Terminal Destination
I'm starting this blog to share some of my favorite projects—what I enjoyed about them, why I think they turned out well, and how I created them. I'll also be linking these posts to social media to showcase my work and connect with others.
This first piece of mine might be a bit overly symbolic—but at the time, I thought it was a great idea. Terminal Destination took a lot of groundwork. My goal was to capture the essence of the old Hollywood "The End" text that appeared in films from the 1930s and '40s and juxtapose it with images that would spark a sense of storytelling in the viewer.
Take, for example, the image of an airplane flying over a suburban city below. Looking at it, I immediately start to wonder—what led up to this moment? Was there just a scene showing the protagonists on the plane? Who are they? Where are they going?
For me, this image embodies the kind of art I aim to create. When I was a kid, there was a cable channel called AMC (American Movie Classics) that showed old black-and-white films without commercial interruptions. Unlike today, when you can start any film at a whim, these films ran on a schedule—you couldn’t pause or rewind them. The ones that stuck with me the most were the ones I caught in the middle and never got to finish. I had to fill in the blanks myself, imagining what had happened before and what would come next.
That feeling—the need to construct a story from scattered pieces—is what I try to capture in my images. And with Terminal Destination, I think I came pretty close.
Really cool costume?.. clothing?.. art
There are a couple of artists using costumes in a sculptural sense that I really enjoy. The first is Nick Cave. He is pretty well known for his ‘sound suits’. These are full figure garb that create in my mind a mystical monster.
Nick Cave
I feel that without knowing too much about him, Nick Cave must have some inspiration from Mardi Gras Indian costumes. All of the elaborate bead work, the colors…
Mardi Gras Indians
Exhibition of Nick Caves work
Beyond Nick Cave, I enjoy looking at the work of the Poncili Creación collective. They seem to do performance art with these figures.
Poncili Creacion Collective
Kind of opposite of Nick Caves work, this is crude styrofoam, spray paint, and seems to have been done quickly. It’s more raw, but fun.
Poncili Creacion Collective
Poncili Creacion Collective
Beppe Giacobbe
Beppe Giacobbe is an Italian illustrator. The majority of his work is commercial. But some of it straddles the edge of surrealism along the lines of Magritte or DeChirico. It's that surrealist work that grabbed my attention. His work is very simple.
While its not earth shattering. Its enjoyable. Each piece is a quick puzzle that you figure out. I don’t think I would want to have one of his works around to study day after day. Its more like a cross word puzzle. It grabs all of your attention for a brief period of time… but you aren’t going to be hanging it on your wall and studying it the next day.
So… Beppe is a good illustrator. Probably my favorite work is below. Where he is combining art with text.
Adding a few more of his works below. There are a ton more if you google him. If you had the desire to do so… you have to be in the right mood.
Nina Chanel Abney
I like the work of Nina Chanel. Recently I came across her work for the first time when I picked up an issue of Juxtapoze where she was featured.
Abney - 'unknown title'
What struck me was the way she seemed to be influenced both by the work of Basquiat and Stuart Davis.
Abney - 'Why'
Looking at Abney's work in detail in order to see how she does it, it looks like she is using spray paint and stencils. While I have nothing against this medium, and believe that this style suites her work well from afar.
Abney - 'Detail view'
So two thumbs up for the vibrant colors and composition. I’d like to see it in person in order to judge the tactile nature of the work. I hope it is not flat.
Riding a bike in the forest
New drawing of a lady riding a bike through the forest. I was watching a movie recently and there was this scene that held a lot of tension. It was of a lady in a dark green forest on a bike. Nothing else. It stuck with me. I did a few quick sketches and then eventually came up with this.
Here is the initial first sketch.
Eventually I came up with a slightly different composition and went ahead with this drawing.
I thought the first drawing was a little too realistic. So I morphed it slightly into what you can see below.
I don't think I am quite done here. I'd like to abstract it even a little more. I like the head turning over the shoulder and the idea that something off the page is menacing an otherwise breezy summer jaunt.
Why is this such an iconic image of Chinese contemporary art?
It seems that every time a survey for contemporary Chinese art is taken, this image comes up. "To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain" Zhang Huan 1995. I suppose its kind of interesting. But why is it 'THE IMAGE' for mid 90's Chinese art?
Currin, His Time and Evolution
John Currin has evolved into a contemporary master of human interactions.
