Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See

A new collection of essays on Lawrence Weiner published in association with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, reviewed on TATE ETC.'s website

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue13/booksetc.htm

Continuation

Richard Prince
Continuation
Serpentine Gallery
26 June 2008 - 7 September 2008
















Richard Prince
Covering Hannah (1987 Grand National), 2008
248.9 x 332.7 cm
© 2008 Richard Prince

Richard Prince is an artist who shot to international fame in the 1980s. He is renowned for his appropriation of adverts, trashy novels and bad jokes - elements of American consumer culture that allow him to filter the American dream. Some might also like to cast him as “the one who got rich through stealing the image of the Marlboro Man”. Continuation, at the Serpentine Gallery, is a show Prince has curated himself, in collaboration with the gallery’s directors.

Many of the works in the show are previously unseen, and Prince, we are told, has curated these works from his own collection in a way that mirrors their display in his own studios. Upon reading this, one might expect to witness a dynamic, rough and ready arrangement of works. Contrarily, the works are genteelly and spaciously arranged, and the gallery itself, a Neo-Classical pavilion in its picturesque chocolate box setting, is partly responsible. The entrance to the exhibition is a delicately lit hall of fame for Prince’s mutely coloured, lightly painted cast car bonnets. The artist plays off the gallery’s teahouse of British politeness in his presentation of all that is macho American. His life-size working model of a vintage car pushes the boundaries in this vein, pimped all over with semi-pornographic images from his ‘Girlfriends’ series.

For Prince, the car is an important allusion to the freedom of the open road; the exhilarating American landscape. The same goes for his now infamous enlarged photographs of original Marlboro cowboy campaign shots – one of which earned him £1.7m – the highest price ever paid for a photograph, to date. Beyond the hotly debated critical and moral issue of appropriation, however, Prince’s cowboy series is about the Romantic demise of the American dream. The cowboys furiously traverse the open prairie planes, and, freed from the logos and lettering of Marlboro advertising, we longingly re-imagine their destination ad infinitum.















Richard Prince
Untitled (cowboy), 1989
Ektacolor photograph
127 x 178 cm
© 2008 Richard Prince

Continuation takes us on a fascinating visual journey through a largely masculine Americana, told by an artist who in the 1970s worked as a picture-clipper for Time-Life magazine. Prince is both a collector and an artist and this is a wide-ranging exhibition about his fascination with image production and consumer desire – between seedily slathered canvases based on his collection of naughty-nurse literature and his new paintings that playfully appendage limbs to the painted women of renowned Modernist artist, Willem De Kooning.




This article was published in The Oxford Times on 15 August 2008

Street and Studio

Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photography
Tate Modern
22 May 2008 - 31 August 2008


















Pieter Hugo
Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Lagos, Nigeria, 2007
C-Print
100 x 100 cm
Courtesy Galerie Bertrand & Gruner and the artist
© Pieter Hugo


Tate Modern’s Urban History of Photography celebrates the cultural importance of the portrait in historical and contemporary uses of the photograph. In this exhibition, the studio and city streets are motifs that set a yardstick against the evolving relationship of artist and subject. We navigate the viewpoints of over 100 photographers chronologically, from the 19th into the 20th Century. It is a steep and
informative journey through social ideologies, Modernist trends, clothing fashions and industrial booms.

The exhibition provides an academic pursuit of the lens, starting with its very embryonic technological and social stages. This is a long and well-trodden road: along the naïve unassuming routes of photography typified here in John Thomson’s images of Caney the Clown and his Covent Garden Flower Women, 1877, en-route to the well-known golden era of studio photography encapsulated by Cecil Beaton’s ‘photocratic’ class of elegant celebrities.

There are, however, some beautiful, non-standard, shock moments in this exhibition. With the 1930s seeing the studio a ‘safer’ commonplace tool, the photographer had to find new ways in which to become marketable, and so emerged the cheeky ‘surprise’ street photographers who startled their subjects in amusement parks and fair grounds. Mobile studio in tow, they tried to sell their somewhat humorous ‘real life’ portraits to their subjects, and these curious prints are collected here for our delight.

Seventy years later, in the guise of Martin Parr in the ‘Contemporary Street and Studio’ room, we witness the development of this ‘roaming’ photographic industry. For his Autoportraits series, 1999-2001, Martin Parr poses with a fake ‘friendly’ camera smile, perhaps conveying a sardonic stance towards the studio industry.

Jumping from the war years to the inter-war period, from 60s ‘Liberation’ to internationalism, a dynamic political undertone seems to lie at the heart of this exhibition. This political focus appears less interested in iconic photography than in social and aesthetic developments, such as the evolution from singular portraiture to image series and image-text combinations. Between beautifully composed originals by Henri Cartier-Bresson – pioneer of the ‘decisive moment’ – and Ron Galella’s aggressive, unauthorised paparazzi shots of ‘celebs’ such as Woody Allen and Mia Farrow (right: Ron Gallela, Woody Allen / Mia Farrow, September 18, 1980, New York City, Courtesy Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen, Amsterdam © Ron Gallela), we are immersed and seduced into the medium as much as we are given a safe critical distance. The show ends with Rineke Dijkstra’s hilarious filmic document of trashy late 90s clubbers, a convergence of studio and location photography in the medium of video.




This article was published in The Oxford Times on 15 August 2008