Abelardo Morell: Reclaiming the Familiar

The Universe Next Door is a fitting description of the work of Abelardo Morell, whose photographs are now on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum through January 5, 2014. Morell reveals a world not traditionally captured in photographs, one that exists beyond the scope of the lens. One can dream up such landscapes but rarely do we get to see them within the formal confines of art.

The Cuban-born American artist employs the age-old technique of camera obscura to achieve his signature photographs. The Latin phrase for “dark room,” camera obscura refers to an enclosed space with an aperture. When light shines through the aperture, images from the outside are projected within.

Drawing of a 19th century camera obscura, Dionysis Larder, 1855

Anyone can make a camera obscura: all you need are a box and a light source. Once you insert a hole - a well-calculated hole - on one side of the box, light from the external scene will pass through and project itself onto the interior’s surface. The image will be upside down, but the colors and shapes of the scene will remain. Morell’s Light Bulb, one of the first images to greet you in the Getty exhibition, captures the fundamentals of this process.

Light Bulb, 1991
Gelatin silver print

If Morell's camera obscuras appear repetitive at first glance, don't be misled. His pictures never fail to surprise. He captures the individuality of spaces; an almost schizophrenic individuality. The same room can have an endless quotient of personalities when Morell is behind the camera. An autumnal landscape casts itself upon the walls of a quiet and pristine room; the same landscape presents itself in another photograph, yet this time it is winter.

Dream-like, too, are his photographs. A hotel room becomes extraordinary when the silhouette of an upside-down Chrysler building traverses down the wall, its spire extending across the length of the rug. Such images remind us that the elements of our familiar universe can be made unexpectedly, powerfully new.

The Chrysler Building in Hotel Room, 1997

Morell propels the outside world into domestic interiors. Public and private spaces converge. The affect is something Frank Lloyd Wright might like, who endorsed the philosophy of bringing the outside in.

Morell's projections not only render environments surreal but also theatrical. Indeed his wife, Lisa, recounts her experiences of watching the outside world projected onto their bedroom wall: “…You and I would sleep there with the black plastic on the windows, and then in the morning we could watch all the neighbors walking by and the squirrels on the telephone wires, and, it felt like a dream sometimes.”

Camera Obscura: View of the Brooklyn Bridge in Bedroom, 2009

With the curtains closed save for an opening to let the light in, the Morells engaged with the outside world in secret. I doubt Morell’s goal was voyeuristic, but it certainly allowed room for that. There is nothing wrong with innocent curiosity.

Struck by Morell's potential to spark an interesting dialogue, museums have invited him to shoot camera obscuras on their premises. The image below, taken at the Whitney Museum in New York, is a fun play on Morell's photographs of domestic interiors. It also recreates the art-viewing experience: the Edward Hopper painting is no longer seen against a traditional monochromatic wall, but a textured one that both distorts and enhances certain qualities of the painting. Note how the projected building overlaps with the wall in the painting. It makes the latter appear as though it, too, is made of brick.

Camera Obscura Image of Windows in Gallery with Hopper Painting, 2003

Morell continues to push the envelope. Most recently he has begun exploring a technique involving the use of a “tent camera.” His own invention, it enables him to achieve the effects of camera obscura entirely outdoors. In the image below, what initially looks like a sand painting is actually a projection of the Golden Gate Bridge onto a patch of ground. Morell calls it “a collision of two realities on a surface.”

Tent Camera Image on Ground: View of the Golden Gate Bridge from Battery Yates, 2012

Morell's experiments with camera obscura are among his many diverse pursuits. He is also known for his images that capture life from a child’s perspective, his sensuous photographs of books, and his cliché-verres ("glass pictures," referring to his hand-made negatives). You can see them all on his website.

...Wonder how Morell managed to project his images upright? I did, too. He used a prism.

Prior to opening at the Getty, The Universe Next Door made its debut at The Art Institute of Chicago. In February 2014 it will travel to The High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

A nod from The New Yorker

...100 years later, Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending A Staircase continues to inspire a legacy of artistic references:

Harry Bliss, Husband Descending a Staircase After Tripping on his Wife's Shoes
New Yorker Cartoon (Published Sept. 23, 2013)

A nod to Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending A Staircase (No.2), 1912
Philadelphia Museum of Art

First exhibited in 1913 at the Armory Show in New York, Duchamp's Nude Descending A Staircase inspired public outrage. The painting challenged expectations: it was abstract, ambiguous, and reduced the female form to what one critic called "an explosion in a shingle factory." As far as audiences were concerned, Duchamp had thrown classical nudes like Venus of Urbino and La Grand Odalisque out the window.

Officially titled the International Exhibition of Modern Art, the Armory Show was America's first grand attempt to engage with modernism. Before 1913, most Americans were unaware of artists like Picasso, Matisse, and Manet; now they were hungry for them. The kinetic pulse of Europe, so unequivocally tied to modern art, was hard to ignore.1

That isn't to say that modern art didn't exist in America before 1913. Artists who had traveled to Europe, like Marsden Hartley and Robert Henri, returned to the States with a new sensibility that penetrated their art.