When John Currin rose quickly to prominence in New York during the middle 1990's, his early works of large breasted crudely painted women created a storm of outrage among many critics. Along with Lisa Yuskavage and Elizabeth Peyton, Currin shot to the forefront of a movement inspired in part by Hockney and Alex Katz. Yet unlike his contemporaries, Currin has taken a series of steps towards proclaiming himself as both a serious and thoughtful artist of his day.
To understand Currin fully, you must start with a couple of artists practicing a generation before him. In many ways both Hockney and Katz typified the high art of "bad painting1." Both artists were very young on the eve of postmodernism. The art world had for years previously been concerned with the Greenburg/Duchampian ideals that championed forms of abstraction or a progressive lineage. The figurative style that these two artists grappled with were at the time seen as taboo, or against the grain. Painters were more concerned with splattering paint onto the canvas and talking about how this represented their souls malcontent or an intellectual belief.
In the 1960's, Hockney created a vast number of quick drawings and paintings based themselves perhaps on outsider art and Mattise to some extent. These works thrived on childish techniques that contained the raw essentials of a definable narrative. Hockney's responsive drawings in many ways show the terrible pressure put onto young artists to conform with their times. The quick loose jagged mark making that you can find in a Hockney work is very representative of De Kooning. Only Hockney was bringing these drawings back from pure abstraction, the opposite direction De Kooning had traveled in.
As part of a young group of artists emerging out of London grappling with the figure, these artists sought not realism, but an emotional raw effusion of tactility. The punk movement of the 1970's, the pared down chords and hard driving messy style of the Ramones would be a good analogy to what these artists were attempting to capture, only it was with pen and a paint brush instead of a guitar.
Hockney's career has had its ups and downs, but now as we find ourselves with over forty years of work to look back upon, we can start to judge his importance as an artist. The cruder work of Hockney eventually straddled many different ideas, and become known as a man obsessed with historical roots of painting. He has studied perspective and how the eye sees. Hockney authored a definitive book that explored the draftsmanship of old masters, attempting to explain how such realistic masterpieces were produced using mechanical tools. Mostly Hockney is loved for his minimalist style. His paintings speak of moments, or places as a poem, editing out extraneous subject matter. If you take a look at 'Two Men in a Shower," you will see exactly that and nothing else. Two men posed behind a shower curtain, the water falling down upon them. And in the background a pastel orange/pink wash across the rest of the canvas. There is almost no depth to the composition, the tiles of the bathroom, or whatever else may have been in this space is taken away. We are left with a meditative moment, serene with the actions taking place on the canvas.
Just as Hockney pared down everything to a minimal degree, Katz did so but with an eye not towards telling any story, but instead in the direction of capturing an almost plastic representation of the figure. These two artists have enjoyed a remarkable run of success, and Katz has had his share of iconic paintings. But Katz pretty much stayed with a tried and true recipe he knew the public clamored for. Katz never looks back in history for inspiration or examines his contemporaries for new ideas. A Katz from 1965 is pretty much the same as a Katz from 2000.
What sets Currin apart from his contemporaries is a searching quality found in any great artist. From one work to the next a viewer can see an evolution in his thought process. In his earliest works Currin did primarily concern himself with painting in a youthful style that if taken as a whole would leave any viewer lacking. But, like Hockney, Currin became immersed in the history of painting as well as the manner in which the eye sees.
Part of what makes comparing artists and styles interesting to the observer is in tracking influences of one artist upon another. Discerning how one artist takes what he or she desires from another and then in turn influences yet another group is part of what makes the art world so terribly interesting. Anyone working today has all of history to feed upon. You might hear someone say "Vermeer was the greatest artist who ever lived," and in one sense, this could be construed as a truth. In his day, Vermeer's lush interiors and breathtaking painting techniques were in his time startling achievements. Vermeer still commands respect not only because his paintings are still quite good by today's standards, but even more because of his place in history. Vermeer influenced his contemporaries through his realist portrayals of figures, his palate that so elegantly captured light, and his finely crafted compositions. Altogether his work was revolutionary during his period, artists came from across Europe to study his work and incorporate its ideas into their own paintings. Today hundreds or thousands of people can and do paint just as well, if not better than Vermeer, but we don't cherish their paintings with the same relish. Academically figures merely lolling in sun drenched rooms going about a daily routine, or just sitting while reading a book have lost their charm primarily because they have been portrayed again and again. Their uniqueness has been lost.
