M. Blash, Reel Image, "Go Forth" Commercial for Levi's, 2009.

In the spot filmmaker M. Blash created for Levi’s Jeans in 2009, Walt Whitman’s voice is like the Pied Piper’s pipe. “Come my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,” recites Whitman, played by an actor (an earlier Levi’s spot purportedly featured an actual recording of the poet). As he says this, the faces of slim, young, beautiful people turn or lean forward like they’ve been summoned; one woman with windswept blond hair and rosy cheeks looks as though she’s bracing herself for a fight. He continues:

Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger.

The young people begin to move, running through fields, scaling rocks and weaving through forests. Dusk approaches, and the “youthful sinewy races” converge, their silhouettes gliding across the screen in front of a still-blue sky. “So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,” says Whitman. “Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost.” There are fire works and shirtless dancing as it darkens, and the young bodies come together like the members of a euphoric hippie commune. “Have the elder races halted?” Whitman asks. “Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? All the past we leave behind.”

Ryan McGinley, known for his wispily androgynous photographs of young creatives, shot the accompanying Levi’s print campaign. I see one particular image, a black and white photograph of two twenty-something boys embracing a horse, each time I walk to the bakery in my largely Salvadoran neighborhood. It hangs on the inside wall of a mini bus shelter and, often, aging men and women who speak to each other only in Spanish sit in front of it.  Other times, my favorite panhandler, a tall, disheveled man who tells me baked goods are bad for me in hopes that I will give my money to him instead, lurks around McGinley’s sign. I don’t know what marketing strategy or loophole led this image  to this particular street, but the eerie, utopic youth culture that McGinley presents hangs right in the midst of the very people it excludes.

Ryan McGinley, "Tracy (Dripping)," 2009.

Anything utopic needs exclusivity, since creating an ideal community means shedding what doesn’t fit the ideal. Utopic ideals also need to be slippery; they can be imagined and represented but never attained, and that’s what makes them attractive.

Ryan McGinley understands utopia better than most. He’s a 21st Century artist who still has muses, and he’s mused these muses into scenarios and settings in which they withdraw from the world and exclusively invest in each other. In 2002, when he became the youngest artist to have a museum show at the Whitney, his photographs purportedly depicted an edgy, brash youth underground in New York but they did so in a way that was so romanticized and ephemeral that they felt like they’d flown in from an alternate universe. His images of Dash Snow the tagger-turned-art-star are especially compelling. Dash lived hard, fast and grittily, which made him muse-worthy but it’s not necessarily the hardness and grit that McGinley chose to present. “I love the idea of graffiti,” he told Ana Finel Honigman in 2003. “But I am not really excited by its esthetics. . . . I love the idea of a kid writing his name hundreds of thousands of times, over and over and over because he feels he needs to.” The Dash that McGinley presented over and over again had an immense, unbridled need for community. He existed above the surface of himself, drawing people to him with his hovering openness. “So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship.”

Ryan McGinley, photograph of Dash Snow

When journalist Ariel Levy shadowed McGinley and Dash Snow in 2007, she described the intimacy of their clique: “There is a physicality between these guys, in their photos and in life, that you usually only see among little kids.” Like most utopic fantasies McGinley creates, including those for Levi’s, adult inhibitions totally dissipate in his portrayals of Dash. All that matters is to constantly stay in motion and to move toward a collective future, bringing along the people who are young and beautiful. It’s never clear where that future is or what it represents.

“Pioneers! O pioneers!” wrote Walt Whitman in 1855. “Fresh and strong the world we seize.”

“Heroin, oh heroin, oh heroin,”  wrote McGinley for Vice Magazine in 2009, the year Dash died. “Taken the lives of so many great artists. Taken so many of my friends’ lives.” McGinley continued, remembering Dash’s “unconscious moving hand. He would be sitting there smoking cigarettes, writing his tag in the air.” It’s this weird collision of hopefulness, tragedy, beauty and listlessness that I think of now when I walk past the bus stop and see the two boys with their horse in the Levi’s “Go Forth!” ad that hangs where it doesn’t belong.

Robert Heinecken, "Time (1st Group)," 1969. Courtesy Cherry and Martin.

