On the occasion of the first comprehensive survey of work from the extremely brief but prolific career of American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), the Guggenheim Museum presents Art in the 1970s: Through the Lens of Francesca Woodman. The program examines the relationship between the still and moving image in Woodman’s and other artists’ production during the 1970s, particularly as associated with Post-Minimalism, performance, and video.

The program is organized by Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, and includes conversations led by an esteemed roster of acclaimed contemporary artists and scholars: George Baker, Associate Professor of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles, Jane Blocker, Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, William Kaizen, Assistant Professor of Art History and Media Studies, Northeastern University, Moyra Davey, an artist and photographer, based in New York, and Joan Jonas, acclaimed multi-media performance artist.

Francesca Woodman is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the exhibition was on view earlier this year. You can find a video walkthrough of that show shot on January 2, 2012 on YouTube.

Art in the 1970s: Through the Lens of Francesca Woodman

Friday, May 18 @ 4:00 pm
$10, $7 members, FREE for students with a valid ID
To reserve a student ticket, please e-mailboxoffice@guggenheim.org

›› Read more about Woodman’s “deeply personal photographic revelations” in critic David Levi Strauss’ Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (Aperture 2003).

›› View a slideshow of images from the exhibition at Guggenheim on The New York Times website, after which you can read Ken Johnson’s review of the show.

Exhibition Photos by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

The first comprehensive survey of work from the extremely brief but prolific career of American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) to be shown in North America is now on view at the Guggenheim Museum (through June 13, 2012).

More than thirty years after Woodman’s suicide at the age of 22–often one of the first things people recall about the artist–the exhibition offers an occasion for the “historical reconsideration of her work and its reception.”

Over 120 vintage photographs on view were culled from her estate of 800 prints and over 10,000 negatives, which is managed by her parents. They span her early experimental responses to class assignments completed while she was still enrolled at RISD in the mid-seventies, to the large-scale blueprint studies of her Temple project from 1980. The exhibition also includes six of her recently discovered and rarely seen short videos, as well as two of her artist books.

Her black-and-white images, dark, ethereal and moody, softened and blurred through the use of a long exposure time, are remarkably coherent explorations of herself, and sometimes other women, in very particular environments.

The Times‘ Ken Johnson calls it a “borderline kitschy style, a heady mix of Victorian Gothic, Surrealism and 19th-century spirit photography,” exploring the non-documentary realm of photography in a manner reminiscent of some of her contemporaries, including Cindy Sherman.

They were taken mostly with a medium format 6×6 camera and printed at 8×10″ or smaller, adding a timeless or antique quality, and necessitating a physically intimate viewing experience.

So “strong, particular, personal and tragic,” is her work, British art dealer Anthony d’Offay, who acquired 18 of her prints from the artist’s boyfriend, says in a video interview, “that you have to confront elements of yourself which perhaps sometimes you’ve avoided.”

—–

On Friday, May 18, 2012, the Guggenheim is hosting a symposium on “Art in the 1970s: Through the Lens of Francesca Woodman,” examining the relationship between the still and moving image in Woodman’s and other artists’ production during the 1970s, particularly as associated with Post-Minimalism, performance, and video, organized by Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography.

Francesca Woodman is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the exhibition was on view earlier this year. You can find a video walkthrough of that show shot on January 2, 2012 on YouTube.

Read more about Woodman’s “deeply personal photographic revelations” in critic David Levi Strauss’ Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (Aperture 2003).

View a slideshow of images from the exhibition at Guggenheim on The New York Times website, after which you can read Ken Johnson’s review of the show.

Exhibition on view:
March 13 – June 13, 2012

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
(at 89th Street)
New York, NY 10128-0173

When Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore staged one of their first moving sculptures at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1969, they began a performance that has never ended. The duo met while studying at St. Martin’s School of Art and embarked on what is now a 45-year collaboration, an eccentric, independent perpetual ‘happening,’ exploring what art historian and curator Robert Rosenblum called, “the singularity of their duality.”

On Tuesday, April 3, 2012, dawning customary deadpan expressions, the duo will bring what the UK’s Independent calls “their seamless double-act, walking in step and talking in antiphon, all clothes, habits and opinions synchronised, [sic] all sentences prefixed by a regal ‘we’,” to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for a conversation with novelist and cultural historian Michael Bracewell.

Together known as one Gilbert & George, they’ve produced an enormous body of visceral, often provocative photography-based work—art independent of any school or movement, art of everyday modern urban life, as they deem with their slogan, “Art for All.” Contrary to the work of many contemporary blockbuster artists, their aim is “to speak across the barriers of knowledge directly to the people about their life and not about the knowledge of art.”

