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Masato Seto

Yancey Richardson Gallery

By Marie Sunshine

Masato Seto’s photography series entitled Biran confronts the viewer with images of apathetic young female attendants known as “betel nut beauties,” women who sell biran in petite vending stands or kiosks. Unique to Taiwan, these kiosks are basically glass box rooms that are separated from outdoor gardens or city environments with access limited to one or two entrances. Their architectural design conveys a sense of isolation from the hustle and bustle of city life and congested traffic of highways, which may easily be interpreted as lonesome cubicles. Customers step into a kiosk to purchase products or to linger longer, taking a break from their work routine. Kiosks that sell biran offer a temporary escape. Biran is a legal stimulate composed of lime, binran leaf and areca nut. When the biran is chewed, the combination of ingredients produces a mild state of euphoria.
 

Born in Thailand, photographer Masato Seto moved to Japan in 1961 when he was eight-years old. By then the country’s tenuous postwar state of affairs, combined with the fast pace of globalization, had begun to foster new artistic perspectives on Japanese identity. The country’s feudal divisions between rural and urban areas weakened, closing the gap between incomes, while in the 1960s television and the inter-city bullet-train united Japanese, both geographically and culturally. Easy access to the big cities further accelerated the exchange of ideas.
 

Postwar Japan fully embraced the idea of the “modern” country, focusing on technological advancement and commissioning “authentic” Japanese art. A generation somewhat removed from its sense of national culture came to rely on the dazzling emergence of new  technologies for its identity. But some artists of this postwar generation began to critique the notion of a commissioned “authenticity” concerning art, and the rebranding, is it were, of “modern” Japan. Among these, there was the photographer Daido Moriyama, (Masato’s teacher in 1976), who photographed subversive subject matter, e.g., graphic sexual interactions, criminals, cityscapes without human presence, and contorted and constricted female nudes. Photographs were highly accessible to the public, and as such they attracted a young following of artists who were trying to find a common voice.  

This increasing influx of technical advances and globalization blurs the line between fantasy and reality in many cultures. In this regard, contemporary Japanese photography continues to use, analyze and manipulate modern iconography to comment on urban life. Masato Seto’s candid depiction of a subversive Taiwanese biran culture echoes the form and subject matter of postwar-Japanese photography; however unlike earlier photographers who have explored specifically the transformation of Japanese identity through modernization, Masato exposes a ubiquitous dichotomy of fallacy and truth. 

This series of photographs plays with the anonymity of the kiosk and betel nut beauty, producing a somewhat unsettling sense of dislocation. Each kiosk may be easily mistaken for another, or perhaps even a generic convenience store that the viewer has seen somewhere else or imagined. Each untitled photograph depicts one attendant captured in the glass façade of the kiosk.   

Formally, Masato’s repetition of style and composition exaggerates the predominant subject matter. He photographs each kiosk asymmetrically. By highlighting the structural components of the kiosk, the photograph reveals the intimate size and aquarium-like nature of the kiosk. There are the details; the small set of stairs that leads up to the kiosk and sets it upon a pedestal distinguishing from the sidewalk and street. Although the kiosk does not over-zealously demand attention from the casual passerby, it gets our attention nevertheless. We venture in. 

The flattened-pictorial space of the photograph mimics the superficial view of the kiosk from a distance; reflection of light and color on the glass façade imply a screen for the viewer to look through. The glass, which separates the viewer from the interior, suggests an animate painting for the viewer to witness, as if it were framing a narrative or introducing a scene from a play or film. By photographing the scene, the photographer enables the viewer to stay longer. The photographically-captured concurrence of transparent and opaque figures obscures the distinction between reality and fantasy. 

Masato has chosen to photograph kiosks at night, which emphasizes the conflicting color palette; the kiosks separation from the outside world and their fanciful quality. The brightly-lit glass cubicals reside on anonymous dark streets of Taiwan, ergo it is difficult for the viewer to identify the exact location of the kiosk. At first glance, the limited color palette conveys simplicity, yet the placement of nearly-pure hues evokes harsh contrasts, which leaves the viewer “dizzied.” As one primary color is set next to another primary color, the combination creates a buzzing effect; the technique contorts the viewer’s perception and further flattens pictorial space. It is difficult to distinguish the foreground from the background of the kiosk’s interior due to the brightly-lit setting, placement of furniture and convoluted view behind glass. The prominent female figure sinks into the background, as the ardent colors swallow her. Her apathetic gaze and languid body language, normally undirected towards the viewer, appears to belong to a separate photograph, a darker image correlating with the unlit street. The color combination complicates the viewer’s perception by skewing boundaries and form.