While Currin developed as an artist, moving from the portrayal of large breasted pin up girls towards a more serious investigation of composition, he obviously looked closely at Vermeer or those artists the old master influenced. What is exceptional in what Currin is up to is that instead of pushing away from the past, he is taking the art of today and forcing it onto the past. "Whereas Manet modernized Titian, Currin antiquates his figures, projecting them out of an art history textbook. Its what the sexual fantasy of a man aroused by the Louvre would look like.2"
In Hockney's book, 'Secret Knowledge,' he attempts unearth the process in which old masters so carefully captured the likenesses of those who would pose for him. When an artist is drawing or painting the figure without aid of a device, he or she is constantly shifting their eyes. Looking up at the model and then focusing upon an exact spot on the canvas to make a mark or correction. In the act of shifting the gaze back and forth, one can create a close likeness to the figure posing. But even the most competent portrait painter or draftsman will create slight alterations that just don't exactly feel like the person they are painting. While using an aid such as an overhead projector and a photograph, an artist can churn out an exact likeness of his subject quickly. The difference is that when not using an aid, the artist is struggling to find the exact curves of the body, shadows of the eye sockets, and foreshortening of the limbs. While using an aid, the artist is free to concentrate on mark making, the thickness of a line, or in matching the color correctly to his/her subject. Vermeer had at his disposal a Camera Obscura, a large box, like a portable closet, in which the artists can place themselves. Inside this dark space, an image is projected upside down like a slide being projected onto a wall. Vermeer could then sketch out the portrait in exact detail, thus attaining the near Photorealist quality found in his paintings. During the early and middle 20th century, most artists strove for imaginative likenesses of the human figure. Even while painting a figure in the studio, artists would encourage themselves to find the differences between what they were seeing and what they were creating and elaborate upon this. The eye focuses on such a narrow point of the figure or canvas at any one time. If you look at the Matisse on the right, you will see a figure that on first glance might seem acceptable to your eye. What your eyes are doing is looking at dozens of very small points a second, piecing them together, and creating an image that seems to feel just fine. This occurs because Matisse was a master in finding the exact curve of the torso, the fold of a leg, and the interaction between the woman and her surroundings. These hundreds of points of reference that our eye focuses upon, when pieced together, seems to be working just fine. It is however an illusion, if the figure in the painting were to stand and walk around the room, it would become immediately apparent that something is amiss. Even if every portion of the figure matches up snugly with the next, it becomes noticeable that the thigh will not hold up as well against her left hand as it does with its immediate surroundings. Diebenkorn and his figures created with fewer lines and only using black ink washes, is a little easier to decipher than Matisse. Try and see where your eye is focusing as your gaze wanders around the drawing. If you look at her right eye, are you also concentrating on the left? Or is your area of focus so detailed that it is only picking up fractions of percentage points at a glance?
Currin is working most likely from photographic images, sketching the figures in the pose he desires from a found image and into a sketchbook. He captures a close but exaggerated likeness and probably screened by the composition. He then transfers the image onto his canvas using projection. The act of doing this incorporates the 20th century expressionist ideal into Vermeer's 17th century camera obscura realism. It is not just that Currins models are soufully manipulated before our eyes, it is also the pallate he uses. In areas, Currin will slop on hearty portions of thick oil paint to his canvas, in others layer upon layer of transparant glazes suffice. The old masters were limited to the tools of their times.
If you compare a classic Vermeer, such as 'Young Woman with a Water Pitcher,' to a contemporary Currin 'Thanksgiving,' you will be immediately struck by several similarities. First of all, Currin is basing the composition partly upon the motif Vermeer used in about half of his canvases. Vermeer constantly returned to a corner of one of his rooms (perhaps this is where he could easily set up his Camera Obscura?). His composition always portrayed a corner of the room on the left side where a window would be casting light onto the primary focal point of the picture situated on the right side (in this picture, it is the girl and the table with a pitcher). Secondly Currin is capturing a moment in time, a family gathered around a morbid Thanksgiving feast. Vermeer always caught daily occurrences as well, such as with a girl opening a window. Thirdly, Both artists are concerned with capturing in a highly realistic manner, not only the folds in the cloth, or shadows cast by light sources, but a true pallet of colors that richly contain the image.