Based on the critical response to Duchamp, America's nod to modernism would nevertheless be a work in progress. Art collectors were integral to the assimilation process, with names like Abby Rockefeller and Mary Quinn Sullivan at the helm. In 1929 these women, along with other collectors and philanthropists, launched the first museum of modern art in the States, today known as MoMA.

1 I'll expound on this in a later post, and also talk about America's invaluable role in preserving European modernism after WWII.

Museum Hours: So much more than art

A panorama of Viennese working class culture and a hymn to the museum, the new film Museum Hours inspires its viewers to look, yes, but also to see.

Director Jem Cohen hovers his magnifying glass over the streets of Vienna and the city's beloved Kunsthistoriches Museum. It is a privileged view for the less itinerant of us. Built in 1891 to house the collection of the imperial family, the Museum has long been a haven of history and the senses. It is also one of friendship: Johann, a gentle, middle-aged museum guard has worked at the Kunsthistoriches for six years; he comes to know Anna, a frequent visitor as of late, who has flown in from Canada to visit her ailing cousin.

The exchanges between the new friends breathe fresh meaning into the museum as a metaphor for life. The more you look the more you discover; the more you discover the less alone you feel.

Cohen invites us to notice details in the seemingly ordinary. We need not ascribe beauty or power to them, but simply notice them. That is how Johann passes the time so pleasantly at work. One of his recent discoveries is a detail in a Breughel painting: a skillet protruding from a reveler’s hat. This leads him to consider eggs, which in turn leads him on a quest to find eggs in every painting he can. This is what it means to be human: to use our powers of observation, and often patience.

Cohen puts you in uncomfortable places that you can either flee or inhabit. When confronted with an unexciting field of wheat on a hill, adorned with but a few winter-bare trees, you realize you are looking at a living painting. Suddenly you understand.

And yet, the scene continues to surprise. Once Johann and Anne approach the hilltop, only Johann is visible for some seconds. He is at the edge of the camera’s lens and Anne is just beyond it. For all the cinematic rhetoric this defies, it feels paradoxically organic. It is akin to looking at an awkwardly cropped Degas painting: it is capturing an unstaged moment in time, and it makes no effort to accommodate our expectations.

The familiar or under-looked details in Museum Hours - textured layers of paint on a canvas; a child's face - crystallize at the end of the film, in Johann’s soliloquy. The manner in which light hits an object, or the way a person expresses pleasure or pain, is worth noticing. Such details enhance our experience of the world, just as making a discovery at the art museum leaves us with a flutter in our hearts.

Art along the staircases

 

The hidden treasures of a city aren't always remote or tucked

away. Sometimes they are hidden in plain sight, like the public stairwells of Los Angeles. A relic of our mass transit era, these stairs offered direct access to bus and rail lines for the residents of hilly neighborhoods. As you might guess, the auto industry ultimately negated the stairs' relevance; but they have since undergone a popular revival. Partly responsible is Charles Fleming, a staircase aficionado who published a guidebook to LA's historic stairwells in 2010. It has opened doors for exploration.

Scattered throughout the East and Westsides of the city, an   impressive network of stairs will lead you up and down hillsides and through eclectic neighborhoods. The stairwells and interspersing walkways are so rich with foliage you may forget you're in the middle of a metropolis. The stunning views are a happy reminder of this, while the burn in your calves will measure how far you've climbed.

Best of all, the routes are teeming with art and history. A  recent walk took me past Rudolph Valentino's home in Whitley Heights, a Mediterranean-style neighborhood built in the 1920s. (Bette Davis and Marlene Dietrich used to live here, too.) I ogled over the remnants of old Hollywood, not to mention the visual pleasures. On a walk near the Hollywood sign I passed a towering medieval archer, painted on the facade of a home. It was not out of context, either: the house was modeled after a castle. Some homes later, I discovered a lifesize statue of a Hindu god meditating. The smorgasbord of style and taste was enchanting.

The artistic charm of these tucked-away communities isn't always overt. There are quiet accessories like Victorian-style crown molding, colorful mosaic floor tiles and beautifully-carved support systems. The doorways are magnificent, too. Some look like the threshold to a medieval fortress, while others are daintily decorated with woodcarvings and inlaid materials like glass or tile. Looking every which way I felt like a shifty-eyed sleuth, sniffing out the subtle details that were so plentiful.

To put it simply, staircase walks provide a respite from the daily grind, not to mention the daily grime, of the city. If the scenery starts to bore you, add an element of suspense to your adventure. Try stealing an orange from someone's tree; you just might get accosted by their rabid dog. RUN, but make sure to catch the house with the year-round Christmas tree on your way out.

