MUSÉE 29 – EVOLUTION
Evolution explores the concepts of progress, transformation, growth, and advancement in an age when images are taking a dramatic shift in the role they play in our lives.
Halloween and Friday the 13th ignited the slasher flame across the box office in the early 80s. Dozens of imitators were manufactured to cash in.
By 1982, the genre peaked and cliches piled up. Then came The Slumber Party Massacre’s witty approach to parodying the recycled scares and commentary on gender roles.
Over the past few days several articles started with, “October 27th, 2018, we saw the largest ever attack on a Jewish community on U.S. soil.” These articles usually go on to accuse Donald Trump of being an anti-semite and or of allowing this attack to have occurred in the first place.
For the second time, Magnum and Aperture are joining together to present Crossings, a Magnum Square Print Sale exploring perspectives on transition and transformation in photography. Crossings encapsulates physical crossings from one side to another, and the personal crossings that manifest in growth, revolt, mutation, self-realization, and voyages of the mind.
When we think of motion and motion photography, we think of dancers gliding across a stage or perhaps people made still, captured between moments of intensity. Either way, we think of the subject in motion while the camera remains steady, nearly predatory in the way it remains calm until the time to pounce. But what does it mean to flip this concept? The subjects still, the camera in motion. With this particular type of photography, movement is so apparent in the way that the photographs show a blend of blur and focus while also leaving the movement out of frame.
Swarms of New Yorkers commute between Brooklyn and Manhattan on the L Train every day. Packed tight with passengers, the train serves both boroughs through its tunnel under the East River. The underwater tunnel was severely damaged during Hurricane Sandy and is in need of repairs. Already closed on weeknights and weekends, the L Train is fully shutting down in April for a 15-month maintenance period.
Most American political ads are terrible. Regardless of whether or not the information in the ad is even true or has context, most campaign materials are incredibly lacking in any cinematic imagination or technique. It’s all too easy to visualize the black-and-white footage of a candidate that a SuperPAC opposes, storm clouds over a government building, and shots of “sketchy,” non-white individuals stalking the night. Even gentler campaign ads can be just as eye-rollingly predictable, as if stock footage of a diverse crowd of blue-collar workers in hard hats, soldiers saluting the flag, and children studying happily implies the candidate has plans to address racial injustice, military spending, labor unions, or education funding. Political advertisements rarely delve into visual styles that are more complicated than an Instagram filter. If campaign media receives widespread attention, it does so through production disasters, rather than through its effectiveness.
Feminists gathered at the Atlantic City boardwalk outside the 1968 Miss America Pageant to protest in a rally that would become iconic for decades to come. Including a Freedom Trash Can, a sheep wearing a Miss America sash, and stink bombs, these activists fought the unattainable beauty standards and oppression they experienced as women.
Back in the dog days of mid-August, 36-year-old Vanessa Campos was murdered in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne park. Her death came a year-and-a-half after the French parliament government passed a law designed to both stem prostitution and protect its practitioners - among whose ranks Campos counted herself. A transgender woman from Peru, she was shot by thieves taking advantage of her and her john’s vulnerability in an isolated corner of the park, widely known as one of Paris’ major bazaars of prostitution.
The phrase “Digital anthropology” could best describe the new Whitney Exhibit Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018. As we get a glimpse of our history and how the advances in technology, systematic thinking and computing code have transformed the way we perceive the world, what will the digital remains of our civilization look like? Will we be remembered for our Twitter feed discourse on reality shows, the way we programmed ourselves into the computer or our voyeuristic tendencies to huddle around the television set like a fire-place?
Besides all of its obvious firsts, World War One also saw the rise of war photojournalism. Of course, the presence of cameras on the battlefield had gone back to the American Civil War, but the cameras of these eras were too cumbersome, too delicate, and too slow to be operated in the middle of an actual conflict. Because of these limitations, most of the photos from the war focused on the aftermath of the battles; corpses posed amongst debris in an attempt to recreate the violence that had just occurred.
Why porcelain dolls?
MK: Primarily, they are breakable and affordable. I was searching for something that you can easily drop from the height of 4 meters in my studio and would smash great on the floor, creating a massive and complex event.
I could control the camera by a noise trigger, so effectively, I only had to let them fall in the right position to trigger the camera and do the shot.
Steve Miller: In your last show at Petzel, I was struck by the variety of your approach and your asking questions about the nature of our collective moment in time. I see your work implying movement, being in motion and physically moving through the world. The most obvious example is your FedEx works (2007– ) where the shipping of the work and its arrival at the final destination creates the image. You have talked about the corporate ownership of a space, the space of the shipping box, and the movement of the work through time is a fascinating twist for me on an intentional readymade. But you've got kind of two dialogues going on here. How did these two worlds, corporate and aesthetic, embrace?
The YouTube community has been in a whirlwind over the ongoing eight-part documentary series by YouTube star Shane Dawson since the beginning of its release two weeks ago. Dawson’s video series, titled “The Mind of Jake Paul,” is asking the controversial question: is YouTube-sensation Jake Paul a sociopath?
When I set off on a solo trip to Mongolia, I had no idea what to expect. I just knew I had to go - to photograph the reindeer herders way up north by Siberia. Suddenly I found myself climbing slippery mountains on horseback during sleet storms for hours on end, sleeping in smoky teepees with large families and eating bowls of sheep innards. It was worth every minute.
“He looks weird.” My 8 year old nephew tells me as he looks at an image on my laptop of a transgender man from Lorenzo Triburgo’s “Transportraits” series. At this point my response is instinctual, “What makes you say that?”. With a sigh of relief, my nephew tells me that he was only speaking about the model’s tattoos and the vibrant painted backdrop, not objecting to the very existence of transgender man. But most of the time, these reasons aren’t so benign.
Can a woman be an artist and a muse? This was the kind of uphill battle of rhetoric female Surrealists like Leonor Fini encountered in their quest to broaden portrayals of gender, identity, and sexuality in art. Leonor Fini was a pioneer for her efforts to invert the traditional Muse, in which she domesticated her male subjects in more feminine depictions and, in doing so, empowered her female subjects through mythical creatures and folklore, such as her use of the Sphinx. Much of Fini’s art, as with other artistic movements of her era, was a reaction to the horror and inhumanity experienced in the wake of the Second World War.