They manipulate images of architecture, lurid graffiti, shop windows and most often themselves on exceptionally powerful computers in their home studio and print on massive, mural-sized panels, 200 of which made up their monumental 2007 retrospective occupying the entire forth floor at Tate Modern, the largest exhibition by a living artist there yet. In collaboration with Aperture Foundation, Tate Publishing also released a unique, two-volume retrospective monograph joined in one carrying case designed and produced by the artists, Gilbert & George: The Complete Pictures, 1971–2005.

In their time together, Gilbert & George have taken tens of thousands of photographs virtually all within walking distance of their East London flat for their art of everyday life. As they often claim, “Nothing happens in the world that doesn’t happen in the East End.” With subject matter covering what the Guardian coupled as “nudity,  bondage, bad language and turds,” and series titles such as Cunt Scum, Naked Shit, New Horny Pictures and Drunk with God, their work has attracted alternatively the outrage and adoration of the media.

Some question it as pure shock value, though Gilbert & George refute this claim, suggesting to the Independent, “We want to un-shock people, and bringing these subjects into the open, allowing them to live and breathe, should un-shock.”

In a four-part video tour of their studio, they say furthermore:

Each of our pictures is a kind of visual love letter from us to the viewer and it is the space between the picture and the viewer that makes art, the thoughts and feelings that go through the person when examining the picture.

Their aim is to confront the viewer with some kind of morality, ambiguous or otherwise, but never to impose. Rather, they explore it together with the viewer.

“We are not sending them to heaven or hell,” says Gilbert in another video interview. “We are sending them,” laughs George, “to the bar instead.”

Second Annual Robert Rosenblum Lecture:
Gilbert & George in Conversation with Michael Bracewell
Tuesday, April 3, 2012 at 6:30 PM
SOLD OUT

Standby tickets may be available if space allows. Please call the Box Office at (212) 423-3587 for more information. $10, $7 members, free for students with a valid ID.

Solomon T. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10128

Black Out Copy by Sarah Anne Johnson

Tomorrow evening photographer Sarah Anne Johnson will give an artist’s talk at Aperture bookstore and gallery as part of the Parsons lecture series. Johnson’s work integrates multiple mediums including sculptural and performance elements along with painting and printmaking to create her images. Tree Planting, a series of photographs by Johnson recently featured in Guggenheim group show, Haunted, exemplifies the artist’s multi-media approach to photography and to narrative. In sixty five images the artist depicts a summer spent planting trees in de-forrested Manitoba, a common Canadian rite of passage. Moving between photographs documenting the physical lived experience and photographed scenes of small scale models reenacting moments that happened in real life, the work builds apon and evolves the use of sets, props and theater in photography. Johnson is represented by the Julie Saul gallery in New York and Stephen Bulger gallery in Toronto.

Sarah Anne Johnson: Parsons Lecture Series
Tuesday, October 5, 6:30 pm

Aperture Bookstore and Gallery
547 West 27th street
New York, New York

Night Operations by An my Le

Haunted, an exhibition currently on view at the Guggenheim examines contemporary photographic imagery that deals with themes of memory, trauma and a return to the past. Included in the exhibit’s diverse roster of artists are Aperture published and master photographer Sally Mann, Spencer Finch, who recently spoke at the Aperture bookstore, An my Le, whose limited edition print Night Operations is available through Aperture, Cindy Sherman, featured in Aperture magazine issue 169, Sophie Calle, featured in Aperture magazine issue 142 and issue 191, Miranda Lichtenstein and more.

Also included in the exhibition is work by artist Waled Beshty, who was recently featured in Aperture’s Words Without Pictures and The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Astraction in Photography. Beshty will give a talk about themes in his work and current issues in the art world at the Guggenhiem next Wednesday, May 26th.

Click here to purchase tickets and find out more about Walead Beshty’s talk at the Guggenheim

Haunted
Part I: March 26-September 6, 2010
Part II: June 4-September 1, 2010

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York

Copyright Walead Beshty

Artist Walead Beshty is part of a group exhibition, Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum. Beshty’s work, featured in Aperture magazine issue 192, documents the abandoned Iraqi diplomatic mission in former East Berlin. On May 26th, you have the chance to attend an exhibition viewing and reception with Beshty and curators . Tickets are free for students, $7 for members, and $10 for the general public. RSVP, or buy tickets here.

Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Avenue
New York, NY

Since 1925 the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has annually offered Fellowships to artists, scholars, and scientists in all fields. This year, after considering the recommendations of panels and juries comprised of hundreds of distinguished artists, scholars, and scientists, the Board of Trustees has granted 180 Fellowships. Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of impressive achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

Congratulations to Brian Ulrich the recipient of a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography. Ulrich will be using this award to continue his Copia project which addresses one of the biggest challenges at the dawn of the 21st century: our relationship to  consumption and the potential reassessing of its role and purpose in our lives.

Join Brian Ulrich at Art Chicago, where he will be signing copies of his book MP3: Midwest Photographers Publication Project at Aperture’s booth.

View event details here.