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Weekly UpdatesJosef Schulz: Form
Yossi Milo Gallery
New York City
December 11, 2008-January 31, 2009
Luisa Lambri: Photographs
Luhring Augustine
New York City
January 10-February 7, 2009
David Haxton: Color Photographs
Priska C. Juschka Fine Art
New York City
January 15-February 14, 2009
Photography has a unique dialectical relationship with modernist architecture--each evolving at nearly the same moment in the framed glass daguerreotype and the Crystal Palace. The dichotomy between the most illusionistic and most experiential of cultural phenomenon was elided definitively by the rhetoric of light and lightness that accompanied the modular, open buildings of the Bauhaus and the International style, while the documentary truth of the photograph was analogous to the transparency of function, material, and method in modern construction. In a reciprocal vein, the limitless visual perspectives of photography and increasing dissemination of architectural knowledge through reproductions affected architectural style.
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Le Corbusier compared his notion of architecture as aura directly to the "magnification of space" inhered in Cubism, enhanced by his embrace of carefully cropped photographs to illustrate his theoretical writings. (1) Beyond architectural genres rooted in painting traditions, a number of major photographers, from Alfred Stieglitz to James Welling, have focused on architectural sites and precepts in structural relation to the geometric viewfinder window as well as geometric abstraction in painting that has increasingly incorporated process and repetition. Perhaps climactic in this lineage is the collaborative oeuvre of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who have restricted their photographic practice for decades to the deadpan documentation of early modern industrial buildings presented in serial formats. Solo exhibitions of three photographers in New York this winter built upon this discourse and, collectively, expanded its scope
Josef Schulz is among two generations of heritors of the Bechers at the Dusseldorf Academy, including Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Thomas Ruff, and his close artistic peer, Frank Breuer. Schulz photographs generic corporate buildings with a large-format camera and digitally modifies them, removing logos and other identifying features and altering color, light effects, shape, and background so that the resulting bold graphic images supersede a substantive relation to their sources. Although uninhabited, isolated, and flattened, Schulz's "forms," as he calls his re-worked subjects, are not foreboding or flimsy. They can take on an iconic status in the context of the horizontal orientation and crisp focus of the prints, but also suggest, in their puzzle-like composition, pictorial abstraction.
Schulz emphasizes color or light variously in the works on view. Those highlighting the former are characterized by De Stijl-like motifs, as in one image of a steely corrugated facade ornamented with saturated pink dashes and set on a sleek stone plinth like a monumental modernist jewel. Corrugated texture is exploited across several works as a schematic, optical device that merges prosaic familiarity with computer-generated linear design and plays on surface and depth perception. In another image the convex exterior corner of a white building crowned with a band of the trompe l'oeil vertical striations is centralized close to the picture plane. Its diverging ground lines vanish into a whitish setting that extends, by formal implication, into the gallery wall.
The real wall is referenced more distinctly in two images of curvilinear, concrete-looking overpasses that recede from cropped foreground views into a fading, ambiguous distance. Others of the several images in a similar monochrome, warmed slightly through light values and atmospheric density, include simulated greenery juxtaposed with chunky neutralized structures to suggest pristine but sturdy, unemotional but not uninviting, potentially public environments. One image of a rich bluish, mirror-paned box-building perched majestically on a velvet lawn merges into and reflects the sky behind in a tour de force of Schulz's ultimately optimistic retracing of an idealized, "pure" modernism.
David Haxton has a peer relationship with the Bechers in an art-world context as stable mates at Sonnabend Gallery in the mid-1970s, where work that elided Minimalist and Conceptual forms, including photography and performance, was prevalent. Within this milieu, Haxton's aesthetic is close to that of Mel Bochner and Barry Le Va. For two decades Haxton has photographed abstract tableaux that he creates in empty studio spaces with paper backdrops employed in conventional studio photography. He begins with a makeshift wood and metal human-scale box-frame that delineates the parameters of the ensuing installation, Lengths of the papers are then suspended from the faux rafters, ornamented with square-ish, razor-edge perforations and lit dramatically to affect layers of chiaroscuro patterning. The positive cut-outs are left in the shallow photographic floor space along with strategically strewn clamps, clips, and paper rolls, insinuating, according to the artist, the moment each hanging has been completed. The performance aspect grows out of Haxton's early 16mm films, in which he draws contours in space with his body, often ending with their inverse, systematic erasure. (2) In his photographs, the physical activity is toward the goal of the photograph a priori, conveyed not least from his choice of medium-referential props.