Vermeer created an image that was for its time startling, but today easily produced. Currin, in 'Thanksgiving,' uses all of art history to and the leniency of our Post Modern culture to produce something fully new for our age. First of all we have the figures of the three ladies that are cleverly misshapen. They're necks are too long, their heads are too large, these are figures that could not exist in reality. But Currin is pulling it off thanks in a large part to the old masters techniques of accurate depiction being subjugated by the more nuanced and searching quality of the abstract expressionists; the steps they have taken to devolve and reconstruct the figure. Besides the Expressionist influence, Currin is taking the absurdities from Surrealism and incorporating this into his canvas. The raw turkey, is this family about to carve into the beast uncooked? What is being fed to the girl in the middle, exaggerated in her pose like a young chick waiting to find nourishment from her mother. The darkened interior lends a Kafkaesque intrigue almost opposite to the light that is radiating into the Vermeer. Primarily what differentiates the two paintings is strictly the period of time in which they are painted. If these paintings were both contemporary, Currin's would be arguably the more competent of the two on almost every count.
Alex Katz was a man of his times, and Pop art was huge during the 1960's. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein led the vanguard and mandated a slick commercial style that reverberated loudly. Katz perfected a unique style all of his own, his images were crisp and sparse, almost as if he were interpreting the loose quality of billboards and commercial advertisements, using what he found as guidelines in his picture creations. He turned himself into a later-day Fairfield Porter with out obvious brush marks or transparent layers showing labored under-painting. Katz's style quickly became synonymous with the artist and as the years went by he rarely explored the limits of his confines, content to produce images that were highly sought after, but in the end ideas that he had mined so repeatedly, most of the life was sucked out of his hand.
Over the last few years, as he enters the twilight of his career, Katz has been attempting to expand his legacy by manufacturing works that will broaden his oeuvre. Perhaps he has forgotten what it is to be an artist, or it might just be that he was nothing more than a crass manipulator from the beginning, but the paintings he has created are less than astounding and in many regards are nothing other than a slight whimper to the end of what was at first a promising career. His paintings do not expand his legacy; instead they are expansive works on par with a most thoughtless child's scribbling. Somewhere he seems to have gotten the notion that a larger painting is better than a small for no other reason than the spectacle of size alone. Upon entering a retrospective of his recent work you will be surrounded by paintings the size of billboards, and with little more than a few dabs of paint, creating a mockery of everything except for the greed of collectors driving the whole endeavor. Through some creed, the financial engine driving the gallery system in New York states for the most part that a large painting is worth multiple amounts more than a smaller work. Maybe Katz got it in his head that because some collector was willing to pay ten times more for a billboard sized painting, this work was all the better than his smaller work. Well its not so, people are still purchasing his work on a potential that has long since faded, and the anticipation of his works value to continue to be thought of as a wise investment. After his death, Katz will be remembered for a couple dozen great works, but his career will be more strongly remembered as so many other artists of our capitalistic time, as one who did not meet expectations.
Like Alex Katz, Yuskavage and Peyton have not grown as artists overly much since they initially found success. Yuskavage is slowly expanding her repertoire of images, experimenting with light and color, but like a skipping record she is painting large breasted Barbie dolls in a large gambit of titillating poses. It is almost remarkable how only a few years ago Yuskavage and Currin were commonly spoken of together in the same sentence. Today she is still admired by most of those on the high-minded world art scene as a woman brave enough to push the male gaze back into the face of men.
But is this enough? Compositionally her paintings are about as invigorating as a bad Norman Rockwell. Her stylistic approach is almost on par with an airbrush. And her paintings stand out only because of the luminous though overused monochromatic color scheme of her pallet. Some critics are becoming bold enough to criticize her openly, "her imagery seems to embody the conceit, and common enough today, that painting amounts to little more than onanistic indulgence.3" But these quips are often hedged inside of an otherwise glowing preponderance of hypocrisy. Most amazing of all is the fact that where Currin was and still is exorcised for painting the female in the manner he did during his large breasted years, Yuskavage is held up as a shining light of feminism. Unless she undertakes a major retooling of her oeuvre, in time Yuskavage will come to the end of her popularity and go the way of so many of the unheralded Abstract Expressionists of the 1950's. It is inconceivable that if she were to leave behind only what she has thus far produced, her legacy will be remembered as nothing other than a two bit Vargas emulator.
Elizabeth Peyton is not growing very quickly either; just like Yuskavich she has found an enormous amount of critical acclaim. Her watercolors and paintings are quick and small, thus producing an enormous cash flow. This might have something to do with her stunted development. The fact that she was immediately appreciated and showered with accolades might have blinded her to need of continuous growth. Beyond that, she does have one thing going for her, and that is the paintings she does pull off have an aura of perfection surrounding them.