Hugh W. Diamond, a 19th century English psychiatrist, began using photography as a therapeutic strategy nearly as soon as photography existed. Diamond would photograph the mentally ill patients he worked with and then confront them with the resulting likenesses, confident that the radical power of reality would jar them into recognizing their own delusions. He once wrote of a patient he called A.D., who believed herself to be royalty:

Her subsequent amusement in seeing the portraits [of herself in various stages of her illness] and her frequent conversation about them was the first decided step  in her gradual improvement.

Diamond believed his strategy worked—no one can argue with a picture.

But argue with pictures is practically all artists have done over the past 60 years, ever since pop cut into the ego of abstract expressionism and advertisements became as visually adventurous as art. They Have Not the Art to Argue with Pictures, the current exhibition at Cherry and Martin Gallery, takes as its premise the immense distrust that 20th and 21st century artists have for the photographic image. It also probes the indulgent fascination that always seems to accompany that distrust.  They Have Not the Art primarily mines the work of Robert Heinecken, the late California artist whose gritty, un-apologetically risque reinterpretations of magazine imagery exposed but also seemed in awe of pop culture’s sexiness.

Robert Heinecken, "Revised Magazine: Jungle Prints / Cuts / Porno," 1993. Courtesy Cherry and Martin.

In Revised Magazine: Jungle Prints / Cuts / Porno (1993), Heinecken juxtaposes images from mainstream ads–a black and white one that says “Be what you want, but always be you” and another of a model in a tiger print top–with blatantly erotic images of women painted with tiger stripes or clad in jungle print jump suits. The resulting tangle of bodies is crass and even cheap; there’s nothing lyrical about the way Heinecken cuts into and overlays images. In another collage, Hite/Hustler Fashion Beaver Hunt #1 (1981), a stately woman holds a blue fan and stands between two plush arm chairs. She would have been wearing a white sheath if Heinecken hadn’t replaced it with the cut out of a tan, nude female torso haphazardly wrapped in black and white rope. Instead, she wears a naked body.

Heinecken’s images feel dirty, not because they’re in poor taste or needlessly provocative, but because they literally do “dirty up” the sleek surface of ads in a way that doesn’t invalidate the sensuality of glossy imagery but rather follows that sensuality through to its natural conclusions. If Heinecken aimed to combat the packaged, deceptively complete aura of 20th century advertisements, he did so by exposing and then re-complicating their subtext.

Robert Heinecken, "Revised Magazine: Maidenform," 1993. Courtesy Cherry and Martin.

Subtext literacy is what the exhibition’s ungainly title,  They Have Not the Art to Argue with Pictures, refers to. It’s a phrase from Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book, Understanding Media, written after Heinecken had already begun his long career as an art-maker. McLuhan suggests that pictures can’t be understood in the sequential way most have been taught to read text and that those who have the tools to argue with contemporary imagery are those who understand that media collapses sequences into each other and presents a thrust of emotional energy meant to manipulate.

Heinecken had the tools he needed to argue, but not to conquer. The exciting and frightening aspect of his work is that it’s endlessly caught in the web of its source material. Even though Heinecken breaks into imagery, superimposing pin-up girls over domesticated car ads and cutting body parts out of magazine spreads, he never breaks out of it. But breaking out isn’t the point; needing to argue is.

They Have Not the Art to Argue with Pictures, which closes on July 17th, also traces Heinecken’s legacy through the work of a number of younger artists, including Erik Frydenborg, Nicolás Guagnini, Wade Guyton, Leigh Ledare, Amanda Ross-Ho and Collier Schorr.

Annelle's Cornbread (Marks, Mississippi), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

I’m a sucker for a storyline involving a protagonist’s search for identity across generations and distant lands. More often than not this fascination is satisfied by reading a novel or watching a film, maybe listening to a three-verse country song. It’s not often that such a sprawling narrative emerges from within a work of art, but such is the case with the series of photographs by San Francisco-based artist Danielle Nelson Mourning in her debut solo exhibition at Taylor De Cordoba Gallery in Culver City.

