Photographer Roger Ballen is known for his stark, artful montages of South African life: the dirt-poor of rural townships, the beatific scallywags and sooty lowlifes living on skid-row mixed in with the detritus washed up from the slums and shanties. His new music video with Cape Town band Die Antwoord “I Fink U Freeky,” meshes hip hop beats with his signature style of photography, animating his still images.
The slang used by Die Antwoord is Zef, an Afrikaans term that roughly translates to “common or trashy,” referencing a white trash culture, cheap, tin Ford Zephyrs (zef), trailer park kitsch, cool tough guys with style.
"I Fink U Freeky" - Die Antwoord - Photograph by Roger Ballen
Ballen’s work is a blend of photography and art, combining still life compositions and live portraiture. The artist has been shooting black and white film for nearly fifty years. Having grown up in the era of b&w photography Ballen continues to be one of the last few experimenting exclusively in this media. Explaining his passion for black and white and the constraints it implies, Ballen says, “Black and White is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.” Read more about Roger Ballen’s work
Nineteen year old street photographer Shane Vincent has an eye for capturing those ephemeral moments when the changing light transforms the mundane into the sublime.
The project, Stand in Line, came about when Vincent began photographing utility poles in the streets of North London where he lives: “The series started at a time where the sky looked pretty cool,” he says. “It was autumn so it would change constantly. It caused me to look up a lot.” The outcome of his first photograph, Stay connected of a utility pole “with wires coming out at all directions,” was captivating enough, recollects the young photographer, that it caused him to pay more regard to the perpendicular poles and lampposts which most take for granted and which habitually punctuate the urban horizon. By isolating them against the vivid autumnal sky, and shooting them from an anamorphic perspective, Vincent enhanced their geometric abstractions.
Stiff styles of portraiture were common practice in Elizabethan times – three contemporary artists re imagine the formal poses through photography.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, using his minimalist approach creates a series of austere portraits of Henry VIII’s six wives. Christian Tagliavini’s subjects are attired in garments handcrafted from paper and fabric the artist creates himself. And South Korean artist Chan-Hyo Bae creates a series of self-portraits identifying himself in the strangely foreign, militaristic poses of royalty.
Zander Olsen’s photo series is an intervention with the landscape, a bending of the line of the horizon to create an illusion of continuity.
Olsen wraps the trees with white fabric and photographs from the viewpoint where the elements come together in perfect unity. He has created these site-specific installations in forests in Surrey, Hampshire and Wales.
Olsen’s works suggests an inversion of emulating linear perspective in two-dimensional works of art, a technique developed by Renaissance artists using foreshortening – in this case Olsen redefines a three-dimensional environment by extending a flat line across it to create an illusion two-dimensional space. Take for example the works of Georges Rousse who paints walls of interiors, photographing them finally at a fixed perspective to create the affect of continuous graphical lines across the space.
A witty narrative of thwarted simian desire is the theme of Walton Ford’s new series of watercolor paintings at Paul Kasmin Gallery. Ford’s obsession with King Kong, the super-sized movie monster came from his childhood viewings of the 1933 cinematic tale of abduction depicting the clash of the beastly brute Kong and delicate, blonde sophisticate, famously played by Faye Wray.
The story is less Beauty and the Beast, more unrequited love akin to Nabokov’sLolita in which Kong, the faux monster gorilla, is trapped by unnatural desire and vanity towards an act unacceptable to consummate.
In his other series, displayed like a comic strip narrative on the gallery walls, Ford returns to his earlier Audubon inspired style, depicting a scenario described in the naturalist’s journals about his pet parrot. I chatted to Ford about his new work and flipped through his past drawings in my old copy of Pancha Tantra, a collection inspired by the ancient Sanskrit book of animal fables, possibly the oldest on the planet.
I asked Ford about his inspiration behind the story of the dead parrot and masturbating monkey, and Ford explained that Audubon’s father was a ship’s Captain: “He used to bring exotic animals home to France,” recounted Ford, “Audubon himself was born out of wedlock: the Captain had a mistress in Haiti, and after Audubon was born from this mistress, the Captain brought the young boy home to his wife in France who raised Audubon.”
Tom Sachs has an extensive series of cameras that he sometimes re-constructs from machine parts of other devices, rebranding them to explore their value in relation to consumer desire – ‘Like a Leica,’ was one such artwork from his inventory of image makers. His first was a clay replica of a Nikon SLR camera he made for his father when he was eight years old.
After a few years of tinkering in his studio, Tom Sachs has resurfaced with a new show entitled Work at New York’s Sperone Westwater gallery filling three floors with art exploring as many creative tangents: a series of pyrographic works, using a wood burning-etching technique; a foamcore crafted collection based on Sevres porcelain; and a series that pays homage to James Brown, with a JB listening station, his Last Supper packed in a microwave, and a framed array of JB’s hair products.
Sachs had cited James Brown’s work ethic as an inspiration for the show, so I took him to task for being late for our meeting and disappointing Brown’s high standards for punctuality.
“When Brown fined his workers for being late it was contributing to a culture of punctuality,” explained Sachs in defense of the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. “He fined them for missing a beat, he used punctuality as a percussive element: to be on time, to keep time; not miss a beat.”
Sachs runs his Vulcan smithy of tinkerers like a boot camp, with red beans and rice every Monday. “Rather than a prison fantasy it’s more a utopian fantasy. More Amish. You can leave,” he forewarns me, “but you might find that the outside world may not be as inviting.”
The first air show at the Grand Palais in Paris, France. September 30th, 1909. Photographed in Autochrome Lumière by Léon Gimpel
While art fairs have become common, attracting patrons the world over – they are still a long way off from the extravagant theatricality of events from the past century.
An example is Paris’ Grand Palais, a building that was designed as the venue for singular happenings in the 19th c. and became a host for world fairs for over a hundred years.
Salon de locomotion aerienne 1909 - Grand Palais, Paris
Marilyn Minter, Cheshire (Wangechi) - 2011 enamel on metal - 60 x 96 inches (152.4 x 243.8 cm) , Courtesy of Salon 94 gallery
Sublime soapy bubbles of goo slide down baby, frolicking in a playpen of silver slime. The slow-motion video, shot with a Fantom, plays at Salon 94’s exhibition of Marilyn Minter’s latest works, coming at the ‘heels’ of her last series of slippery stilettos and video project Green Pink Caviar. The baby’s atavistic slide into pleasure is impulsive and contagious, and implicates our adult world of sophistication and restraint.
In Cheshire Minter does an extreme close-up of grinning teeth that would delight any dentist with a desire for detail. I asked Minter about her use of close-ups, which left no narrative clues as to gender, and she said she liked the implied mystery and the multi-readings this made possible.
A show of self-portraits curated by Shirin Neshat is on exhibit at the Leila Heller Gallery. Neshat began posing for her own camera in 1993 and this led to her series of photographs Women of Allah. Rather than a projection of her own persona, she styled herself after warrior women, drawing on the role Muslim women played in the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution.
Neshat says that her exploration into self-depiction was inspired by Frida Kahlo. “As a young art student in the mid 1980s, I remember developing an obsession with the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and her self-portraits. I was astonished by how her powerful paintings pulled the viewer in to her private world to witness the beauty and the horror she experienced in her personal life. Through the depiction of her own body and the use of visual metaphors, Frida Kahlo let loose her emotional and psychological anguish, her spiritual and moral orientation, and most importantly she revealed that art operates somewhere between the artist’s conscious and subconscious.”
Shirin Neshat Photographed by Stephan Würth for SPREAD 2010