Peytons's inspiration regarding image matter includes the weekly tabloids and snap shots of either her friends in various poses or celebrities in repose. These pictures are then faithfully transcribed onto a canvas or sheet of paper... not exactly, but through the observational Matisse method. Thus, the composition feels a little jerky and somewhat out of whack. Thick and transparent layers of paint are applied in a manner that produces great drips and accidents, which are incorporated into her work. "Peyton's style is a kind of sloppy translucence. She prefers wide swaths of color on her small paintings., in thin layers that reveal her process of adding paint. Peyton slathers on paint in a general way, as if replicating a washed-out Polorid.4" The end result is a study of paint. The image becomes in many ways an afterthought to the brush marks and various means of paint application.
Peyton is not a lost cause yet by any means. It seems doubtful that she will pin a legacy on the high handed feminist compliments that glorify her as turning the objectification of females on its head. Many of her works so far have been of young androgynous males. On the other hand, she is growing as an artist with goals similar to Chuck Close (an artist concerned primarily with the beauty of process). Though she still has yet to make more than a few tentative steps in any direction of her own, the promise of her future still looms large.
Jenny Saville is in many ways outside of the artists I have talked about before in this article. Instead of owing a major allegiance to Hockney and Katz, she follows along the lines of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. Her work is large in scale, often measuring more than twenty feet in breadth. Her work also deals with largeness in another sense. These paintings are almost all self-portraits. They deal with her self perceptions surrounding the female figure via the gaze of the male. That is she is confronting the ideas surrounding that of being female long propagated by the other sex. In many ways she is also dealing with the plain everyday horror of being alive. Her work is amazing in its profusion of different applications of paint, and is troubling in the confrontational attitude it aspires towards via subject matter.
Britain has celebrated its figurative painters over the last century while the USA has triumphed its ground breaking abstract expressionists. These artists aspired towards capturing the very essence of living flesh on a canvas. Much in the manner that DeKooning mastered the process of paint manipulation in his almost abstract 'Woman' pieces, Freud attained and unprecedented level of realism with his thick brushwork over the course of his career. Saville, along with other artists of her generation such as Peyton and Currin, are the culmination of the merging lines of art; abstract expressionism and British figurative painting.
Saville has taken from the pages of both DeKooning and Freud along with the over the top massive wall paintings of the 1980's New York art scene. She has taken from the Abstract Expressionist ilk and combined it with the postmodern practice of Photorealism used by Currin, Yuskavage, and Peyton. Saville's work is much in line with Peyton's, only Saville has let go of many of her hesitations and misgivings. Both artists are exploring the manipulation of paint on opposite scales of size. But whereas Peyton is content thus far to produce iconic images of mass culture, Saville is striving to become the very best 'artist' her abilities will allow for and in the very truest meaning of the word. Every work Saville has produced thus far is a risk on her part.
The Massive Influence of Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman has been one of the biggest influences on contemporary art. This article looks at both the culture that helped form her ideas and those her work impacted.
One of the most intriguing aspects of studying a large group of artists is in watching how one artist influences another. The whole artistic community is constantly feeding upon one another, using what he or she finds of interest and incorporating influential ideas or mannerisms into their own work. In this postmodern world small and large leaps of new thoughts are a constant occurrence, and sharing abounds with in every artist's practice. It is becoming ever more apparent that Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman have had an enormous impact on today's photographers, and in turn today's painters. Cindy Sherman has for a long period of time been held up as a remarkable example of both critical theory as well as artistic achievement. Jeff Wall has explored crafted narrative in a wholly new direction that is layered atop of Sherman's work. The work of Wall's is a bridge between Sherman and younger artists whose current practice is far removed from her initial intent.
Sherman has toiled on an evolving three decade long body of work. Each piece is numbered in chronological order from #1 to somewhere in the 400's today. Looking back, one can now sharply divide her work into two parts with a brief interlude of searching in between. Her earliest pieces were taken using black and white stock while paying tribute to film noir stills. Positioning herself in an evocative situation, she would capture an image by using a shutter release from where she would be standing (in one hand you can usually see her holding the release). What resulted, for its time, was a truly innovative approach to photography. Her images almost beg a viewer to create a pseudo-narrative around the scene. For example, in " Untitled Film Still #8," we see Sherman leaning out of a sliding glass door. She is wearing a black wig, sunglasses, and a slip pulled up around her legs. She might be quite drunk, for she is leaning against the door for support with a hand holding a martini glass. The expression on her face as she stares at the viewer is not one of welcome exactly, but confrontation. Behind her is what might be a bedroom cloaked in darkness. Between the viewer and the artist is what might be a sun hat carefully placed on a deck chair. The chair could be acting as a barrier, creating a feeling of tension between the artist and the viewer. We are asked to interpret what might be occurring here, to build a narrative out of Signifiers and our own past experiences. The viewer has the ability not only to piece together a story over what has occurred in the recent past but also to take some stabs at what might occur in the near future.