Homecoming presents large-scale ink jet prints of the artist’s pilgrimage across the country and the Atlantic to understand herself and her ancestry. This is no documentary, though; Mourning has visited old family homes in Marks, Mississippi and Niagara Falls, New York to make self-portraits in which the self is more fictional than real. She assumes the dress and style of domestic women from decades past, recalling in part Cindy Sherman’s Complete Untitled Film Stills, though in a decidedly less aggressive way. Mourning goes to Ireland as well to recreate haunting scenes of life during the potato famine of 1845. The work is endearing in its earnest investigation of family history and self, and in its multidimensional presentation of women of certain eras and of domestic life. It seems to be an intensely personal practice, as if the project would mean as much to the artist regardless of whether it had an audience. Sometimes work comes across as so prepared for an audience that there is a paucity of the artist’s own identity, but there’s none of that here.

Rhubarb (Cavan County, Ireland), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The most affecting work in the show is the 8mm film, Memories from a Pleasant Visit, which mimics vintage 8mm home movies authentically with its camera shake, jumpy scene cuts and film noise. In it, the characters from Mourning’s Mississippi and Niagara Falls photo narratives are brought to life, though there is still a sense of disconnect between the intent of the characters as they move about, and any narrative that the viewer should draw from the quick scenes. Perhaps the film is the least narrative piece in the show because its presentation of ideas is so hectic, like scraps from the reel of life lying in disjointed piles on the cutting room floor of one’s mind. I actually wonder if I’ve ever been more taken with a work of video art, however. Maybe I relate to each of these divergent female characters, respond to grandma’s chatter as she flips through old photo albums, and possibly—most of all—enjoy the private thrill of being frightened by the subtle Hitchcockian tones of the film. The dull tapping of ivory keys, the lone voice of a choir girl singing, the black-and-white footage capturing the manic twirling of a woman in a gown—it’s chilling. But more so, it’s entrancing.

Paten Circle II (Marks, Mississippi), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

Danielle Nelson Mourning lives in San Francisco, CA. She earned her MFA at Royal College of Art, London. Her work has been included in several group exhibitions, including at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; Hoopers Gallery, London; and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Prague. Homecoming closes today, June 26. The film Memories from a Pleasant Visit can also be viewed at this link.

Jessica Hilltout; Domingos Ball, Mozambique; Chicome, Mozambique; from Amen series

Contemporary art, with it’s postmodern penchant for theory-riddled subtext and quirky aesthetics, doesn’t often fall under the category of “feel good” entertainment. That’s not a degradation, it’s a generalization by someone who looks at a lot of contemporary art. And nobody ever said that the role of art is solely to make the viewer feel good. However, when one comes across a series of work that is both visually and intellectually compelling, as well as inspiring, one takes notice. Perhaps one (that would be me) is even seeking it out on a subconscious level. Humans and their pesky yearning to be inspired. We seek this kind of joy and inspiration in other forms of art and entertainment as well, including: film, literature and sports. And in the case of sporting events, I can think of no better example of people coming together from around the world to be inspired and compelled than the FIFA (Soccer) World Cup. Sure, the Olympics draws upon that enthusiasm and serves up its share of inspiration every four years as well, but not like the World Cup. These fans are dedicated; they know the game, they follow the teams and players 365 days a year, every year. They play the game themselves.

Jessica Hilltout; petit-poto, Burkina Faso; James Town, Accra; from Amen series

As the 2010 World Cup kicks off its first full week in South Africa, the culmination of joy and inspiration seems even more heightened in comparison to previous years. Its host country is a historical nerve center for racial strife, social tension and high crime, with a rapidly increasing rate of disease, including HIV/AIDS. It is also a “model of racial reconciliation following decades of apartheid, with a burgeoning black middle class” (source). And, as often happens when a country finds itself climbing out of the trenches of tragedy, an event such as the World Cup—or even a simple pickup game of soccer—acts as a natural binding agent, suffusing hope far beyond the reach of sports enthusiasm. I should note that, certainly, not everyone takes such an optimistic view of the World Cup in South Africa, and of course my view is that of an outsider in any case; an observation more than an opinion. But by in large, the World Cup and the game of soccer (er, football) are inspiring a nation and a world at the moment.

