End of Silver Gelatin Prints at the Library of Congress

Start of a glide, Orville and Wilbur Wright, collection of the Library of Congress

My recent article for Washington City Paper is this week's arts feature. You'll need to read it before reading the blog post.

PROPS TO THE EDITOR
Initially a 2800+ epistle was whittled into a 1500-word essay, and stands as another testament to the relationship between writer and editor. I've been lucky enough to do some freelance writing for CP for the last 16 months, and Jonathan Fischer has been a heckuvan editor (not to take anything away from Erin Engstrom and Ally Schwartz, who have edited most of my smaller ditties for City Lights). I don't know if he has made me a better writer, but he has certainly made my writing look better in print.

THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR
Two elements didn't make the print edition.I thought I would share them here.

The first bit was about Jantzen in the 1980s. His first job was working as a preservation technician for the Library of Congress.

The negatives he worked from were not the original negatives. Jantzen knows this first
hand; he used to be employed by the Library in the 1980s as a contracted preservation
technician. One of his responsibilities was quality control on negative duplication. “Part
of my job was to make certain the duplicate matched up with the original. You know. No
big hairs [on the duplicate negative].” Because materials become brittle as they age, the
Library of Congress duplicated the negatives in their collection so they could continue
to provide duplicate prints of work in the collection without damaging the primary
artifact. “When I first heard of it I thought it was bull shit – that you could not have a
duplicate that would behave the same as the original. And, I was stunned [ at the result].”
He wondered what it would be like to print with the duplicate. 20 years later, he became
that guy.

The second bit that was not included was a note on the developing process.

The process of developing a silver gelatin print lacks the immediacy of digital
photography. The film, a negative image, is dusted off and set in the negative carrier,
which is then placed in the enlarger. Light shines through the negative and projects an
image onto an easel below. To figure out the right exposure, a single sheet of silver
gelatin paper is placed on the easel, and strips are exposed to various durations of light.
The paper is developed through successive liquid baths, which reveal the image and
desensitize the strips of silver within the paper to any further exposure to light. The
various strips determine contrast and brightness, and allows Jantzen to make an informed
decision about how long to expose the print. That first print he likens to a rough draft. Usually
those are good enough for a basic print. However, since he does not know what client
requested the image from the Library of Congress, he has to assume the print must be
exhibition quality.

A second print is exposed, and Jantzen goes through steps called dodging and burning.
Dodging is a process of blocking light to allow more detail to appear within darker
sections of the print. Burning is a process of over-exposing very light sections of the
print, again to allow more detail in those areas of the composition. . “If there was a slight
difference between an almost perfect print and a perfect print, I’ll expose more paper.”
Detailed notes are taken throughout the process. In the end, the prints that require it will
receive spotting and etching. Spotting is the process of adding dabs of dye to the print to
obscure dost spots that affixed to the negative when the original negative was initially
processed. Etching is the process of taking a knife to the final print an scraping away bits

of silver gelatin to reveal more details and value within the darkest parts of the print. The
final step involves toning the prints to give them a warmer quality. 

On a final note: One thing I constantly find of interest is how quickly digital has evolved. This might be the reason why I have chosen to write about the issue with the Library of Congress as well as an early critique of the Photo Annual at Artisphere. I bought my first digital camera in 2003. It was a 5 megapixel (mp) point-and-shoot (pas) and it cost $800 refurbished. Today 5 mp is standard on an iPhone and you can buy a 16 mp pas for around $100.

I Got Vandalized

In April, Christopher Knight via the L.A. Times CultureMonster blog tossed some criticism toward the Washington City Paper (specifically Kriston Capps, Jeffry Cudlin, and I), for an article that made fun of an unsuccessful attack on a Gauguin painting. (Unfortunately we couldn't become web-famous for a day, because he didn't mention us by name... he did call us dumb.) The biggest offense in our blog post was not that we pretended there were other works of art we'd destroy first, but that I claimed to defacing a Sol LeWitt wall drawing weekly. (Which is ludicrous on many levels.) Several other art blogs were upset at us because they expected better. Perhaps they were right. (Though, in our defense, I still maintain that we wrote the piece for the blog of a weekly tabloid four days after April Fool's Day, and that the tabloid gets a large sum of revenue from "adult" shops. The New York Times the Washington City Paper is not.)