Prior to Sherman, photographers did create artistic images, but they were along the lines of Ansel Adams or Robert Frank. The photograph was treated as a documentary device that recorded for posterity actual occurrences. War photography, the dust bowl in the 1930's, Adams' records of Yosemite, these are what you could think of as pre-Sherman art. Man Ray was about as close as you could get to a real artist, but his surrealist images are almost laughably arcane and naïve today. Sherman took what was in retrospect an obvious step forwards in our lexicon, perhaps inspired by two separate quarters of the advertisement industry and documentary photography.
During 1959, Bruce Davidson followed a group of kids around New York, snapping standoffish alienated youths. These photographs feel like they could be straight out of a modern day fashion add and were ahead of their time period. The loosely posed photographs straddled the boundary of fiction and reality, these were actual street toughs, but you can feel the proximity of the camera and read the knowledge of its presence in the actions taken by these kids.
The film studios of the thirties and forties kept photographers on the sets of their larger productions to take stock images of the sets. These photographers would have say Bogart and Peter Lorre pose at a dimly lit table in conversation for the image separate from the actual shooting of footage that would end up in the can. The images would then be developed and sent out to film magazines and newspapers in order to hype the coming release. What made these photos unique was that most of them ended up not having very much to do with the film itself. These photos that captured a momentary narrative played out by one or more actors on a set that existed nowhere outside of the studios. If you were to sit down and watch 'Casablanca,' you would never see a comparable scene caught by the stills taken by the studio photographers on the screen. This entire endeavor was utilitarian.
Secondly, Sherman could have been inspired by magazine advertisements. For example Marlboro and Camel cigarettes placed huge advertising campaigns portraying action scenes caught on camera during the 60's and 70's. Camel used a pre Indiana Jones type and portrayed him making his way down a jungle river, or ruggedly trekking across the plains of Africa. Marlboro on the other hand caught cowboys rustling their way over the American west of the last century. Both of these advertising campaigns were staged, using actors to portray a desired typecast. Both of these campaigns captured a fuzzy narrative where the viewer would be asked to create a situation in order to explain just why these men were where they were.
While Sherman's photos portrayed an idea that advertising had ventured into in the past, her work was new in that no person had previously consciously gone about creating 'art' in such a manner. It is not unlike Duchamp's using a urinal and calling it art. Sherman took something that was part of our everyday lives, and showed it to us in a new light. Only a few years after she found such great success, Sherman revolted against her own previously brilliant work and started to capture images of violently dismembered mannequins, or derogatory and ugly self-portraits.
It's sort of ironic in that Sherman needed to break away with her strong body of early work so that she would not be typecast or stop growing and what she has produced since then would not be heralded or spoken of if it were not for the name of Sherman attached to it. Her work instead of dealing with other artists has been influenced almost exclusively via critical acclaim by seducing theorists. Radical feminists have long and rightly decried the use of a woman in film as an object, one whose purpose is to be ravished by the eye similar to a fetish object. These ivory tower theorists like Dr. Laura Mulvey or Mary Ann Doane held an enormous sway over the art world from the 70's to the late 1990's, using their pulpits as fronts for political correctness. No one knew exactly where the art world was heading during this period and for a time it seemed as though these professor's ideas would were prophetic. Listening to this clatter, Sherman has jumped in and produced what could be the most disastrous body of work by a major artist during our time. As you can see in '#137,' this work is almost un-viewable, without merit except for its revolt against typecast. Sadly, from around 1980 on, this is about all you will get, leading one to wonder if her early work was nothing other than a glorious fluke.
Sherman had a noticeable influence on Wall. But it could be said that any artist dealing with the figure and narrative post Sherman could be tied back to her in some way or another if only because of her profound impact on fictionalized narrative. Wall on the other hand took Sherman's ideas a step further by incorporating a meta-narrative. While Sherman focuses in on the figure, often cropping herself, and thus pulling the spectators eye directly towards what she intended to articulate, Wall heads often in the other direction. In many of his works, his figures comprise barely a fraction of the over all composition. This allows for the eye to skip around from one space to another. Early on in his career, Wall toyed with Sherman to a large degree, setting up situations where figures would be interacting with each other such as in 'Mimic.' Here we see another narrative unfolding. An Asian man is walking down the street, perhaps deliberately giving a wide birth to a biker and his woman. The biker is flipping the guy off and the lady seems indifferent. Perhaps she is a lady of the night, just wanting to get this over with. The undertones of this piece are not as complex as what you will find in the best Sherman work, mainly because the narrative does not have very far to evolve either towards the past or into the future. What is different here is the more contemporary and evolved use of composition and light. Also, the narrative is in play with a threesome, forcing the viewer to examine both how the individual characters are reacting to one another, as well as how they are exist with in themselves.
