation.
The Met’s take on the iconic book, titled “Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans,” is both reevaluation and extended cut. The show leads in with several images from Frank’s previous studies in South America, England and France, that cast light on his early development. In these rough prints, Frank is already learning to use selective focus to isolate a figure, create plunging angles to drive the scene, and crop so that the photograph feels like a moment in time. Another early highlight is his application for the Guggenheim fellowship that funded the production of The Americans and his massive, continental road trip. This document doesn’t do much to cast Frank as a great writer, but coupled with the letter of recommendation from Walker Evans and promises of a book deal, it’s clear that even then, getting a grant was more about politics than artistic practice.
But politics or no, what is more interesting now is the marvel of how Frank could have known, could have seen in those fleeting moments between sight and shutter release exactly how to make tension visually potent. Photographs like Trolly—New Orleans, 1955, of a segregated trolly car with white women and children taking priority seating over African Americans, still hang with a tangible feeling of revelation. Again, in Charleston, South Carolina, 1955, where a resigned African American nanny holds a white baby in her arms and looks away into the distance, the message is just as unassuming and intense as it was 50 years ago. The contact sheets with multiple variations of these iconic shots, and the wall of test prints point to how calculated Frank really was when it came to getting it just right. What he created was more than momentary perception, but meaning that builds and takes its time until realization breaks like a cold sweat. Frank knew that significance is something that can’t be forced; it only happens when you let it unfold.
So 50 years later the legacy of The Americans is not the work, but actually the man. Frank is present in this show in a way he never could have been with the original book: his process, his judgments, his intentions. In his later years, Frank grew frustrated with the eventual success of his creation and sought to subvert it by symbolically destroying it in a series of film performances, which play at the very end of the exhibition. In spite of him, his visual essay is stronger than ever, and with that strength, his vision of America becomes our history.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Reaching In and Reaching Out
Hung Liu
Apsaras
Nancy Hoffman
September 10 – October 31, 2009
Loss, expressed through reverent mysticism, is on view in Hung Lui’s show at Nancy Hoffman. Her large-scale oils hang like silent effigies to the living, documenting a wide range of moments that are presented to an omnipresent observer like prayers. Painting from photographs in the wake of the cataclysmic 2008 Sichuan earthquake that shook China and cost hundreds of thousands of lives, Liu creates portraits that say less about any one individual and more about the universal emotions of fatality that surface when life crumbles around us.
Liu’s often paint laden canvases represent a play on the Chinese Social Realist style she was trained in. Instead of choosing idealized settings and figures to represent the betterment of the Chinese people, her large scale canvases focus on individual moments of humanity. In Mirror, a young girl’s self-reflection is captured in the midst of the devastation that was once her room as she mindlessly combs her hair in the mirror attached to the front of her destroyed armoire. The quality of the paint application is what gives the scene its sentiment with soft, streaky, luminosity despite heavy, painterly, smudges. The canvas becomes an ephemeral surface, the patterned wreckage of the room emanating in bright pastels all around the placid central figure; a break from the chaos. The right two feet or so of the canvas is given over to a bloody, red panel with a black circle—a Buddhist symbol of rebirth—hastily posited in the center and hovering over a mess of black slathered below it. The panel adds a sense of immaterial resonance through its abstraction, a metaphysical contrast to the details of the physical in the majority of the painting.
Liu continues in this vein, the circle reprising itself in red in the background of a funeral march, as a group of weary soldiers carry a cloth-wrapped body up a steep hill of rocks. The circle leaks pale streams over the men’s heads, as though blessing their efforts. It shows up again in a series of small digital illustrations featuring the faces of children often seeking comfort in the arms of parents and older siblings, their small faces unable to comprehend the weight of the decimation around them. In another series, she paints the faces of subjects praying, crying, physically damaged, and hiding as small Apsaras, the Buddhist spirits of fallen heroes, drift around their heads.
Liu takes on a forceful, traumatic subject, but the delicacy of her touch on the lives in these moments is what speaks. She uses her paint as a tool to mediate the overwhelming horror and lay it to rest.
Apsaras
Nancy Hoffman
September 10 – October 31, 2009
Loss, expressed through reverent mysticism, is on view in Hung Lui’s show at Nancy Hoffman. Her large-scale oils hang like silent effigies to the living, documenting a wide range of moments that are presented to an omnipresent observer like prayers. Painting from photographs in the wake of the cataclysmic 2008 Sichuan earthquake that shook China and cost hundreds of thousands of lives, Liu creates portraits that say less about any one individual and more about the universal emotions of fatality that surface when life crumbles around us.
Liu’s often paint laden canvases represent a play on the Chinese Social Realist style she was trained in. Instead of choosing idealized settings and figures to represent the betterment of the Chinese people, her large scale canvases focus on individual moments of humanity. In Mirror, a young girl’s self-reflection is captured in the midst of the devastation that was once her room as she mindlessly combs her hair in the mirror attached to the front of her destroyed armoire. The quality of the paint application is what gives the scene its sentiment with soft, streaky, luminosity despite heavy, painterly, smudges. The canvas becomes an ephemeral surface, the patterned wreckage of the room emanating in bright pastels all around the placid central figure; a break from the chaos. The right two feet or so of the canvas is given over to a bloody, red panel with a black circle—a Buddhist symbol of rebirth—hastily posited in the center and hovering over a mess of black slathered below it. The panel adds a sense of immaterial resonance through its abstraction, a metaphysical contrast to the details of the physical in the majority of the painting.
Liu continues in this vein, the circle reprising itself in red in the background of a funeral march, as a group of weary soldiers carry a cloth-wrapped body up a steep hill of rocks. The circle leaks pale streams over the men’s heads, as though blessing their efforts. It shows up again in a series of small digital illustrations featuring the faces of children often seeking comfort in the arms of parents and older siblings, their small faces unable to comprehend the weight of the decimation around them. In another series, she paints the faces of subjects praying, crying, physically damaged, and hiding as small Apsaras, the Buddhist spirits of fallen heroes, drift around their heads.
Liu takes on a forceful, traumatic subject, but the delicacy of her touch on the lives in these moments is what speaks. She uses her paint as a tool to mediate the overwhelming horror and lay it to rest.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