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The insular nature of Haxton's project and the arbitrary cuttings recall the Dada of Jean Arp's collages and Kurt Schwitters's Merzbau (1923-43). However, Haxton's scrims are definitively and cleanly worked into a pictorial space. With the high-keyed lighting through the "windows," the grammar of modern buildings is strongly evoked, underscored by the urban view from the second-story gallery's large window that effectively comprises one wall of the show. Three large-scale white-on-white (color) prints starkly connote gestalt-like incarnations of the modern high-rise, with floor lamps illuminating the mise-en-scene, within the delimited stage. In this reading, the scrappy remnants below, which reveal the truth behind each image, double as mild metaphoric detritus in a streetscape.
A few of the works feature crumples and folds that suggest stagnated or re-directed construction as well as the artist's quietly emotional engagement with his selected materials; several contrast unadorned sheets of color with the skeletal, punctured ones, adding gradients of opacity and translucency to the shadow play. The repetitive but hand-hewn signature imprint of the holes re-inscribes the regularity of Haxton's artistic operation and the patient energy with which he has pursued the mining of self-delimited means for the essence of fundamental phenomenological experience.
Luisa Lambri photographs details of modern buildings by renowned architects to create the most poetic and least pictorial images of these three artists. Rather than focusing on distinguishing elements of these architectural landmarks. Lambri employs close cropping and manipulates lighting to transpose them into anonymous spatial fragments. Nonetheless, her pilgrimages to the sites add performative and heuristic dimensions that inflect their incremental Minimalist variations. The corners and edges that comprise the literal subject matter of these grisaille-toned prints also recall Minimalist insistence on the link between object-images and their situated space.
The first of three series in the exhibition consists of seven images of a single view at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea (Santiago de Compostela): an interior corner cropped high where the white wall intersects a continuous covered ceiling beam, differentiated only by subtle shifts in lighting that Lambri attains mainly through shutter speeds rather than externally or in the printing. A Vorticist pattern emerges through these re-takes of an enigmatic shadow present in reality. The content is most effective in a group of six arranged in two rows piercing an expansive gallery wall at the six concave corner points. On the one hand the results can appear cool and detached; on the other as extremely personal reactions to immersion in these spaces. Another series focuses on a repeated dark corner of a wood-stripped wall from a low vantage point in a Frank Lloyd Wright house (Kentuck Knob, near Pittsburgh). Each of three prints is a barely distinct variation in blacks, recalling the visual sensibility of Ad Reinhardt's black "cross" paintings. There is also a quixotic relation of the discernable texture in the wood planks that create chevron forms at the corner with the slanted wood-beam ceiling of the gallery.
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In the final series, four prints each depict a bare wall at the Centro Galego with the floor in the lower third of the picture plane. A slightly oblique perspective picks up on the diagonals and veins of marble floor tiles. The thin floor molding is highlighted with a hot spot that spreads out from one point, evoking a landscape horizon as viewers approach and retreat from the image. Here a shifting foreground between the prints, confused by the tile patterns, provides the perceptual tension, while the squinty light remains static among them.
Schulz's visions have a plasticity that may be compared to that of the architectural draftsman, similarly indicating space through the positioning of surface planes that take on an art-life of their own. Haxton is concerned with making space tangible--the underpinnings of architectural theory. Lambri is critical illuminator and advocate of architectural awareness and its vicissitudes. Schulz's images most resemble real architecture; Haxton's most convey real space. Lambri is most traditional in photographic technique and implicit function of documentation in terms of architectural reality. All three artists obscure epistemological boundaries between architecture as idea and its photographic representation in particularized, visionary examples.
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