Jeff Wall's first major show was in the 1978, but slowly emerged from Canada in the 1980's as people began to understand his unique perspective. Today one can look at Sherman's dismembered mannequins, compare it with Wall's elaborate narrative compositions and see little in common between them. But they both started in the same place and evolved from that point along two completely different paths. Wall's photographs have evolved considerably from the time of 'Mimic.' His work effuses narrative through ever more complex structures. He continues to pull ever further away from the primary interaction, such as you see above, while contemplating more complex yet unresolved stories.
'A Sudden Gust of Wind' was inspired by the Japanese artist Hokusai's seminal 19th century prints "Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji." One of the thirty-six woodcuts in this series portrays a snaking river making its way through large fields with papers being carried into the sky by a strong breeze. Wall's photograph was created using digital technology over a span of half a year while mixing several shots of actors taken during separate periods of time. What is unique about this photograph, like a large number of his works, is that he is en-capturing such a large-scale panoramic scope. "Gust of Wind" forces the viewer to accept small fragments of the composition in order to read it in its entirety. This is not a picture that deals with the minimalism ideals of 'gestalt,' with the ability to understand every aspect of the work at once and at every moment. Instead, it forces one to engage with the work, to create a narrative out of what the artist has chosen to represent.
The importance of Wall's work straddles two arenas. His contribution to narrative is worthy because he has carried Raymond Carver's minimalist literature style into photography. To understand this relation, Carver spent a career producing short stories that really had no plots. He took prose and turned it into a form of poetry. His work centered on everyday situations rather than events that were plotted from beginning to end. You can see this in Wall's work. Only Wall for the most part has gone in for the over the top Hollywood action moments, his work also reads as a few lines of haiku or a good but mysterious poem. The other arena, as I have stated before, deals with the scope of his panorama. By stepping back so far from any key narrative point, Wall influenced an enormous number of today's practicing photographers. Gursky is probably the best-known artist to use this method, and is indicative compositionally to his peers. I say this in the sense that in '99 cent' you see no figures and no narrative. His work is strictly about place, startling in its frankness. If figures do crop up in this work, they offer no sense of story; they are merely aspects of the composition with neither more nor less importance towards its success than any other object.
In the 1980's a group of Latino artists collaborating with each other and known as ASCO produced several 'No Movies' that re-explored Sherman's studio production-still influence. ASCO was a group project comprised of several Latino artists, and whose story is fascinating unto it's self, though rather complicated for this article. These artists had no education in the art world and thus what they produced could be considered outsider art. But they attempted to be engaged with what was occurring nationally during their time over every aspect of contemporary art by educating themselves. The 'No Movies' comprised only a small aspect of what ASCO was attempting to accomplish. This undertaking produced a short series of photographs that were used partly as a protest against the plight of the United States Chicano Cinema in its day. To put it mildly, there was no representation except for Cheech and Chong, and thus ASCO sought this avenue in which to express their cinematic aspirations. Unlike Sherman, every still that ASCO produced had been carefully thought out inside the context of a film. The photos would be released along with production notes and a script synopsis. So instead of the ambiguity that revolved around Sherman's work, the viewer could lock into a clearly defined and structured narrative.
In the 1990's a group of young female photographers from Yale graduate school created quite a stir with their work. Anna Gaskell, Justine Kurland, and Jenny Gage were among these artists and have produced some startling images over the last decade. Anna Gaskell has created a fictionalized place, filled with young girls just past the age of puberty. This is not an ideal world or a place of serenity. Instead, the viewer might take away a feeling of abject horror over the almost mindless group thought portrayed here. This is a place of heartless reaction and indifferent exploration, almost as if the girls were living without any outside supervision or adults. "A number of these narratives explore the concept that children are not innocent beings and, when left alone without the guidance and love of adults or the governance of society, they can become savage". Adding to the effect of mindlessness is the manner in which Gaskell is photographing her subjects. Every frame is shot at an angle to thoroughly maximize an uncomfortable wall between the viewer and the girls being documented. "Unusual viewing angles and close ups violent cropping and stark contrasts of shadow and light result in a set of menacing claustrophobic spaces that intimate not only anxiety about ones coming of age but a general psychological unease. Gaskell's work does not posses specific narrative but rests rather on a series of suggestive 'actions'. In fact her whole oeuvre is based on implication rather than description; it is this ambiguity hovering as it does between what is imagined and what one sees between reality and fiction that reinforces the sense of malaise and intrigue for the viewer."