The varied dichotomies—e.g. street and kiosk, light and dark, woman and inanimate material—elicit a tension that problematizes the viewer’s gaze and questions the authenticity of the subject matter. The biran kiosk may offer an escape from reality, but human form remains a distinctive reminder of truth.   M

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AIPAD 2009

A Report on the Photography Show

By Joel Simpson 

Produced by AIPAD, (Association of International Photographic Art Dealers) this year’s edition of The Photography Show focused on its deep riches while stressing its perennial strong suit, education. The organizers invited each of the 73 (out of 120 member) participating galleries to select one photograph as particularly innovative, then published an attractive booklet devoting each page to a single image, with a generous paragraph of history and interpretation. The booklet, entitled simply Innovation, makes the most of photography’s subtler pleasures, and serves as a reminder that one of the joys of AIPAD is letting the dealers talk about the works they’re showing (and selling). Dealers here take the time to share their passion with the curious; for example, Barry Singer excitedly pulled Eugene Harris’s famous Peruvian Flute Player (1950, from The Family of Man) off the wall to show this visitor the hand-written dedication to Edward Steichen’s son (Steichen organized the show, which became a classic). 

Innovation begins, appropriately enough, with an image from Serge Plantureux’s Paris-based gallery, that has come to play the role of rooting AIPAD in photography’s deepest history, namely an extremely rare 1841 seven-minute daguerreotype self-portrait by Pierre Ambroise Richebourg, friend to Daguerre, and later official photographer to Napoleon III and the Tsar of Russia. Plantureux always comes to New York armed with a crop of mini-photo monographs that his assistants have created on surprising subjects, often from photography’s vast vernacular reservoir of snapshots. This year’s star is a 5 x 5 inch semi-hard cover 50-pager offering a collection of images of people at target ranges — the “other” shooters — including such celebrities as Paul Eluard (a photo postcard, including verso, 1929) Cartier-Bresson (in 1930), Man Ray, Fellini and Giles Deleuze. 

It is a credit to the compilers of Innovation that they conceived of their subject in the broadest possible terms. Technical means is a solid starting point, extending from the early days through such discoveries as Brassaï’s 1934 Picasso-influenced combination photograph-and-glass-etching Transmutation, Sevillane  (Gallery 19/21), a 1935/36 print from a solarized negative depicting Picasso’s photographer-mistress Dora Maar by the inevitable Man Ray (Robert Klein gallery), and two print solarizations by darkroom chemical experimenter Edmund Teske, the Woman Holding Potted Plant, New York City (1939), an anti-fashion statement (Janet Sirmon Fine Art), and his Kenneth Anger Overlaid with Gustave Doré (1952), one of his more famous duo-tone solarizations, which he achieved by partial fixation and re-exposure to white light (Barry Singer Gallery). Innovation extends into the conceptual, with Kenneth Josephson’s playful piece, New York State (1970), in which a hand extending out from the camera holds a postcard image of an ocean liner right above the horizon of the sea (Yancey Richardson Gallery); and the social, with Carrie Mae Weems’ Untitled (Man with Mirror) (1990), an outstanding example of her depiction of African-American subjects as content-rich, mysterious, cocooned in evanescent symbolic meanings, viz. the diametric contrary to stereotypes. 

Techincal innovation continues into the present, as photographers modify the medium to extend its expressive range. In an age when digital technology has made the photographic snapshot even more effortless, these artists go to a great deal of trouble to achieve their ends, and their most magnificent results were in this show. In Oui, The People (L’Ortolan) (38 x 48 in) Louviere + Vanessa, known previously for their work using human blood and encaustic, turn to kozo, gold leaf and resin to produce textured, vignetted images that penetrate even farther into dream states than their earlier work. Here the dream is of a woman eating a highly protected French songbird, the ortolan, illustrating the artists’ larger theme of the fate of threatened species. 

Doug and Mike Starn, whose earlier work revived the wonder of naked trees by rendering them in encaustic, here offer a spiritual image of a blue Buddha haloed in blue and gold, using a combination of techniques, starting with the carbon process/potassium dichromate process whose origins go back to 1855. It involves layering multiple gelatin tissues of color, but the Starns allow the layers to rip and peel back, revealing gold-leaf illuminated underlayers — their innovation. They entitle the 2005-9 piece ironically Dig Yourself (presumably referring to the Buddha consciousness we’re all capable of) (37 x 60 in). Their artistic approach seems to be to take images made banal by overexposure — who hasn’t taken pictures of the patterns of tree branches or absorbed a mind-numbing quantity of holy images — and revive the original spark of interest by means of a laborious technique that renders the very medium fascinating, though still in the background (Hackelbury Fine Art Limited).