Christopher Knight might be tickled pink to learn that Karma has turned its ugly head. Last week,

Friday, a group of MoMA Young Associates came down to see the WPA's Options 2011, amongst a few other stops. They toured the exhibition and listened to some of the artists discuss their works. When it was my turn to speak, I stopped mid-sentence and noticed that someone had amended my installation.

My past couple of blog posts have mentioned this work. It's a series of collaborations with day laborers, whom I hired for 30 minutes to complete an hour of labor, and to discuss their experiences. Most of the laborers are immigrants, and some I learned are illegal. We've discussed labor issues, abusive treatment, sneaking into the country, being unable to sneak out as easily, and personal stories about family, lost love, and politics. I've been fairly fortunate that my work in the exhibition has received some mention in The Washington Post and on Pink Line Project.

The work in the show is an installation of completed projects - documentation, if you will. On the wall behind the saw horses, lumber, fasteners, and tools, are accounts of my conversations with these men. One of the men told me a story about the woman he intended to marry upon his return to Mexico. He hoped to return to Mexico a year after he left. He's been stuck in the States for four years, and she has since married and had a child. He called her Ani, and he wrote her name on a board in nails. As I began to talk about the projects to the MoMA Young Associates I looked down. Some ass hole added a series of nails in the shape of a triangle.

I've worked as a carpenter's assistant. I know it's not uncommon for crews to "correct" the work of a "Mexican" (as some of these men are called by passersby - a lot of them are not from Mexico). This was not work that needed correction. Alas, it is now a part of the piece.

Considering the work is conceptual, and that the story is the more profound piece of art, I don't really think of the work as getting defaced. And, considering the climate of hostility toward illegal immigrants, I think its addition is fitting. I'm still peeved, though.

Wesselmann Review Overdue

The back story is as follows.

April 16 I went to see the Tom Wesselmann drawing exhibition at the Kreeger Museum, took part of that weekend to write a review of it for City Paper, and then went back to the business of being an art professor the following week. The following weekend, the Washington Post surprised readers with Jessica Dawson's (I think) final exhibition review (she had announced her departure from WP weeks earlier, and to the best of my knowledge everyone thought she was done).

I submitted my write-up that weekend (April 23/24), and my editor suggested I re-work the review the following week (around April 28) to address some of Dawson's comments. Instead I tabled the review to write a couple other pieces, prepare and grade final projects and exams, pack and move, finish a commission before I lost my painting studio, and a few other odds and ends.

Then it was July, and I thought that "I better finish the Wesselmann review." So, I finished it up and submitted it. My editor liked it, but wondered how he could justify publishing to the blog a review for an exhibition that opened in April. So, the review is below. Enjoy.

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Placing an exhibition of Tom Wesselmann's drawings in the Kreeger Museum seems as logical as placing a smart phone with touch screen in a museum dedicated to the rotary phone. Wesselmann's "Pop Art" is out of place in the same building that houses a collection of late 19th Century and early 20th Century European masterpieces. Or, is it? Jessica Dawson's review of the show on April 22 asked one major question, "how Pop was he, really?" Though she lets us decide for ourselves, she did note that, "Wesselmann owed more to Matisse than to the 1960s avant-garde." (Note: Roy Lichtenstein was also fascinated by Matisse.) In the context of the exhibition on display, the relationship between Wesselmann and the 19th Century European Avant Garde is probably closer than we might consider, and Wesselmann is revealed as the artist of still life and nudes that he had always been.

