ai
It is
an article of faith in contemporary art that consumerism is bad. But if people
stopped buying unneeded stuff, the economy would collapse, and where would we
be then? So artists continue to worry about consumerism and its soul-eroding
effects, as they have been doing for at least the last half century.
Photographers seem to be especially concerned with the
topic, maybe because of the degree to which their medium is used to grease the
wheels of commerce. In reaction, many conceptually minded artists turn
photography back on itself, looking askance at its panoptical gaze, and “New
Photography 2012” at the Museum of Modern Art offers some interesting examples.
Organized by Eva Respini, a MoMA photography curator, it
is not a theme show. But it happens that four of its five participants focus on
one aspect or another of industrially manufactured culture. We are invited to
ponder relations between artifacts of mass production, technologies of
reproduction and our own infinitely manipulable selves.
Anne Collier approaches these matters in a cool,
classical, subtly witty way in large, pellucid staged photographs. She can be
too obvious, as in a picture of a photo magazine double-page spread in which
cameras and texts extolling them hover against the background of a nude female
torso.
On the other hand, she can be insiderish. A photograph of
a MoMA date book opened to a page bearing a reproduction of one of Edward
Weston’s photographs of his young son’s naked torso nods to what the initiated
will recognize: Sherrie Levine’s appropriation of images from that series for
her own meta-photographs.
At best, as in a picture of old vinyl-album covers in two
stacks leaning against a blank wall, Ms. Collier gets at something less
predictable. The facing ones present photographs of blue sky punctuated by
different wispy clouds. There is a poetry here that intimates something of the
hold certain valued objects can have on inchoate feeling and imagination.
More heavy-handed are color montages, resembling slick
advertisements, by Michele Abeles, in which we see the bodies of naked men
through spaces in grids and between stripes cut from translucent colored
plastic, newspapers, wrapping paper, still-life photographs and other sorts of
printed material. Since we are more accustomed to the use of female bodies as
attracters of consumers’ eyes and minds, Ms. Abeles’s substitution of the male
body may cause a flicker of cognitive dissonance. But her images are too
literal to unsettle habitual expectations deeply.
Artifacts of mass culture are not always tangible
objects. Shirana Shahbazi’s large color abstractions picture what philosophers
call “secondary qualities”: the colors, light and textures that contribute to
the allure of desirable commodities. Some feature geometrically divided
sections of saturated color. One depicts three shiny spheres, yellow, red and
white. While the qualities in Ms. Shahbazi’s pictures do not seem to adhere to
any recognizable things, they certainly are attached to the objects immediately
present to viewers: the photographic prints themselves. These are deluxe
commodities, whatever else they may be or mean.
Cultural artifacts can also be prepackaged fantasies
delivered by movies and fan magazines. A work by Zoe Crosher, “The Michelle
duBois Project,” is based on a trove of amateur snapshots saved by Ms. duBois,
a woman from the American Midwest who traveled a lot and sometimes worked as an
escort in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.
Taken by Ms. duBois and anonymous others, they represent
her in various stereotypically glamorous guises: sexy nurse, blond movie star,
dark temptress and so on. She was, it seems, a kind of naïve Cindy Sherman.
Ms. Crosher’s part has been to rephotograph, enlarge,
alter and strategically display these pictures in ways Ms. duBois probably
never imagined. These interventions are problematic. Two much-enlarged pictures
show partly crumpled portraits of Ms. duBois looking quite lovely in a small
black hat with a see-through veil, gold gloves and a dark fur coat.
Did Ms. Crosher find the photographs already crumpled?
Did she crumple copies of them for her own purposes? We do not know. In any
case, Ms. Crosher’s source material is far more intriguing than anything she
does to massage our thoughts about it.
Considering these four photographers, you might wonder:
what about real life, which photography was once thought capable of capturing
with unrivaled acuity?
That is where the two-man team known as Birdhead comes
in. Ji Weiyu and Song Tao use nondigital (i.e., analog) cameras and film to
shoot scenes all around their hometown, Shanghai. Printed in black and white on
unframed sheets arranged in a grid on the gallery wall, their shadowy
photographs of people, buildings, skies, trees and other ordinary subjects
create an appealing visual stream of poetic consciousness.
But with a much larger picture of the two artists posing
like rock stars at the center of the grid, flanked by a pair of real antique
wooden cabinet doors that are attached to the wall on top of some of the
photographs, their presentation takes on an off-putting grandiosity. It comes
down to branding, after all.
“New Photography 2012” continues through Feb. 4 at the
Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.