Jessica Hilltout; Orlando, Chicome; Michael Sarkodie, Ghana; from Amen series

But what if the grandiose spectacle of the World Cup is removed from the sport? Will a nation—a continent—still be inspired by the game? In a new solo exhibition at Joao Ferreira Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, Belgian photographer Jessica Hilltout presents a series of work entitled Amen, capturing images of rural football players from all over Africa. Equally inspiring to the aforementioned global match, the matches played by the rural footballers offer none of the World Cup’s fanfare. Their equipment is makeshift, their pitches (fields) are crude. There are no Nike logos or Gatorade sponsorships. But the essence of joy—of hard work, inspiration and coming together around a game—translates the same. As the artist says, “Amen, above all else, captures the strength of the human spirit.”

Jessica Hilltout; Demble, Ivory Coast; Unknown, Bukina Faso; from Amen series

Born in Belgium, Jessica Hilltout has had a nomadic that has taken her across Europe, Asia and Africa. She earned her BA in Photography at Blackpool College of Art, UK. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at The National Portrait Gallery, London and Aliceday Gallery, Brussels.

Sarah Charlesworth, "Herald Tribune, 1977" (1977). Twenty-six chromogenic prints, 59.7 x 41.9 cm each, edition 2/3.

Despite its subtitle, Haunted includes work in a wide variety of media, including painting and sculpture. Helpfully, the works are organized into thematic sections that guide the viewer through the winding gallery: Appropriation and the Archive; Documentation and Reiteration; Landscape, Architecture, and the Passage of Time; and Trauma and the Uncanny. These divisions assist the viewer in comprehending the modes in which current artists have reckoned with history and their art-historical antecedents. Insightful wall text accompanies the beginning of each new section.

Idris Khan, "Homage to Bernd Becher" (2007). Bromide print, 49.8 x 39.7 cm, edition 1/6.

Walking up the curving ramp, the viewer encounters Appropriation and the Archive first. This is the perfect introduction to the show for both uninitiated and seasoned viewers, featuring imagery “borrowed” from print media, movies, and other images taken from the public domain. The textbook-classics are here: Andy Warhol, Sherry Levine, Richard Prince, Sarah Charlesworth. For the experienced, it’s like greeting old friends; for the newcomer, it’s a well-rounded primer. Though it may be familiar, Charlesworth’s Herald Tribune, November 1977 (1977) is particularly gratifying to see in person. Idris Khan’s Homage to Bernd Becher (2007) is a diminutive powerhouse of layered emotive lines that conjure up the industrial structures documented by photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. The work in this section stands as a persuasive critique of the myth of artistic originality.

Spencer Finch, "42 Minutes (after Kawabata) (2005). Seven chromogenic prints, 15.2 x 15.2 cm each.

Continuing up and around, the Documentation and Reiteration portion displays the photographic evidence of performance work, citing notables such as Marina Abramovic, Tacita Dean, and Ana Mendieta. Though most of the works in this section stand on their own, they function primarily as reminiscent testimonials to events in the past. The performances that provide the basis for this section provoked conversations among fellow viewers: one well-dressed woman recounted her experience of seeing an Abramovic performance to her companion; an elderly couple argued about the processes likely used to make Markus Hansen’s Curtain (2004).  Landscape, Architecture, and the Passage of Time is modest, with many of the works being smaller than their counterparts in other sections of the exhibition; but it also contained some of the most evocative work. Spencer Finch’s 42 Minutes (after Kawabata) (2005) is a series of seven photographs that transform a snowy landscape into a picture of an interior door via a reflection on glass. The subtle shift from landscape to door, inside to outside, means that one image manifests itself in another, and no image in the series truly exists without its counterparts. This is a literal haunting, and it is eloquent.

Nate Lowman, "Loser" (2009). Alkyd on canvas, 101.6 x 76.2 cm.

Organized around a theory that originated with psychologist Sigmund Freud, Trauma and the Uncanny contains intriguing and provocative work, some by lesser-known artists. Nate Lowman breathes new life into the raster-dot image first promoted by pop artists like Sigmar Polke, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. The Last Supper (2009) and Loser (2009) are compositions that manage to be smart, funny, and heart-rending all at once. Gillian Wearing’s Self-Portrait at Three Years Old (2004) provides a double-take experience: the artist took a sweet childhood portrait and cut out/replaced her three-year-old eyes with her own adult eyes. The new portrait could function as a mask, hiding the adult self behind a guise of innocence; or show the outward form of a child who understands more than she lets on. The effect is disturbing.