How did Wesselmann become a Pop Artist? Better still, how did many of the artists we identify as "Pop" become Pop Artists? In 1962 and 63, when exhibitions of new, often American art (mostly painting), were organized in LA, New York, and DC, curators and organizers summarized what they saw with descriptive titles like "New Painting of Common Objects" (Pasadena Museum of Art), "New Realists" (Sidney Janis Gallery), "Six Painters and the Object" (Guggenheim Museum), and "The Popular Image" (Washington Gallery of Modern Art). All were significant exhibitions that included some artists we continually label as Pop Artists: George Segal, Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Watts, Jim Dine, and Jim Rosenquist, to name a few. However, like Wesselmann, Segal, Thiebaud, and Watts showed a greater commitment to interests other than Pop: genre, still life, and Fluxus (respectively). Jim Dine could also be considered to have a greater interest in still life than to Pop, and would probably find a better fit in the quasi-category of Neo-Dada with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (artists who were also included in the seminal shows of Pop, who also hated the label of Pop, and probably also hate the label Neo-Dada). Even Jim Rosenquist in his recent autobiography fights the label of Pop artist. As Donald Judd noted early in 1963 the "various artists are too diverse to be given one label..."

Unfortunately, one label stuck, and that label was Pop Art. Alan Solomon also recognized the limitations of the so-called movement's title, and in his essay "The New Art," (first published as the catalog essay for "The Popular Image" at The Washington Gallery of Modern Art), "Like all vital new movements in the modern period… it has quickly been assigned a pejorative title – or string of titles, in this case … emphasizing the wrong attributes of the style." Wesselmann gets lumped into Pop Art because, amongst other things, he wasn't bashful about collaging elements from billboards into a composition that reflected what should be a contemporary still life: a hoagie, a pack of Pall Malls, and a can of Budweiser. So to look at Wesselmann at the Kreeger, it is necessary to remove that rubbish Pop Art label and heap it into Lawrence Alloway's dustbin, where it belongs.

"Drawing," at the Kreeger, contextualizes Wesselmann in the great tradition of reinventing Classical art traditions. In the late 1950s, when Wesselmann was studying at the Cooper Union, art students throughout the country were being trained to become the new generation of Abstract Expressionists, and it became essential for many of those artists to abandon that training in favor for something different. At the same time, it was essential not to return to old methodologies of painting. But returning to old subjects was permissible, and for Wesselmann the great challenge in his mind was to make a drawing or painting of the nude female form that was just as beautiful as the nude female he was drawing or painting. Often his subject was a model named Claire, a woman he eventually married.

Every reclined female Wesselmann painted is reminiscent of Manet's "Olympia," which in turn reference's Titian's "Venus." Neither Titian nor Manet is remotely Pop, but referencing either establishes Wesselmann's interest with art history. His relationship with art history is further cemented in several of the works on display. "Great American Nude #20" quotes Van Gogh's "Sunflowers." A study of "Judy Trying on Clothes" is reminiscent of Degas' drawings of women preparing for the bath. Matisse is also a reoccurring name in many of Wesselmann's titles.

What the exhibition does as a whole is deny Wesselmann as a painter. He seldom challenges the medium in the way that Sisley, Chagal, or Mondrian challenged painting, - works by artists you can view in the Kreeger's permanent collection, upstairs. Wesselmann's use of painting is often flat, and seems only in the service of applying color to an otherwise exquisite drawing. Color in service of the drawing is best illustrated in his later cut steel pieces like Hillside Farm, Callicoon Center, 1990, and Still Life with Fuji Chrysanthemums (double layer) 1985/92.

Drawing Version of Bedroom Painting

With these cut steel pieces we truly get a sense of what Wesselmann was attempting with his work: challenging the limitations of drawing. As Richard Serra demonstrated with lead, unless molten and fluid, you can't draw with steel. So the challenge of these later works is to maintain the sensitivity and grace of fluid line in an otherwise inflexible medium. Throughout the progression of the exhibition we see how Wesselmann challenged the notions of drawing, by denying their flat surfaces with works like Drawing Version of Bedroom Painting #24 (1973), or Drawing Maquette for Still Life #59 (1972), both of which take a series of flat drawings and stack them into sculptural compositions.

