MoCP Newsletter

January 17, 2006

MoCP Receives Major Kertész Series

In January 2006 Mr. Richard Hanson made the most important single donation of photographic works to MoCP in its 25 year history. André Kertész, while generally under-exposed in galleries and museums during his lifetime (1894 - 1984), was and is widely acknowledged as a mentor and main influence by photographers and artists in other media of his generation.

Henri Cartier-Bresson once stated on behalf of himself, Robert Capa, and Brassaï, “Whatever we have done, Kertész did first.” This body of 121 photographs, made between the early 1920s and the late 1960s, records Kertész’s public observations of the private act of reading. Approximately half were published in the book On Reading (Grossman, New York) in 1971; MoCP will assist the estate with an expanded re-publication of On Reading.

Kertész, born in Budapest, Hungary, began taking photographs in 1912. He was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army where he volunteered for the Polish and Russian fronts, and later returned to Budapest before moving to Paris in 1925. After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Paris was a vital axis of the international avant-garde and became the destination for artists Ergy Landau, Francois Kollar, Emeric Feher, Brassaï, Isis Germaine Krull, and Robert Capa, to name a few. Along with fellow Hungarian artists, Kertész circulated among the avant-garde literary and artistic groups and embraced the subjects, sights, and community ensconced in the “City of Light.” As the vitality of the community in Paris responded to political volatility within Europe and the allure of New York as an artistic community grew, Kertész accepted an offer from the Keystone photo agency in New York. He moved with his wife to New York in 1936 and struggled there to establish himself as an artist and commercial photographer.

Mr. Hanson’s donation represents a collection of images taken by Kertész in Hungary, France, and the United States that spans this photographic career of over fifty years, illustrating the consistency and skill with which Kertész expressed his subtle and penetrating vision. The collection presents views of humanity, architecture, and the absorptive power of reading as a universal pleasure, and will serve as a cornerstone of the Museum’s collection of black and white street photography. An exhibition of the series will be on view in the main galleries June 6th through August 12th of 2006.

Lannan Foundation Underwrites National Tour

In December of 2005, the Lannan Foundation awarded MoCP a major grant to tour two bodies of work by photographer An-My-Lê. An-My Lê: Small Wars and 29 Palms will open at the Marion Center, College of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in January 2006, and travel to The Rhode Island School of Design Museum in June, 2006. After its MoCP presentation in November, 2006, it will travel to the Henry Art Gallery in the fall of 2007, and to the Johnson Museum, Cornell University in 2008.

Small Wars and 29 Palms explore the conflicts that bracket the last half-century of American history: the war in Vietnam and the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Small Wars (1999-2002) depicts men who reenact battles from the war in Vietnam on weekends in the forests of Virginia. Lê’s current and ongoing series, 29 Palms (2003-present), documents the military base of the same name in the California desert where soldiers train before being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Lê, who was born in Vietnam in 1960 and came to the United States as a refugee in 1975, created the Small Wars series to explore, as she describes it, “the Vietnam of the mind;” a conception of war that emerges from the vast collection of documentation, personal histories, and fictional interpretations confronting veterans, survivors, and subsequent generations. Her pictures from 29 Palms present an epic American West in lush detail, harkening back to 19th century landscape photography. With Hollywood just 150 miles away, 29 Palms is a place where fictions are performed, not unlike the Vietnam reenactments in Virginia.

MoCP exhibited five photographs from the Small Wars series in the 2005 exhibition Stages of Memory: The Vietnam War, after having acquired 4 photographs from the 29 Palms series for the permanent collection months earlier. The exhibition of both complete series will be on view at MoCP November 16, 2006 through January 13, 2007.

Artist to Watch: Misty Keasler

Misty Keasler’s Japanese Love Hotels Project
Photography of highly charged spaces devoid of human presence is almost a genre in the history of the medium. (Make a list: William Henry Fox Talbot’s library, Roger Fenton’s Valley of Death, Eugene Atget’s morning streets in the Marais, Lynn Cohen’s firing ranges, etc.) But Misty Keasler’s records are significantly different. These spaces are sexually determined, and sex is the ultimate manifestation of presence and absence. I’m here, you’re there, we’re here, we’re gone.

Misty Keasler’s Japanese Love Hotels series is perhaps closest to the work of Lynn Cohen in that Cohen chooses spaces that have evidence of their function—class rooms, beauty salons, medical examination rooms. We see the equipment and fill in the missing people. But when we do this with Keasler’s spaces, we become implicated in fantasies, some with moral weight, rather than being simply providers of invisible facts. We are forced to be active rather than neutral observers, a position generally reserved for social documentary photography.

The most sophisticated level of this work, it seems to me, is that it reminds us that photography might be a pathological response to the perception of experience on the part of the Victorians who invented it. Is the possibility of saving our responses to experience by saving a (very) partial record of perception a good thing? Is painting and drawing any different? And, by extension, what exactly was the point of making pictures in the first place? Could it be the inability by at least some percentage of the species to stand the impact of getting so much information coming in through our eyes? A friend of mine once showed me a cartoon where one cave man was showing off his brand new drawing of a horse to another cave man, who said, tersely, “I don’t get it.” I took this completely wrong, apparently, because it occurred to me that two-dimensional representation wasn’t a necessity or even a possibility for the second cave man. He not only didn’t get it, he didn’t need it. Seeing a horse live was perfect and complete for him.

Keasler has assigned us the job of imagining these spaces occupied with all kinds of interesting sexual activity. While pornography was one of the very first uses of photography, it suffers from being an imagination sedative—it shuts down invention for the sake of an overestimated value of the explicit, just like photography in general. How much nicer it is to fill in the shackles and other devices while quarantining the urge to judge these as sites of neurotic behavior.

So how do we reconcile the quintessentially animal behavior of sex with humanity perceptually impaired by photography? Well, of course, the past thirty years have produced a volume of writing pointing out that photography has established a new kind of sex between virulent media and innocent bystanders, spawning an almost transparently thin monster slouching toward vacuity to be reborn. Artists like Keasler understand that photography is better at dancing around the edges of the waiting room of experience, rather than looking directly at the action.

(Excerpted from an essay by MoCP Director Rod Slemmons to be published by Chronicle Books in an upcoming book of Keasler’s Japanese Love Hotels photographs.)

PHOTOGRAPHY BENEFIT FOR MOCP

Save the Date
17 March 2006

Museum of Contemporary Photography presents
the Museum Council’s annual

Photography Benefit

An exclusive opening reception for the new exhibition
Anticipation. Wend through rooms awash in videos by such artists as Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Janet Cardiff, and Andrea Bowers while enjoying exceptional jazz, delectable refreshments, and a live and silent auction of photography by leading international artists.

Honorary Chair: U.S. Senator Barack Obama
Musical Guest: The Jeff Parker Trio

Tickets on sale Feb 1
312.663.5554 OR www.mocp.org

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