Gillian Wearing, "Self-Portrait at Three Years Old", (2004). Chromogenic print, 182 x 122 cm.

There is no doubt that the work in the exhibition is superlative, and the thematic arrangement makes it easy for the casual art viewer to understand the context—without seeming too obvious for the more sophisticated habitué. This is museum curation at its best: stimulating but accessible, informative without condescension. The nostalgia in evidence brings to mind a quote from the late cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard: “Simulation is master, and nostalgia, the phantasmal parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials, alone remains.” The nostalgia demonstrated by the artists is wistful but not sentimental; and the history they mine tells us as much about the present as it does about our past.

The subway in any major city is a conduit, where thousands of lives flow like water through pipes in the journey from past to future. The subway station, however, is like a purgatory—a present-tense place where the journey temporarily hangs in the balance as one waits on the platform, maybe reading a book or reading the looks on the faces of passersby. Some people are hardened by years of public transportation; they pay no mind to who or what is happening around them. Others can’t help but assume the posture of human curiosity in such spaces and find fascinating the fleeting masses of strangers. Chilean-born, Berlin-based artist, Pablo Zuleta Zahr, belongs to a third category altogether. He surpasses the instinct to merely “people watch” and goes beyond to create elaborately curated photo documentaries of people moving through a particular station. The footage that he captures is true—real people passing through a real subway station—but the art that he makes from the video footage turns into a sociological exercise wherein people are organized by gender, style, and color of clothing and then regrouped into “patterned panoramas,” as the gallery refers to them.

For his first show in the United States, entitled Event Horizon at Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, NM, Zuleta Zahr presents work from his series’ Baquadano and Madrid, as well as the four panel video installation, BUTTERFLYJACKPOT. Baquadano consists of large format photographic grids comprised of stills from ten hours of video footage of Chilean metro passengers. The results of the artist’s meticulous reorganization of people are almost abstract; the visuals of color and pattern become as strange and alluring as the orchestrated grouping of originally disconnected individuals.

Pablo Zuleta Zahr lives and works in Berlin and holds an MFA from Düsseldorf Art Academy. His work has been exhibited widely outside of the U.S., including at MITTAGEISEN, Berlin, Germany; Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago de Chile; Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Spain; Studio la Città, Verona, Italy; Gallery Bendana-Pinel, Paris, France; and Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, UK, among elsewhere.

The Pretenders, 2008

Chrissie Hynde met her soul mate at a party hosted by Damien Hirst’s wife. Hynde, not a party person, had gone with a girlfriend out of a sense of obligation. When she realized she’d dropped in on a Congolese Art themed festival, replete with a Congolese barbecue, she headed straight to the bar. “Anyone who knows me knows exactly what I would think about that,” Hynde said in a recent interview. She proceeded to get “wrecked” and while getting wrecked met JP Jones, a young Welsh musician who would become her band mate and muse. “It was some sort of wanky arty party,” Jones later said when asked where he first encountered Hynde.

While Hynde’s anti-diva diplomacy has always attracted me, I certainly don’t know her. Nor do I know much about The Pretenders—beyond the opening verses to Private Life and rumors of members’ drug induced downfalls. But I can imagine why someone like Hynde might resent a Congolese Art party, especially one hosted by a few wealthy Brits and frequented by a hand-picked assortment of artists and intellectuals.

Circle of Charles Marville (French, 1816-ca.1879), Women of Algiers, 1858, Salted-paper print, Ken and Jenny Jacobson orientalist photography collection, The Getty Research Institute

I spent yesterday, Thursday, May 6^th, at The Getty Museum, attending a different sort of art party, one at which the option of getting wrecked did not present itself. But opportunities to over-indulge in freshly brewed coffee and gaze out at sunny green vistas more than sufficed. Called Zoom Out: The Making and Unmaking of the “Orient” Through Photography, this party had a guest list of people who read Edward Said and write papers with titles like The Prosthetic Eye: Photography as Cure and Poison. This sort of guest has symmetrically styled hair (even the man with Einstein-worthy, sandy-colored tufts made an effort to balance his mop), sports silk scarves and wears tastefully unobtrusive eyeglasses. As my companion, a hip, inquisitive specialist in Vietnam War era photography, assured me, art historians are the best looking academics around—far superior to, say, those working in Early Modern Studies.