All of the work on display stresses Wesselmann's unmistakably traditional interests, as Dawson points out, but it hardly seems to be an albatross. The only Pop in the show is one of expectation: Wesselmann's label as a Pop Artist, despite how the show was promoted, is a bubble that bursts. His practice gave a breath of new life to Classical themes of still life and the nude, and it pushed the boundaries of two-dimensional surfaces. Through Wesselmann we can actually learn something about art and its history, as opposed to some mimeographed day-glow portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which teaches us more about marketing.

JOBs Article in Washington City Paper

A couple weeks back I had a conversation with Maura Judkis, who writes for Washington City Paper, about my JOB Creation Project. Nearly 2 hours of conversation have been distilled into this linked article.

The American University Museum in the Katzen Arts Center has a couple of shows opening tomorrow (May 8). One Hour Photo, a project conceived by Adam Good and curated Chajana denHarder and Chandi Kelley, has been getting a lot of buzz of late (articles have popped up in The Washington Post and Pink Line Project). The concept: each photograph (of the 128 photographs created by 128 photographers) will be on display for one hour during the show. Each of the artists have signed a (moral) contract never to exhibit the work publicly again. I am one of the artists, and if you are interested to see my image of the hotel and opera sign across the street from the Amargosa Opera House, you can view it on June 1st between 2 and 3pm. (After which I can show you a print, I can e-mail you an image, I can sell a print (I think), but I can never exhibit it).

I love the concept of this exhibition, which is why I submitted a work. I don't consider myself a conceptual artist any more than I consider myself a political artist (see the WCP article). But, I do know my work rubs elbows with those labels from time to time, since it might comment on something "political," or it might be concept-driven. Since I don't consider myself a photographer, just an artist who happens to use photography as a medium of executing and articulating an idea from time to time, I have no qualms with exhibiting and then "destroying" the image of the opera house sign.

The other exhibition to mention is of Emilie Brzezinski's Family Trees. Last November I had an opportunity to see this work first hand; Barbara Rose had contacted me looking for someone to make a video of the work and of an interview about the work. I spent two days out at Ms. Brzezinski's home and studio and had a pleasant and interesting time. Of course, between the time I was asked to do the shoot and the time I got out there, I completely forgot that her husband, Zbigniew, was Carter's national security advisor. So, there I was, meandering around the home seeing these photographs of her husband with Carter and the Pope (J.P.2). Kind of a Twilight Zone moment of the fish-out-of-water scenario... the kind where you have to ask yourself, "how did I get here?"

Side note: Emilie grows her own mushrooms and makes w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l mushroom soup. We had a bit of wodka with lunch. So, I can say I've done shots with Barbara Rose and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Long story short, the intention of the video documentation was so that it would play inside one of the trees of the installation when it exhibited in New York in February. Barbara didn't think my rough cut set the right mood or was in the appropriate direction for her vision. So, I mailed all of the video files to her around Christmas and haven't heard boo about the project since. I am curious to see if any video is included in this installation. And, I'd like to see Emilie again, too; she's a sweet woman.

Finally, I look forward to seeing "Convergence" one last time. I happened upon the exhibit as it was being installed, and Jack Rassmusen gave me a sneak peek of the show. The shows Jack has been able to assemble in his tenure at the gallery never fail to impress me, either for the work on display or for the unusual nature of the work exhibited.

What do I mean by unusual? When was the last time you saw a group show of Lebanese artists? The fact that Jack is willing to go to Peru or Norway or wherever to put together a show is fabulous, and far more interesting than the National Gallery of Art having another exhibit of Jasper Johns work. So, stepping off the elevator, onto the third floor, and seeing a video triptych by Jean-Pierre Watchi blew me away. I walked into the rotunda and scattered around the floor was Mario Saba's "The Temple," with a projected blue screen on the wall, noise - noise - noise, and a couple of assistants tasked with the busy work of putting it all together. He graciously spent a few minutes discussing the work with me, though the chaos of sound and the erosion of memory make me recall only this little bit: an allegory about the collapse of the Tower of Babel, hence the noise.

Why do I mention this now, one week before the close of the show? I heard the exhibit reviewed on NPR. That sort of takes the steam out of writing about it on this little blog. But, the show is quite remarkable, and a public needs to be reminded it is still here, even if for only a little while longer -- and that it is worth seeing.