Most radical, however, is the sculptural installation by Alan Burr Johnson, Smoke (2008; Lisa Sette Gallery) consisting of hundreds of unique transparencies mounted in small circular metal frames of various diameters between about one and two inches, normally used for scientific identification. The individual images are of vaguely membranous patterns, and pinned through the plastic to the wall, so that they dangle to any passing breeze, and cast shadows (double, according to the lighting). The overall form of the ensemble of these pinned, framed, circular transparencies is of a galactic swirl, with a large foot below and a smaller one above, measuring overall 51 x 14 inches, effectively representing the turbulent order in chaos.

As a coda to this collection in the show, there is one photograph that uses the very earliest technique of pinhole image projection — known even to the ancient Greeks — to create the contemporary incongruity of a corner of a drawing room enveloped by lush verdure, as if moss had taken over a humid, enclosed space: Camera Obscura Image of Central Park Looking North (2008; Boni Benrubi Gallery). Looking closely, though, the image is Central Park upside down. To get this amount of detail and color, the hole would have to be very small indeed, and the exposure consequently very long. So to the naked eye, the room must have been nearly totally dark. The long exposure reveals beauty that the eye can’t see.  

Throckmorton Fine Art exhibited four stunning works by Gao Yuan, a Chinese photographer who divides here time between Beijing and New York. Four of her Twelve Moons, portraits of mothers holding their naked babies, all of whom live in Beijing but have come from different provinces; all of whom are married to construction workers who are building the “new China.” 

Each of the circular images is named according to a sign from the Chinese zodiac; the works featured here included the Ox, the Snake, the Dog and the Rat. What we see are determined mothers of very diverse appearance, holding very alert babies of about a year old, with obvious family resemblances. Each circle is dominated by a different sky color, all of them luminous pastel gradients, with a landscape background composite representing the building of the new China: sky needles & skyscrapers, sports centers, bridges, construction cranes, parking lots, crops, etc. It appears to be a tribute to the mothers who make this possible, always a fitting sentiment in a society where boys are blatantly favored over girls. The circularity of the images and the symbolic backgrounds remind one of Judy Chicago’s famous iconographic plates, her tributes to outstanding women throughout history (now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum), or closer to home the wonderful Madonna Series of New York multi-media artist Christine Twomey, in which  mothers are depicted hold their naked babies symbolizing the end-points of an evolutionary journey. All three artists, in turning real women into icons of achievement (Chicago), progress (Gao), or evolution (Twomey), stress diversity. There is no single hero, no best exemplar, no greatest savior: human advancement relies on a collective effort from a wide range of contributors. This is, of course, a truism, but it is also a  subtle corrective to the male-derived singularly heroic narratives.

One overall tendency in this show that deserves mention; there seemed to be a greater focus on nature than in past shows. There was an unusually high number of iceberg and ice sheet images, reflecting the anxious fact of their melting. Notable among them was Olaf Otto Becker’s River Three (Cohen Amador Gallery) showing the acquamarine flow of water over an ice bank into an acquamarine river, the near bank in the foreground pockmarked with melt-holes. Although the locale is unidentified, one thinks of Greenland, and the ominous reports of all the melting going on up there. Another striking natural series showed details from the cliffs of Upper Normandy, corresponding to the more familiar white cliffs of Dover on the other side of the English Channel: St. Pierre en Port by Jem Southam (Charles Issacs Photographs Inc.) depicts a huge riven chunk of the chalky calcium carbonate, fallen from the dramatically lit cliff in the background, one of a series of three large photographs that take us to a striking though little-visited natural wonder.

Several more exceptional finds, in a sea of delights: The Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery showed a very singular work by Jim Campbell. It was a scene from a New York subway station as a rear illuminated transparency, but the illumination consisted in a series of small button-size lamps. When they were all on, the illumination was even, but every few seconds, some of them would blink off, creating virtual moving shadows in the transparency. It was as if one was watching ghosts move through the subway station. This was in fact a super low-res video of people walking through the scene. The actual video had been converted to something like one dot per inch, and each dot was represented by a button light. As they flashed on and off, the transparency itself served as a diffuser, blending them into a liminal moving form. The movements were familiar and human, but they had hardly any shape. Campbell had revealed a certain feeling of mystery in the subway, which we mostly ignore out of the banal frequency of use. But who hasn’t felt an occasional frisson late at night on a deserted subway stairway, an austere, 80-year old artifact in the immense functioning museum of New York’s subterranean transportation and commerce?.