Plato's cave, look out

What do you get when you cross an artist with a library? ...A cave! Okay, let me explain. I was recently welcomed into the home of artist and actor Leigh McCloskey and his lovely wife, Carla, for a film screening. Leigh is a spiritual man, very gestural and easily possessed by his ideas. In a word, he is impassioned. His library-turned-cave is a perfect example.

Leigh, shortly after 9/11, decided a re-structuring of the world was in order. His solution? To turn his library into a celestial, cosmic space laden with paintings of sacred feminines and metaphysical imagery. But it's a little more complex than that. While I can't do justice to Leigh's process, in summary he sees great importance in the intersection of humanity and the universe at large. He believes that we have lost touch with our interconnectedness; that we have become critics and not creators, and the remedy for this is reconnecting with the extra-human realm.

His vision has manifested into something spectacular. The ceilings, walls and floors of his library are all painted in a royal blue. Fluorescent figures, symbols and shapes float through the space. Lilith and Eve make an appearance amidst radiant bursts of light and figures with glowing halos. No feature or accessory has been ignored either. Even the spines of books are painted. So is the couch, including the underside of the cushions. A freestanding column beside the couch has an image of Eve swirling around it. There is a bowl resting atop the column that Leigh says represents Eve's chalice. He doesn't miss a thing. I can't help but imagine him painting in some entranced reverie, initiating every object or fixture into his little blue world.

And while the images and motifs seem kind of chaotic, according to Leigh they actually reflect a method. Everything in the room plays off one another, sort of like a map of the universe.

If you are wondering why Leigh calls this space a cave, it has to do with the primordial nature of its namesake. Caves harken back to a time when humans were more connected with themselves and the universe. Whether you experience a 70s throwback or an otherworldly dimension on this visit, the sensory experience is palpable. It's too bad Plato's prisoners didn't have colorful digs like this.

[Photo courtesy of Leigh McCloskey's website: http://www.leighmccloskey.com/Artist/artist_main.htm]

Humans are the new medium

If you live in Los Angeles and write about art, it's likely that all-things-Pacific Standard Time are leaving your fingertips. And no, I don't mean the time zone, but the title of an initiative spanning Southern California that aims to explore the L.A. art scene from 1945-1980.

A recent PST foray brought me to the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, a sort of mini art colony that has workspaces, studios and an exhibition gallery. Their current show, "Collaboration Labs: Southern California Artists and the Artist Space Movement," is thought-provoking and immersive with its video installations and vintage photographs. The exhibit ventures to explore just what the title implies: artist-run spaces, specifically as an alternative to the gallery space, in the 1970s. In a decade rife with instability, such collaborations reflected not only political and social concerns, but also a desire to cooperate and collectivize.

One of the period's seminal artists, Barbara Smith, caught my eye. Born in Pasadena, CA and known for her performance art, Smith stole my heart with her 1972 work "Nude Frieze." Captured in a series of black and white photographs, the performance involved suspending naked people to a wall with nothing but duct-tape. (Since the photos are pretty explicit, click here to see an example; to whet your appetites, I included a PG-13 image above.) A highly orchestrated affair, Smith served as a sort of "conductor," directing people through a microphone to tape her nude subjects to a wall. After remaining suspended for a given period, the nudes broke free. The end result? A wall of flaccid tape revealing some suggestion of the bodies it once adhered--a sort of relic of the performance.

Smith's work is rife with allusions, from the Crucifixion to the sculptural friezes of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Here Smith is the sculptor, modeling her "material" for the purpose of enacting a vision. Her vision involves a form of sacrifice, albeit a cooperative one, where the subjects have consented to be painfully adhered to a wall. Unless you're into S&M, I have a hard time finding physical joy in this experience...

The impact of Smith's work can undoubtedly stand alone, but I can't help thinking about a

similar piece made a decade earlier. Yves Klein, a sort of conceptual artist from France, launched a series called "Anthropometries" in the 1960s. Under his supervision, a tuxedo-clad Klein directed nude women to cover themselves in paint and impress their bodies atop a large canvas. The entire performance was accompanied by a live classical orchestra and audience; one can only imagine the spectacle. Ultimately, the sole remnant of this event was the imprint of women's bodies on a canvas, similar to the wall of tape from Smith's "Nude Frieze."

It's hard to deny that Smith was engaging in a dialogue with Klein. There are, of course, differences, but the general theme of supervising a human "medium" is hard to ignore. Whether Klein's work is collaborative is questionable, but he did not forcefully compel his subjects to participate--they were consciously and willfully involved in the process, even if to ultimately follow the artist's directions. However, the gender element is ridden with controversy, a tone that isn't as potent in Barbara Smith's work. By re-enacting the tradition of the empowered male artist and quite female muse, Klein is clearly playing with gender roles. It's comically ambiguous, though, since we can't identify whether he is critiquing this dynamic or celebrating it.

If you want to fully experience the glory of Barbara Smith and some of her collaborators, the 18th Street Arts Center is worth paying a visit indeed.