Mathew Pokoik - news

The first hard frost of the season arrived early this morning here in Mt Tremper. I woke up to find the garden awash in a greenish white gown. Glancing out the window a red tailed hawk landed on a tree limb nearby, giving me a rare close-up look at this bird. Good signs for this first cold weather event of the season.

Kara Walker, Cotton Hoards in Southern Swamp, from the series “Harpers Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated),” 2005.

I’ve recently been considering how racism has been addressed by photographic artists investigating the American experience. This came about due to a variety of events. First being the Kara Walker show at the Whitney, an excellent example of the power of art to speak to the challenging places of our cultural pysche. Then, recent incidents such as the Jena Six, or much closer to home, at Columbia University, where a noose was hung on the door of a controversial African-American professor. Both events highlight the fact that racism and inequality are a living reality in contemporary America (just in case you are one of the many who believe this is no longer the case).

I strongly believe that one of the roles art can play in our world, culture, and experience is to touch upon these places; to address them in ways that are more complex and nuanced, less black and white, right and wrong, than we may often be willing to accept. Over the next few weeks I would like to take up this challenging and difficult subject matter, to examine some of the ways photography has examined racism in America, ways in which photography bears-witness to this basic American conflict and reality.

Many of the images I will highlight address the basic grammar of visual images; how images can encompass complex social events often with more power through an oblique glance than through the obvious photo-journalistic photograph of “historic events”.

Minstrel Poster, Alabama 1936, ©Walker Evans

The first image that comes to mind on this subject is Walker Evans, Minstrel Poster. It is a remarkable image that creates a feeling of both awe and discomfort in me. It holds my attention by the simple fact that I do not entirely understand it. That is its challenge; we need to work our way through its possible meanings ourselves, with no help from Evans, because of his neutral point-of-view.

In this photo we have an advertisement for a Minstrel Show, a first hand document of popular stereotypes of African-Americans in the 30’s. Playing a banjo, stealing a watermelon, chasing chickens, big-lipped, clowning and laughing, a happy-go-lucky image that degrades by painting a picture that all is happy under the sun. Even the title of the Minstrel troupe “J.C. Lincoln’s Sunny South Minstrels” paints a picture of a comic barrel of monkeys Shangri-la of the African-American experience. As if no harm came be done, which is certainly the image that these stereotypes project.

And yet, the poster is ripped and falling apart; sections are missing giving us only a partial picture of this document. In fact, is the document the poster or is the document Evan’s photograph? Is this torn and fading poster a metaphor for the fading depression era South or is it simply a straight photograph of a torn poster?

Peter Galassi has the following to say about Evans’s work from the introduction of Walker Evans & Company:

Evans approaches the decaying show bill and the weathered facade with the same blunt frontality. The forthright address of his photography may be interpreted as an uncompromising indictment of an ugly fact or as an admiring regard for a beautiful thing…The originality of Evan’s “clinical editing of society” involved a convergence of critical intelligence and passionate feeling. His skeptical mind rejected conventional taxonomies of American identity; to construct his own, he photographed only what moved him. It might inspire him to wonderment; it might fill him with anger and disgust; it might provoke his sense of humor or his sense of irony, or both. If it left him bored or indifferent, he ignored it. Once his volatile intuition had selected the significant thing, however, he recorded it with the studied indifference of an archaeologist, stripping the image of any pictorial rhetoric that would instruct the viewer how to feel.

It is exactly this “stripping of pictorial rhetoric” that challenges me when I approach this image. It is what it is, and Evans presents this torn and fading Minstrel Poster for us to determine what it may mean. We need to navigate these treacherous waters ourselves. Is this only a poster from a era in our collective history? Or is it something greater, a set of facts that rise to a grim poetry, giving voice to an aspect of ourselves and our culture we would prefer to turn away from?

I also find curious that Evans presented us with two different croppings from the same negative. The one above is as he presented it for the MOMA exhibition of American Photographs in 1938. The cropping below is how it was published in the book edition of American Photographs, placed in a sequence after four straight portraits.

Minstrel Showbill, 1936 ©Walker Evans

from Plants in the City, The Global City, Dubai. ©Mathew Pokoik

I’ve just completed a major website update for The Global City, many images have been added along with a new organizational structure into series of related albums. The albums are for the time being:

The Street

The Street, Media, and Pedestrians

The Street and Pedestrians

Outdoor Markets

Plants in the City

Windows and Reflections

Monuments

The Bus

Words

Sacred Sites

Bodies of Water in the City

This is a living and morphing body of work and I expect that this list of albums will grow and change in the future.

from The Street, Media, and Pedestrians, The Global City, NYC. ©Mathew Pokoik

©Wendy Ewald, from White Self/Black Self

Tomorrow night, Wednesday 10/17, Aperture Foundation will be hosting a fantastic panel discussion Seeing and Being Seen with one of my favorite photographic artists Wendy Ewald. Anyone in the visual arts who works in the field of education could certainly learn from Wendy and her remarkable collaborative process.

