Proof of Concept

 


I spent some time in Germany last month. Excited to visit the country that produced the most interesting photographers of the last two decades, I was anxious to catch of glimpse of a new generation of photographers that tailed talent like Candida Hofer, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Demand.

A day of running about the Mitte, I discovered most galleries were, in fact, featuring photography. But what Berlin offered in quantity it lacked in quality. Most exhibitions struck me as incredibly derivative , or otherwise hollow.

The notable exception was Torste Solin's show at KOMET This image, featured in Photography Now, caught my attention. The predictable sexual formula of cartoonish eyes and large, milky breast was neutralized by this grotesque hairless mammal draped around the model's neck. Even though I was braced for some type of horrible Heavy Metal>esque soft-core porn shots, I had to check it out.

Entering Komet, I was surrounded by Solin's "Dolls" heavily distorted and airbrushed babes, like the Strawberry Short Cake Dolls of my childhood: each woman was paired up with her own pet.

Solin's aesthetic resides neatly in the center of the content of his work, that is the hyperbole of sexual signifiers. Solin's does sexy so well, in his images it morphs into comic and grotesque and then does a juicy hip swivel to land back where they started.


I was reminded of one of my current favorite photographers, Lorreta Lux. Lux transforms benign portraits of children into uncanny perfectness that manages to reference both advertising photography and classic portrait painting, without being either. Like Solin, she does not aim for transparency, but has begun to articulate a vocabulary for digital manipulation that is no longer mimetic of reality. Lux and Solin's work mark the transition into a new maturity for digitally manipulated imagery. Breaking with the unimaginative mimetic of nascent technology, these artists are no longer concerned about simply mastering photoshop to emulate the natural world. They are evolving their skills to create works that reveal the language of the media in which they are working. Historically, this proves to mark a productive and aesthetically sophisticated movement. Like the Abstract Expressionists, or Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secessionist , both groups of artists departed from the previous pursuit of make their respective mediums transparent in pursuit of the ideal of creating a seamless window to reality and began to explore the idiosyncratic properties of their chosen medium. It is encouraging to see media artists step into a new confidence and awareness of the aesthetic language of their chosen tools.

#

Morimura has always managed to make the best kind of art: art that can find the intersection of humor, critically and truth. He was a favorite of mine as a student for this reason, later as an instructor of photography I loved to scandalize and delight my class by showing a smart Japanese cross dresser.

In his show at Lurhing Augustine Morimura has redirected his witty criticism from the Imperialist export of Western Art and comments on the western world's ideals of feminine beauty to focus ideologues of the 20th century. The back part of the gallery features Morimura's foray into video. It is an effective medium as you see Morimura strain to continue posing as Einstein in his iconic photo with his tongue sticking out. We see Morimura vacillate from a convincing living meme of Einstein, to some bizarre version of Gene Simmons, to something far more obscene, when for a moment, face remaining still he lightly wiggles the tip of his distended tongue.

Also feature is Requiem: Mishima 2007. Morimura reenacts Yukio Mishima's speech from 1970 addressed to a group of young soldiers. Morimura modifies the speech to young Japanese artist. In his impassioned speech he says he no longer has faith in art, and accuses the audience of spiritual bankruptcy. The focus on dictators such as Hitler and Stalin is an obvious criticism of the culture of fear and misinformation happening in present day America, but Morimura brings it back home to us in the arts in his version of Mishima's speech. We are all aware of how complacency led the German's imperceptibly into Hitler's Nazi's, and the Russian people into a fascism twisted by fear from the lofty principles of socialism. But are we in the arts allowing capitalism to first lull us into vapid producers and then twist us into commodities of status, void of innovation and substance?

After a long day taking visiting Chicago artist Basia Toczydlowska around Chelsea all day, it was a bit hard to make the trek to Marcin Ramocki's VertexList in Williamsburg. It was well worth the trip. The show proved to have more content, diversity, fun and energy than any of the shows we had seen in Chelsea.

Some of the gallery's usual suspects were featured, but I was also impressed to see some more notable artist working with and about digital media like Edo Stern and even a take on Felix Gonzales Torres by Corey Archangel.

The show was an apt reflection of the chaos, energy, and expirementation that has marked artist's exploration into consumer technology.