“The sight of a Greek head depresses most people, strikes an un-liberated chord, reminds them of books in their grandmother’s parlor and of all they were supposed to learn and never did,” wrote Joan Didion in The White Album, published soon after The Getty opened to the public. “This note of ‘learning’ pervades the entire Getty collection.”  It pervaded yesterday’s panels and talks too. The talks, which continue today, focused on two photographic archives from The Getty Collection: The Ken and Jenny Jacobson Orientalist Photography Collection and the Pierre de Gigord Collection. But if the sight of sightly blurred, romantically composed photos from the 19th Century Middle East and North Africa depressed anyone there, they hid it well.

Pierre de Gigord Collection, The Getty Research Institute

What seems reprehensible about a Congolese Art party is that it uses limited knowledge of another culture as the premise for fun, possibly mindless fun. Academic conferences about how images taken in the Orient changed the course of photography’s history also take limited knowledge of another culture as the premise. But the overarching goal is not fun and what does take place is rarely mindless, even if you genuinely enjoy probing the politics of representation–and, of course, most art historians do.

Nancy Micklewright, The Getty Foundation’s Senior Program Officer and yesterday’s closing speaker, showed a series of photographs from the Gigord Collection, probably taken by a box camera. A group of Turkish women and one man act out different stereotypes. In one image, they play Harem; in another, they play aristocratic family; in yet another, they play tea party. In all, they’ve donned genre-specific costumes and masked the identity of their surroundings, though a painting above the fire place gives them away.  They’re having their own art party, maybe even their own mindless fun, while half-knowingly, half-unknowingly probing the strange ways in which the photograph has turned their culture into myth.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

The Kitchen in New York City is currently showing On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance, a Leslie Hewitt solo exhibition curated by Rashida Bumbray.  The exhibition features new and recent work by Hewitt in photography, sculpture and film installation.  The Kitchen writes that in this exhibition Hewitt’s ‘…long-standing interest in non-linear perspective merges with W.E.B. Dubois’ theory of double consciousness, to create visually elegant and thoughtfully composed situational works’.

On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance brings together a selection of images from three of Hewitt’s photographic projects.  Riffs on Real Time (2008) features sculptural, layered collages with mundane objects created to be captured in photograph.  These sculptural creations reflect the condition of existence through a shared temporality.  In the Midday (2009) series she creates contemporary still-life arrangements that reference our consumerist society through repetition.  Hewitt creates and documents multiple times – making each photographic image of the same still-life arrangement subtly altered in perception.  Hewitt’s newest photographic project, A Series of Projections (2010), breaks down and simplifies the artist’s structural complexities.  In a departure, black and white photographs capture photographic fragments projected onto the studio wall in addition to honing in on objects placed on wooden surfaces.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

Like much of Hewitt’s work, her new film installation, created in collaboration with experiential cinematographer Bradford Young, is inspired by a literary source – in this instance Claude Brown’s Harlem migration text Manchild in the Promised Land (1965).  This film installation engages the landscape of a particular place (Harlem) and the manifest implications and effects of movement through this space.  Hewitt and Young drew visual inspiration from Harlem’s dense urban grid, its architectural features and through the study of its street archives.  The Kitchen describes this film installation as featuring ‘a series of silent vignettes’ where ‘time is marked through oscillations between the still and the moving image’.  The passage of the gallery visitor through the installation mirrors and completes the work.  This theme of human movement is as particularly definitive to our global age as it was to the formation of 20th century Harlem.

Leslie Hewitt graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2000 and earned an MFA from Yale University in 2004.  She also undertook Africana Studies and Cultural Studies at New York University from 2001-2003.  Hewitt received the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands and, more recently, the 2010 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individual Artist Grant.  She is currently in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

Leslie Hewitt is represented by D’Amelio Terras in New York and is in the public collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  Hewitt has shown extensively across the US and was part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial and MoMA’s New Photography exhibition in 2009.  Hewitt’s work has also been shown internationally – notably at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw.  Look for Leslie Hewitt’s work in the exhibition After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City (organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta).  This exhibition is on view 28 March – 11 August 2010.

