art and photography arranged by: james williams. today’s artistic situation is highly complex,...
TRANSCRIPT
Art and Photography
arranged by: james williams
Today’s artistic situation is highly complex, contradictory, and confusing. It is an environment few can make sense of.
Often, curators…simply cherry-pick and assemble what is perceived to be the best art of the moment in the hopes that quality alone will carry the day.
Other curators might select a concept or theme that seems (representative) of the moment and sort worthy art into various conceptual baskets.
The danger here is a heavy-handed, overly predetermined methodology that precludes a full consideration of the art itself.
Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown DirectorWhitney Museum of American Art's
http://www.whitney.org/www/2006biennial/index.php
The Following Images are selected from the 2006 Whitney Biennial.
LOUISE BOURQUE Process is both meaning and method for filmmaker Louise Bourque. Her films and photos reckon with the instabilities of identity, family, and home. Traces of the past (home movies, found footage, childhood memories, dream imagery) are processed in every sense of the word.
IRA COHEN Ira Cohen is a seminal figure in the consciousness-raising, mind-altering counter-culture movement that began in the 1960s. Over the past five decades, he has produced a wide-ranging body of work that includes poetry, audio recordings, photographs, and experimental and documentary films. Influenced by the many years he spent in North Africa, India, and Nepal with several other key figures of the counterculture, Cohen captures in his work transcendent moments filled with potential and being, embodiments of the Sanskrit word Akash, meaning “ether” or “timeless thoughts.”
PAUL CHAN Born 1973, Hong Kong; lives in New York, New York, Paul Chan keeps his art and his politics separate, or at least he claims to. He has been involved in the aid group Voices in the Wilderness (with whom he spent an unsanctioned month in Iraq) and participated in creating The People's Guide to the Republican National Convention (an agitprop map of New York City for use by protesters in 2004).
JAMES BENNING Born 1942, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; lives in Val Verde, California A critical and contemplative engagement with landscape informs the work of filmmaker James Benning. His films are often labeled structuralist and Minimalist, terms that fail to account for the breadth of ideas and emotions to be gleaned from his meticulous studies of geography. “Landscape,” Benning has said, “is actually a function of time,” and for more than thirty years, he has fixed his 16mm camera on American spaces to excavate strata of form, feeling, history, and culture.
ANGELA STRASSHEIM Born 1969, Bloomfield, Iowa; lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and New York, New YorkBefore receiving her MFA from Yale in 2003, Angela Strassheim became certified as a forensic photographer. She did crime scene, evidence, and surveillance photography in Miami and, while working in New York, photographed autopsies.
KENNETH ANGER Born 1927, Santa Monica, California; lives in Hollywood, California, The films and photographs of Kenneth Anger, one of the seminal figures of the American avant-garde cinema, have had a pervasive and profound impact on postwar visual culture.
ADAM MCEWENBorn 1965, London, England; lives in New York, New YorkIn his sculptures, paintings, and installations, Adam McEwen deploys a series of interventions that jolt us temporarily out of our indifference, owing to over-exposure, toward the signs that dominate our daily lives.
BILLY SULLIVANBorn 1946, New York, New York; lives in New York, New YorkBilly Sullivan's portraits and still life's capture the fleeting moments in life that transcend the everyday. Since the late 1960s, he has chronicled in slide photographs the art, fashion, and celebrity scenes through which he travels.
RYAN TRECARTIN Born 1981, Webster, Texas; lives in New Orleans, LouisianaRyan Trecartin's video A Family Finds Entertainment (2004) is a carnivalesque, meandering narrative that chronicles the coming-out of a gay teenager named Skippy. Kicked out of his parents' house upon revealing his sexual preference, he attempts suicide, is run over by a car, and is ultimately "rescued" by a flamboyant group of "experimental people."
ROBERT GOBER, Born 1954, Wallingford, Connecticut; lives in New York, New York, Since the late 1970s, Robert Gober has been making objects, photographs, and large-scale installations that operate like faltering allegories shot through with anxious refrains. Diverse thematic concerns can be traced throughout his work, encompassing the iconography of Catholicism and the body, AIDS and perceptions of sexuality, childhood memories and ideals of the all-American family.
MICHAEL SNOW Born 1929, Toronto, Canada; lives in Toronto, CanadaSince the late 1960s, Michael Snow has been a key figure in the development of structural and avant-garde film, photography and sculpture producing works infused with a modernist sensibility that, with distinct humor and wit, distills the material elements and structural properties of the filmic medium.
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