This panel highlights artists who collaborate with teens to explore adolescent identity, how young photographers approach their own representation, and the ways in which these dovetail and differ. Panelists include Dawoud Bey, who will reference work from his recent book Class Pictures (Aperture, October 2007), photographer Wendy Ewald, who develops work from images young people make of themselves, and teens involved in the Expanding the Walls program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, who will provide insight into the use of photography to address their own identity, culture, and environment. The panel will be moderated by Phyllis Thompson, a former editor at Aperture Foundation and a scholar specializing in representations of the family and intimacy who now teaches at Harvard. Other artists will join in the discussion.

The New School, Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street
New York, New York
(212) 229-5353
Free! @ 7:00pm

Untitled (Cowboy), 1989, Richard Prince

With the major Richard Prince show now open at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (which I have not yet had a chance to see). I’ve been reading a large collective of reviews and articles on the artist in a variety of publications. This week’s New Yorker has a short piece on Prince by the insightful Peter Schjeldahl that is hands-down the most …well the most intriguing of these articles. Schjeldahl is not afraid to be critical of this art world giant, yet always in ways that make me ponder Prince’s work and the current trends in art that Prince so well represents. Schjeldahl is everything a critic should be, it would seem from the article that he is not entirly enthusiastic with Prince’s work, yet he clearly recognizes the degree to which Prince is a summation of current trends and with his words does not simply approve or disapprove but questions.

Here’s the opening of Schjeldahl’s article on Prince:

The immense art-world success of Richard Prince, the subject of a large and seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim, depresses me, not that I can gainsay it. If “quintessential artist in a generation” were a job opening, Prince, fifty-eight years old, would be an inevitable hire, having hit no end of avant-gardist sweet spots since the late nineteen-seventies in photography, painting, and sculpture. His contemporaries Cindy Sherman and, off and on, Jeff Koons are better, for stand-alone works of originality, beauty, and significance. But they don’t contest Prince’s chosen, Warholian ground as a magus of contemporary American culture…Prince’s works make him an artist as anthropologist, illuminating folkways by recycling advertising photographs, cartoon and one-liner jokes, soft-core pornography, motorcycle-cult ephemera, pulp-novel covers, “Dukes of Hazzard”-era car parts, celebrity memorabilia, and other demotic flotsam. His bald rip-offs of painting styles from Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and, lately, Willem de Kooning make him an artist as irreverent art critic, razzing exalted reputations. Prince can seem to cover, in an insouciantly corrosive way, the whole topography of the aesthetic in present high and low life; and he is acute enough that a refusal to play along, for the nuanced pleasures that he provides, would be bigoted.

So read the article and more important, go see the show of this seminal American artist, if you’re out of town the Guggenheim has an excellent on-line exhibit here.

My only complaint with Schjeldahl is that in a recent write up about the Rembrandt show at the MET, he said that the show “reconfirm’s Rembrandt’s towering supremacy”. How anyone could say this when Vermeer is hanging nearby on the wall is just beyond my comprehension?

from Domesticated ©Amy Stein

Next Sunday will be the closing of The Interactive Landscape. This is a great time to visit the Catskills if your located in the city. The leaves are approaching peak color, the air is cool and smells like fall, and its your last chance to see this fantastic show!

Over the weekend one of the exhibiting photographers Amy Stein, came up from the city for a visit. We had a relaxing dinner on the porch, and spoke about photography. Then went over to the annual Center for Photography at Woodstock’s benefit auction, where Amy outbid me on a fabulous Alessandra Sanguinetti print from her series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams. All in all a photographically jam-packed evening in the backwaters of Ulster County.

You can see Amy’s point-of-view on her blog here.

Mexico City, 9/07 ©Mathew Pokoik

The fifth installment of new photographs includes two images that I am quite curious about. They might be a new direction or sub-album or they might end up in the reject bin. Working on the Global City in Mexico City, has brought about a number of clarifications about my overall conception of the structure of the larger body of work. Particular albums and sub-albums are taking shape. Some of these series may currently have as many as ten complete photographs while others may be vague sketches with one or two finished images. I see this project as an ongoing epic-sized catalogue on a variety of themes relating to the modern global city. I have many years of work ahead, at the moment I’m trying to finish the initial sketch of themes along with at least one visit to a city in all the populated world landmasses. Still to visit to complete this is South America, Africa, and India.

Mexico City, 9/07 ©Mathew Pokoik

Mexico City, 9/07 ©Mathew Pokoik

Mexico City, 9/07 ©Mathew Pokoik