(OD) Remembrance of Pictures Past
Posted on May 15, 2011 | No Comments
During the 1980s I traveled extensively in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, meeting with artists and organizing exhibitions of their artworks for museums in Europe and the United States.
From 1986 through ‘90, I spent three to four months out of each year there; between meetings and meals I photographed. It was a kind of a blind attempt to describe the changes that were taking place in my own life as I participated, from the periphery, in the transformation of Europe.
In 1988 I exhibited my photographs in Budapest. Then, on the way to Berlin where another exhibition was scheduled, my photographs were confiscated by East German border police. A week later the Berlin Wall fell. I filed away my negatives and tossed all my undeveloped film. The pictures just couldn’t come close to the lived experience.
I thought that I knew the world and could express my knowledge through photography. But working in Eastern Europe during its period of unravelling was a process of unlearning, and my camera could not describe the complexity of the changes I was witnessing. My parallel self-transformation seemed trivial by contrast.
My daughter was born in 1990, and I put my cameras in a box in a closet. I closed the door on what had been, for more than a decade, my way of interpreting the world.
[Text written in 2002 for the Liget Gallery Almanach. Video c/o tbrVideos.]
(OD) Remembering Robert Seydel
Posted on January 28, 2011 | No Comments
![Robert Seydel. Untitled [A.S. Wolfe. Photographer], from The Book of Saul, 2000-2007 - Oil and ink on card, 4" x 2 1/2"](http://www.cueartfoundation.org/assets/galleries/99/seydel5.jpg "Robert Seydel. Untitled [A.S. Wolfe. Photographer], from The Book of Saul, 2000-2007 - Oil and ink on card, 4\" x 2 1/2\"")
Dear Friends,
I am deeply saddened to write to you of the death of Robert Seydel, of a heart attack, while preparing for his classes at Hampshire College yesterday morning.
Robert and I came to the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University at the same time, in the early ’90s, fresh out of grad-school. During a period of financial crisis soon after our arrival, there came a day when we were its last two employees. Standing together in its darkened galleries, we conceived of a plan to save the PRC, with Robert taking on the curatorial responsibilities and me the administrative. Enlisting the support of artists and community members, as well as celebrities such as Dennis Hopper and Patti Smith, Robert organized a visionary program for the PRC while I negotiated forgiveness for its debts. A new organization, with a square green logo and a growing focus on the region, emerged. During the years that followed, Robert and I never tired of marveling at our unlikely success. Read more…
(OD) Captain Beefheart: Don’s Piano Worktape
Posted on December 18, 2010 | No Comments
“I was reminded of an interview with Captain Beefheart from some years ago. The interviewer wondered why his most recent album had taken a whole week to make. Beefheart usually only took a day or two. Captain Beefheart’s response was that it took so long because he had to learn to play the piano.”1
I received this short recording in a trade quite a few years ago; a tape of Captain Beefheart whistling, humming, singing, and playing piano into a tape recorder. I’ve always thought of it as the keystone of the larger edifice of sound and visual art created by Beefheart. Most of us encountered Captain Beefheart through his recordings or paintings, some through performances; these are all finished things, fixed in time, conclusive. This recording is from the opposite end of the creative process, as close as one may ever get to the spark.
Thank you, Don, for many years of inspiration. Read more…
- Corbett, Michael. “Captain Beefheart’s Piano: Confessions of an Unrepentant Illiterate,” http://freireproject.org/ojs/index.php/home/article/viewFile/65/39. ↩
(Imp.) Air Can Hurt You Too, part II
Posted on August 3, 2010 | No Comments
Barthes returns to James Van Der Zee’s Family Portrait several times in Camera Lucida, each time describing a more complex relationship of viewer to image. These descriptions are roughly analogous with the advanced stages of aesthetic development described by Abigail Housen, which may thus be employed to “track” his cognitive development as he responds differently to the picture over time. In fact, Barthes’ starting point as “a primitive, without culture” perfectly suits Housen’s technique of “studying people’s aesthetic thought through their speech,”1 capturing the moment-to-moment thoughts of the viewer in relation to an artwork, with no more prompting than the invitation to describe “What’s going on here?” Read more…
- DeSantis, Karen and Abigail Housen. A Brief Guide to Developmental Theory and Aesthetic Development. New York: Visual Understanding in Education, p. 11. ↩
(OD) Rosalind Solomon: Ritual
Posted on May 23, 2010 | No Comments
Rosalind Solomon’s new exhibition, Ritual, opened recently at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery, and her video, A Woman I Once Knew, is being screened at Silverstein’s 20th street space on Saturdays during May and June. This fruitful pairing returns to the theme of ritual activities – personal, religious, political, ceremonial – that Rosalind explored in her one-person show of the same title at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1986. As might be expected of an artist celebrating her 80th birthday this year, her new exhibition may be viewed as a re-appraisal of the earlier one, and will be of particular interest to those who know her work well.
A few nights before the opening, Rosalind and I attended a concert by friends of hers who were performing at the Jazz Standard. It was a lovely spring evening, and while waiting for the band to perform we spoke about the feature on her work in the New York Times “Lens” blog, Rosalind Solomon’s Singular Journey. It must be a curious feeling, I wondered, after a successful career of more than forty years, to be introduced as “one of the most interesting photographers you’ve never heard of.” And yet, as is hinted at in Susana Raab’s thoughtful article, Rosalind began that career at a time when the field of fine-art photography was dominated by a small group of powerful institutional figures. Chief among these was John Szarkowski, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, whose attention Rosalind sought by inviting him to lunch. As Raab relates in her description of Solomon’s early years, although Szarkowski “found her work intriguing … he encouraged her not to show [it] too soon for fear of comparisons to Diane Arbus.” Like so many photographers working without the kind of champion that Arbus had in Szarkowski, Rosalind has pursued a relentlessly private vision, recognized by her colleagues but never achieving the public prominence that her work merits. Read more…
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