Adios California

Funniest little hot tub in Palm Desert

View from the Palm Springs aerial tram at twilight (scary)

Vik Muniz's Pictures of Cars (after Ed Ruscha) at the Imago Gallery, Palm Desert

The Cabazon Dinosaurs through the front window of the Corolla (remembering Pee Wee's Big Adventure)

 Adam's birds stored on top of the refrigerator

View from Griffith Observatory at sunset (amazing!)

Jim Hodges' The Dark Gate at the Hammer Museum

From Jeff Koons' Banality series or custom made gingerbread houses at Gelson's in Pacific Palisades

A Very Short Analysis of "Aperture Remix: A Sixtieth Anniversary Celebration"

The Aperture Remix exhibition is currently on display at the Ball State Art Museum. I was awarded the prize for "most use" the other day when I admitted, in front of a large audience, to visiting it three times with all my classes. I plan on returning before it closes to peruse the small library thoroughly (sounds like a Saturday afternoon well spent).

The premise of the exhibition explores contemporary photographers looking through the archives of Aperture magazine and responding to their influences. Several of my favorites, both young and old, are represented.

Penelope Umbrico, Moving Mountains (photograph courtesy of Ball State University)

Umbrico was paired with the Masters of Photography series. I was less interested in the original mountain images because I had viewed many of them while working at the Center for Creative Photography in graduate school. Umbrico's work was an unexpected homage to the original yet the presentation still maintained her signature style using low technology as an art form.

Someday I hope to see Sunsets (from Flickr) installed in a gallery space. After looking up this link, I am reminded how very few sunsets I see in one year and how that needs to change.

Stephen Shore and Doug Rickard (image courtesy of Ball State University)

I am thrilled every time I get to see a Stephen Shore print in person, let alone his original Amarillo postcards (below). They were just as mundane and dated as anticipated (hard to believe the world looked like that the year I was born).

Stephen Shore, Tall in Texas, 1972 (image via)

Doug Rickard, Mallard Cove Resort, Lake Sutherland, Port Angeles, Washington, August 27, 1973 (image via)

Doug Rickard's internet search results to find photographs that responded well to Shore's  reminded me of scenes straight out of Mad Men. Of particular interest was the above photograph with two compelling formal combinations: interiors and exteriors and warm and cool colors (particularly blue and yellow).

Images of Alec Soth's video, Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree, in response to Robert Adams's Summer Nights (above two images courtesy of Ball State University)

Unfortunately, the most disappointing part of the exhibition centered around two of my most loved photographers. Maybe there weren't enough of Adams's prints in the exhibition or perhaps it was Soth's casual statement:

"Making night pictures, twenty years later, was a struggle. I just couldn't get the blood pumping through my veins. The world I was looking at didn't feel new. It felt like Robert Adams's world. I had a new camera with a video option that I'd never used. I didn't really know what I was doing technically, but that was an asset. It felt good to be a bit lost."

I should review the video away from the space and in the comfort of the living room because I would like to change my mind.

Bovines

Perhaps it started with Errol Morris' Believing is Seeing where he deconstructs Arthur Rothstein's cow skull photograph (above). Since I am making the seniors read this book in the coming weeks, I plan to post a little more about it as it has also been my favorite read on photography in a very long time. In any case, I've noticed a lot of cows in art lately (and I'm not talking about cow parades).



Rodrigo de Filippis, National Interference, 2010 (Digital collage)


Vik Muniz, Two Cows, 1994


Anonymous, Hazel Bauer, 1960s from The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978

Anonymous from 1920s (source same as above)

I still entertain the thought of having a cow on a pole as seen in front of old butcher stores on top of a house I will buy someday. I am still not sure why that visual has always appealed to me - large animals suspended in the sky. I'm not even that interested in these animals (they may have the same amount of letters as "cats" but they aren't the same) but perhaps it is one way of saving one from a butcher shop.

More Marilyn photographs

While trying to find a high resolution image of Vik Muniz's Two Cows for a lecture this evening, I found this.