Bruce Silverstein’s booth exhibited works by Shinichi Maruyama and Aaron Siskind. Each photographer is remarkable. Maruyama mixes water and ink together then manages to photograph instantaneous suspended liquid shapes against a pure white background. It’s as if he’s coaxed an ocean wave out of the ocean, into his studio and got it to hold still so that he could examine its sublime chaotic shape. The prints are big. Siskind, who died in 1991, was, along with his thematic colleagues Harry Callahan and Minor White, an acute observer of shapes and patterns, a creator of semi-abstractions in monochrome, drawn from sources as diverse as grasses, broken windows, marks on pavement, and torn posters. But his stock fell considerably after his death. In an extremely successful gesture of revival, Silverstein performed the brilliant curatorial act of displaying six or more of Siskind’s images of the same subject — all of them printed by the photographer — in a closely aligned grid, à la the Bechers and their followers. The result breathes new life into Siskind’s work, not realized by him, by presenting them as variations on a theme, re-contextualized into contemporary sensibilities.   

But all the joys at this year’s AIPAD are not in the masterpieces. Photography’s “outsider art” is its vernacular wing, photographs rescued from boxes in attics and basements that show exceptional spirit, though often in pursuit of vulgar or voyeuristic ends, but which the passage of time has turned into documents of censored sensibilities. There was a rich harvest of them, most in quite small format, plastering the walls of David Winter’s idiosyncratic booth for his by-appointment Brooklyn gallery, Winter Works on Paper. For example, there was a matted display of eight black and white photographs that reeked of drugstore development from the 1920s, of women walking by in a city, with their bell hats on, showing a bit of calf. This was evidently considered somewhat risqué at the time. Then there’s the picture of Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde fame, sitting next to the grill of his Ford, with his arsenal proudly on display; the photographer was presumably Bonnie. Winter also had the Daily News’ photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald’s corpse, a liberal sprinkling of home-baked porn, particularly buttocks, and most joyously perverse, some enterprising darkroom tinkerer’s photo-fantasies of six women with surreal breast configurations; one on the back and one on the front, three in the front, etc. The edification in all this? Same game today, more or less, only the styles have changed.  M

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Sali Taylor

Gallery nine5

By Joel Simpson

AVenus of Willendorf in high-heel shoes, lipstick and a bra; warrior goddess Athena, dressed “to kill,” with outsided lips, eyes, seven handbags, and carrying a bracelet the size of a hoop on her arm; contemporary supermodels hobnobbing with austere, faceless stone figures their size from Cycladic Greek statuary — Sali Taylor’s work irreverently combines the sacred statuary from the ancient and prehistoric world with the goddesses and treasures of  Fifth Avenue. Both reservoirs of images are rich in cultural referents, so bridging the 4000–5000+ year gap produces a virtually inexhaustible wealth of provocative juxtapositions. In Jiggle, for example, four nubile pom-pom girls, their hair waving, their breasts just barely contained in their scant bikinis, surround a Cycladic figure, endowed by Taylor with a flip hairdo, a matching blue bikini and crowned with a cardboard-looking tiara. Of course, she has no face, and her skin surface is of striated stone; still they remind us that their antique companion was what once passed for a sex queen herself. 

In Flat, Venus de Milo herself (she was Hellenistic, at least 1800 years later than the Cycladic statues) holds the wheel of a background SUV festooned with models in bikinis. Her torso and arms are of flesh, and she’s wearing a yellow bikini. On the right a female silhouette made of letters spelling various adornment devices seems to hold up the body of a leaning model wearing boots, whose head is the impersonal one of a Cycladic statue. Nothing is flat in this image except the presumed tire. The radical composites of the bodies generate large-amplitude oscillations in the lust-saturated gaze. Our attraction to Venus’s ripe human breasts is chastened by her classic stone face, and the process repeats with the leaning model, so that by the time we arrive at the background models accessorizing the SUV our naive arousal is spent. 

Taylor continues in this vein, generating a delightfully ironic body of work that effectively comments on the viewer’s susceptibility to marketing with sexiness. She puts Cycladic bodies on Madonna in three fashionista poses that ooze charm, but thanks to Taylor’s archaeological touch, brim with newfound humor. In a series of nine collages collectively entitled Cycladic Makeover, she presents scenes from an imaginary mime-dance of her Cycladic darlings. The faceless ones climb on top of one another, do splits, hang upside down, cavort around poles, pose with designer handbags while standing on one of their number asleep, etc. It’s reminiscent of the oblique humor of Walt Disney’s 1929 Silly Symphony, “Skeleton Dance,” but more sophisticated. 