The Leslie Hewitt solo exhibition On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance will remain at The Kitchen through 20 May 2010.  A discussion between Leslie Hewitt and Bradford Young, moderated by Rashida Bumbray, will be held Sunday, 9 May at 4.00 pm.

Whitechapel Gallery in London is currently showing Melanie Manchot: Celebration (Cyprus Street).   This project addresses concepts of individual and community identity by revisiting the tradition of public street parties and festivals popular in 20th century London.  Drawing inspiration from these past events captured in newsreels and photographs, Manchot creates and documents her own 21st century street party.

Manchot realized Celebration by working closely with Cyprus Street inhabitants and organizing a party in this Bethnal Green, East London neighborhood.  The artist captured gathered residents as they posed for a group portrait using 35mm film – a medium with historic connection to old newsreels.  Blending photography and film, Manchot used a single tracking shot that pivoted to create a comprehensive, durational group portrait.

Melanie Manchot:  Celebration (Cyprus Street) also includes  photographic portraits of individual Cyprus Street residents.  Manchot’s new film and photographic work is juxtaposed with archival footage selected by the artist of historic street celebrations such as peace parties that took place in 1919 and 1945.  This arrangement allows the gallery visitor to view the changing faces of communities that have coalesced around London’s streets over time.  Most importantly, Manchot’s work reveals the diversifying effects of global migrations on a particular contemporary community.

Celebration (Cyprus Street) is exhibited as a part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s Education Programme.  It was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and was funded by Film London (Digital Archive Film Fund) and Arts Council, England.

Melanie Manchot lives and works in London.  She is represented by Goff + Rosenthal in New York.  Manchot earned an MFA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London and works in photography, film and video.

Melanie Manchot: Celebration (Cyprus Street) will remain at Whitechapel through 14 March 2010.

Ewan Gibbs, San Francisco, 2009; graphite on paper, 11 11/16 x 8 1/4 in.; Commissioned by SFMOMA; © Ewan Gibbs; photo: courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Bean Gilsdorf: How long have you been drawing?

Ewan Gibbs: I started making the work that was the origin of this in 1993, when I was twenty. I came across this language based on knitting patterns and I knew then that this was the thing I was going to do.

BG: When you say “language based on knitting patterns”, what do you mean?

EG: Basically, I had been making paintings that were quite derivative of Lichtenstein: acrylic, flat color, black outline. I was very interested in interiors, but I just felt like it was all too derivative. I was almost paralyzed by the possibilities that were out there. And I just stopped doing anything—it’s a weird place to be, but typical of being a student—and then I found a book on knitting patterns where there’s a grid, and different marks determine what color [yarn] you use.

BG: And what was it that drew you to that?

EG: Well, it’s a functional language, but it can also be quite naturalistic. [In the patterns] they use a darker mark to describe darker areas. There was a practicality, it had another purpose other than as just a drawing. I had people make me needlepoints based on my drawings and I made a couple, as well.

BG: But you didn’t find that satisfying?

EG: I found it very satisfying, but it became a political issue of, “Why is a man doing this?” I wasn’t interested in trying to make some comment about craft, or something that’s traditionally seen as a female thing. Painting and drawing was what I was interested in. So I took an Edward Hopper painting, and I took the knitting pattern—a found image and a found language—and I put them together. It was a way of going back to square one to build my confidence. Then I decided to go into a holiday shop [a travel agency], and I got all the brochures and cut out thousands of these tiny pictures of hotel rooms. They were ready-made images, and they were free. I would never crop them. I thought, “There’s an element here that’s very subjective, I have to choose one, but once I’ve chosen, the composition is fixed.” It eliminated all that subjectivity so that I could function.

BG: How do you achieve the different gradations in the work?