From the link above: "'It’s my favorite photograph!' says Muniz, whose work often incorporates strange materials (jelly, thread, Bosco). 'And the credits of The Misfits, one of my favorite movies, use puzzle pieces. This uses ten puzzles, with the image rotated at odd angles—like 37 degrees, 48 degrees, clockwise, and counterclockwise— relating the material and the idea.'"



I find John Baldessari's image to be a bit more engaging: "Like many of Baldessari’s recent works of subtraction, Marilyn Monroe: Partially Erased is 'about disturbing the hierarchy of vision: You usually look at the face first, and if you’re blocked out, you’re going to look at other things—the way they’re standing, like that. [But] the mole would be there. She never had it removed, so I didn’t either.'”

Samples

Vik Muniz, Sugar Children Jars, 1996


Wolfgang Laib, Jars with Pollen, 1977-97


Daniel Shea, Contaminated Waters, From the series Removing Mountains

Clouds Part 2

Gabriel Orozco, 1994

James Turrell, Roden Crater

Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalents

Ann Stautberg, 9-6-98 Texas Coast, 1999

Alec Soth, Bonnie (with a photograph of an Angel), Port Gibson, Mississippi

Lorna Simpson, Cloud, 2005

Gerhard Richter, Rooms, 1970

Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison, Suspension, 1999-2000

Eadweard Muybridge

Vik Muniz, The Rower, 1993

Richard Misrach, Cloud #240, 1993

Pedro Meyer, Las Vegas, 1998

The Road

Robert Frank, Still from Me and My Brother, 1965-1968

Although Cormac McCarthy's The Road is one of my favorite novels, that is not what this post is about. It's that time of year again where I have finished another Rebecca Solnit book and feel inspired enough to share a passage and the photographs it made me think of while reading it.


Todd Hido, #3277, 1994-2004

This is from the last chapter in Savage Dreams: "Of all the cardinal sins against the environment, driving long distance is the most seductive, the one that brings us back to otherwise inaccessible places, whatever the terms. I love long drives alone. The road is a place itself, or a border between places, a long narrow country without citizens whose only inhabitants are transients and strangers, a great suspended interval of privacy and peace between departure and arrival. And the road is a net dropped over the vastness of the continent, tying together all its distances into one navigable labyrinth of asphalt..."


Len Jenshel, Great Basin National Park, Nevada, 1987

"...Roads are the architecture of our restlessness, of those who wish neither to stay in their built places nor wander in the untouched ones, but to keep moving between them. A road promises something else to us, though the promise is better fulfilled by travelling than by arriving..."


Florian Maier-Aichen, Chamonix-Rue Nationale et le Mont Blanc, 2007

"...A road is itself a kind of sentence, or a story. A real place, it's also a metaphor for time, for future becoming present and then past, for passage. A road that travels over hills is a long sequence of geometrical variations that describes the landscape as it runs through, of s- and c-curves, rises and dips, bends, disappearances, distant reemergings, of a perpetual serpentine writhing in response to the contours that came before."


Danny Lyon, 1962

"In our heads and on maps, a road is a line drawn through the landscape, but from the road itself its foreground appears as a kind of V eternally opening up to wrap around us as we plunge onward, a great crawling king snake devouring us into the world beyond." RS


Richard Misrach, Tracks, Black Rock Desert, NV 1987

After a five hour drive on a windy, narrow road alongside sheer cliffs back to the provincial capital, a seasick inducing ferry ride over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, an hour and a half in the car to stop along a closed bridge near midnight waiting for the maintenance repairs to subside, another ferry across the Puget Sound/Salish Sea, ten hours looking at the roads below from the air above (and a forest fire in Eastern Oregon), and an hour and a half drive in the dark hoping the deer I didn't see on Vancouver Island would stay away from the road that night... I am at the place where my cats live (and they are happy to see me).


Vik Muniz, Historical Photo, 1989

Vancouver Island was my summer vacation - a place without stress, my I-phone, pollution, tons of people, and unfortunately visible wildlife. After I finish these treks across the Lower 48, Alaska and the rest of Canada are calling. It really is time I make my own earthwork.


Stephen Shore, Presidio, Texas, 1975

The next Solnit book on the horizon is Wanderlust: A History of Walking because (believe it or not), this blog will return to earthworks and walking will play a large role.