Taylor’s tour de force is her 25 x 96 inch group portrait entitled Cycladic Reunion, a collage of figures pasted on a two-inch thick piece of wood, in the conglomerate style of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album cover, but on the scale of a big group picture from a wedding. It’s also a celebration of an inclusive diversity that does not discriminate against anyone who is made of or partially made of stone — or flesh. The “family” comprises stone figures, stone bodies with human heads, human bodies with stone heads, and human bodies. All the human components are radically different, all the stone components are from identical or nearly identical statues, so it’s obvious it’s a single family — with a number of in-laws, and it’s hilarious.   

One can enjoy it on one level as sly commentary on usually sacrosanct archaeological artifacts, a kind of semiological rave  that overflows with humor. The contextual histories of Taylor’s elements, however, as she wormholes her way through the last, say 12,000 years, carry a great deal of invisible weight. Combined they generate trenchant commentary on our own feminine culture of beauty and adornment.

For they are really more about us than about the cultures that produced the statues Taylor accessorizes. But one must start with those cultures. People of prehistoric cultures depended on the vagaries of the hunt for their sustenance, and so they lived in a world filled with uncertainty and mystery. As a result, people considered women’s bodies as the locus of magic, mystery and power. Fecundity, lactation, and menstruation were great mysteries, on a par with Death itself, and every woman embodied them, so they left us statuettes with exaggerated breasts, venters and buttocks, amulets of power without faces. 

Are these bodies any less magical today, despite the revelations of gynecological science, Taylor’s work seems to ask? Is there a human nature whose magic, mystery and power we neglect, while we cover it over with glamour, presumably to enhance an otherwise undervalued individual in an overpopulated world?  

Before this turns into a secular sermon, we must acknowledge the vast changes since that time, not only in the regularized food supply but in the exponentially increased population as well. Instead of a birth being a major social event, today it is considered something very private, and the process of finding prospective partners is more complex. The excesses Taylor depicts in a piece like Warrior Athena bespeak an obvious spiritual impoverishment in comparison to the ancient original, but she goes farther. Some of the hand bags depicted are made of animal skins — snake and crocodile — the contemporary equivalent of the bear tooth necklace? Not quite. Bears were killed for food, and the teeth were leftover trophies. The snakes and crocodiles are killed to appease a desire for self-beautification, with an attractive hint of danger. Of course, good art is always a little dangerous.  M

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Laura Sharp Wilson

McKenzie Fine Art

By Mary Hrbacek

Semi-abstract plant forms symbolizing aspects of Wilson’s consciousness populate these multi-layered compositions that obliquely replicate her life.  As she establishes here a semblance of order, her apparent feelings of anxiety and entrapment unfold in formats where vines, ropes, chains and brightly colored ribbons coil tightly over objects or loosely encircle the bows that subtly divide her pictures.  Wilson achieves a delicate balance in densely packed spaces, where she manages to maintain a tenuous order in the thicket of natural shapes that undulate, climb and swirl over the surfaces. These forms are defined by gentleness and fragility; her palette is pastel. 

The flattened surface textures this artist employs to describe her forms suggest a cross-pollination by Persian and East Asian iconography. Visual poetry abounds in these sensitively wrought, intertwining shapes and soft harmonious colors arranged in flat, overlapping spatial relationships that echo the ambient presence of wallpaper. The compositions feature sophisticated pictorial divisions that are subtly suggested though dominant and recessive colors, with intermingled large and small receding shapes, lines and abstracted forms. Wilson’s light touch suits the softness of the Japanese rice paper she mounts on wood panels. Her subject matter resemble webs, diversely colored jungles and twirling honeycombs. These natural motifs convey highly personal symbolic narratives, allowing her to explore the sense of rootlessness and displacement that results from her many recent moves around the country. The creation of repeated forms and the development of patterns engender a familiar, soothing effect. Through her working process, this artist achieves a sense of control and organization in the midst of flux. 

Wilson’s attention to detail, her carefully wrought forms, her patterns and her stylized shapes yield an eternal quality in her art. The amalgam of reverence and balance that dominate the potential chaos elevates these works to a level beyond the secular and the subjective.  Wilson’s search for a life of freedom with balance translates into an art that grapples with a plethora of detail, she successfully juggles each element with countervailing forces that maintain the clarity of the whole.  M