EG: In the pen drawings, there are five different nib sizes, so I’m just picking up a different nib. There are only five variables for any square. In pencil, I’ve got ten different kinds of pencils, and each pencil I can use hard, light, or medium; so then I’ve got thirty different variables. One of the difficulties of what I do, or skills, is to be consistent over a few weeks, to make the same decisions and use the same pressure, so I don’t end up with a stripy picture that looks like a Xerox that’s running out of ink. I firmly believe I could teach anyone to do it, there’s a logic to it.

BG: What determines the scale, if you are working from very small images?

EG: Originally, the source image was about two inches square and I blew it up to the size of the paper. When I started you didn’t have digital photography or home printers, so I’d go to a Xerox shop. Now I take my own photos and print off the exact size I want. I still use A4 paper, which is the most familiar-sized paper, it’s the size of your head, there’s an intimacy. I have no interest in doing a massive one in some bombastic way to impress a crowd. I don’t want people to go, “Wow, that must have taken forever!”

BG: People say that already!

EG: They might, but then I say, “It only takes two weeks,” and they say, “Oh, that’s not that long.” Also, every bit of effort I make is visible, so it’s really economical in terms of effort. We’re fascinated with “work” in art, but it’s so often out of sight. But I can make one mark in one square and it takes a certain amount of time. Multiply that by the total number of marks, and that’s how long it took.

BG: Some of your marks are like counting, they’re like the hatch marks a prisoner makes to mark time.

EG: Yeah, definitely. I was looking for a practice that would…not kill time or waste time, but spend time. Not that I’m interested in labor intensity for the sake of it. The reward in the end is the final image. It’s kind of like, “Look after the pennies and the pounds take care of themselves”—you look after each unit, be diligent and rigorous, and you end up with a naturalistic image. And it’s almost as if these things have made themselves.

Ewan Gibbs, San Francisco, 2009; graphite on paper, 11 11/16 x 8 1/4 in.; Commissioned by SFMOMA; © Ewan Gibbs; photo: courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

BG: Do you feel like your work has a connection to mapping, or is it closer to photography?

EG: I’ve never really thought of it in terms of mapping. And I’m not trying mimic photography, I’m trying to take the best parts of photography, like the naturalism that we accept as the most developed way to view the world. I don’t want someone to see my work and think, “Oh, is that a photograph?” When you get up there you see the marks, they’re very evident. With photography you get up close and there’s so much information. With my drawings you stand back and then you come in close to get more, and then you’re repelled again because there isn’t anything there. There’s more clarity when you stand back.

BG: You’ve had three main bodies of work, Destinations, Hotel Facades, and Typical Interiors. What’s behind that type of imagery?

EG: The interiors, I was just fascinated with the genre. But at a certain point I realized that was an easy way of making art-historical references, and kind of lazy. But in those same travel brochures were pictures of the outsides of the hotels. So that gets us away from the connotations of loneliness and art history and it becomes more objective. I’m not really interested in telling anyone about me, or my life. Then I started using pictures I had taken of landmarks, and I realized that they were more meaningless. A picture of the Chrysler Building doesn’t really have any connotations other then your own anecdotal ones. It doesn’t take you anywhere, you just recognize it, and you stop there. I quite like that. So I did a series of buildings [from photographs] taken from the Empire State Building. But the limitation I put on myself was that I could only take pictures from the viewing deck, because the thought of being able to wander around the city and take pictures of anything brought me back to that daunting subjectivity

BG: What makes one drawing more successful than another?

EG: Sometimes a drawing will fail because there’s not enough clarity, or I don’t feel like the marks work. I did a book of failed drawings. I did 300 drawings, of which 100 failed, and I wanted to make a book of them because if you’re seeing my work for the first time it shows you how the process works and how the language is developed. I didn’t want to make a monograph of my work as if I’m established…to me, this is like an artist’s book rather than a catalog.

BG: But what makes one successful? When do you sit back and say, “This is good, I’ve done good work”?

EW: Well, I’m trying to find the perfect mark. For example, in some I’ve softened the mark with a Q-tip, and that worked for a few drawings. But the same technique failed when I was trying to draw these windows, so the drawing failed. You’ve got to have quality control, don’t you? You’ve got to believe that if someone only saw one of your things that you would be proud. But I realized that there isn’t a perfect language, there’s only the right language for the right picture. If I like it, it’s more like I was a conduit for the language to do its thing.