The link between Gaskell and Sherman is tenuous if only because Gaskell is removed several fold via two decades and countless evolutional steps between the two artists. We can however trace Sherman's influence directly to Gaskell's work by looking at the psudo-documentary aspect of her images. Instead of Sherman posing in an ambiguous scene based on generic remembered film references, we have here a hoard of little girls whose activities are being produced and portrayed as a false reality. The staging and slight of hand used by both artists along with an unresolved narrative reveals Sherman's strong influence upon Gaskell.
Justine Kurland started down a road similar to Gaskell, using groups of actors (females of various ages), positioning them in curious landscapes, and using the figures almost like Barnett Newman would use a vertical line in one of his paintings. If you look at Kurland's photograph 'cyclone,' one aspect that slowly imposes itself upon the viewers consciousness is that their really is very little narrative occurring in this scene. This work on one level deals with the body of work by Vanessa Beecroft who does nothing but take photograph's of grouped naked young women standing in a gallery space while ignoring everything going on around them. The figures in 'Cyclone' are all looking off into the distance in one direction, yet they seem hardly interested. It is as if they are all experiencing the same mild passing fancy in their semi-exhausted and disheveled states to gaze in what coincedentaly happens to be the same direction. Instead of the deep narrative that claws the underside of Gaskell's better work, Kurland seems to be more interested in concerning herself with the more traditional compositional elements found in portraiture. You can see signs of Kurland struggling to find the surreal narrative that Gaskell has mastered in her early photographs, such as with 'Raft Expedition.' But most of Kurland's work in these early bodies of work center around her subjects being caught in a choriographed activity. In many ways Kurland is still exploring who she is as a photographer, playing with what it is she will bring into the art world as herself. Whereas Gaskell has created such a vivid and imaginary world of her own, Kurland is aware of the
Jenny Gage could be seen as a crass manipulator of Cindy Sherman's work. Or if not a manipulator, she could be read as nothing more than your average fashion photography hack. So far she has not produced the greatest body of work, but she is still young. What is invigorating is her potential, and the ideas that she is attempting to deal with. Gage left Yale grad school and found a job as a photographer with Vogue magazine, which has completely influenced her practice. She spent her time during these years taking the ideas of Sherman and placing them back into the fashion pages. "Woman in a Red Diner," entirely alludes to one of Sherman's early works. On the surface, we can read this image in two quickly different initial directions depending on how it is presented. Between the covers of Vogue, this will read entirely as a fashion shot, some stiff model dressed to the nines hawking some clothing. As a photograph by itself, this can be read as a candid shot by some family member of a bored girl looking sort of pissed off. With a little information, we know that this is Gage herself, portraying a young woman caught in a situation that becomes more unclear the longer one studies it. This is one of Gages first mature works and epitomizes her body of work for the most part thus far. What is apparent is that she is starting directly in the shadow of Sherman, only instead of being influenced by advertising; she is pulling Sherman back into the sphere of product hawking.
Gages one and only triumph is a short but remarkable film that she produced in 2000. This film "Drift," works so well because of how it uses her Sherman inspired photography and her corporate ideals while melding them into film. There is little in the way of speaking, the entire film is just one lush panoramic scene straight out of Vogue after another. The narrative is choppy and the viewer has little idea of what is going on. Instead, this film reads as separate short stories without plots, only highly strung emotional outpourings by fashion models with their typical zombied out expressions. This short film could have been a disaster, but instead it thrives as it brings Sherman's fictionalized film stills back into film. A 360-degree turn back to its original medium while taking along all of the sensibilities it has garnered along the way.
Sherman's situational, narrative, and fictional photography was a startling new development, ramifications of which are still being felt. Her influence was not only on the photographic community, but on narrative painting as well. Like the ramifications of Duchamp's ready-made's on the conceptual movement or Greenberg's tight fisted control over the abstract expressionists, the huge swell of narrative painters since the mid-1990's, as well as the photographers discussed here in this article, all can trace at least some line of influence to Sherman.
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