news release The Metropolitan Museum of Art Communications Department 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028-0198 tel 212-570-3951 fax 212-472-2764 For Immediate Release email [email protected] Contact: Elyse Topalian Rebecca Herman Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography Inaugural Installation Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan September 25, 2007 - March 23, 2008 Wall Text Sc Labels Introductory Wall Text This inaugural installation surveys some of the diverse ways contemporary artists have used the camera since the 1960s, when photography played an instrumental role in breaking down the previously well-maintained boundaries between media. The photographic image—mechanically produced, endlessly reproducible, and found in every corner of the culture—was of central importance in dismantling age- old hierarchies, challenging notions of authorship and originality, and radically redefining what constituted a work of art in postwar society. A painting by Gerhard Richter or Andy Warhol could be a coolly distanced grisaille of a humble snapshot or a silkscreen grid of grisly tabloid outtakes, while the traditional work of sculpture was displaced in two diametrically opposed directions: toward the artist's body as subject, object, and implicit point of reference; and outward to ephemeral, site- specific interventions into the landscape, both of which were dependent on the photograph to extend the life of the artist's fleeting gestures. Photography by artists who were not trained photographers in turn freed the medium from some its own timeworn clichés of expressivity. The photograph in series—deliberately pokerfaced studies of snow melting off a bush by Douglas Huebler or of water towers by Bernd and Hilla Becher—undercut the autonomy and singularity of the single image in favor of typological accumulations, serial progressions, or narrative sequences that required the active participation of the viewer in the making of meaning. The late 1970s saw a renewed interest in the psychological, social, and rhetorical functions of imagery, and artists such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince used the camera to show how representations shape our sense of self and the world around us, and not vice versa. In the new decade, the scale and ambition of photography expanded dramatically, absorbing elements of painting, performance, and cinema to make highly seductive pictures with enough power and impact to break through the passivity and habit of a culture addicted to the consumption of images. The accelerated pace of technological change during the 1990s greatly transformed the way visual information was perceived and processed, with the line between reality and the imagination becoming increasingly blurred. The hallucinatory clarity of Rodney Graham's upside-down tree, Sharon Lockhart's reflection-filled hotel room, and Uta Barth's sensuous river view is, nevertheless, rooted in an exploration of analog photography's unique technical and material underpinnings, pushed to the point of bedazzled transcendence. This fervent experimentalism, combined with a profound understanding of the medium's complex history and relationship to other media, provides a template for the works of photographic art to be featured in this new hall. Wall Labels Dennis Oppenheim (American, born 1938) Annual Rings, 1969 Mixed media Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999 (1999.212) During the 1960s artists such as Oppenheim and Robert Smithson sought to liberate sculpture from the pedestals of the gallery and museum, choosing instead to make ephemeral, antimonumental works inextricably bound to their sites in the world. Here, Oppenheim enlarged the patterns of a tree's growth and, by shoveling pathways in the snow, transposed the annual rings to the frozen waterway that separates the United States and Canada as well as their differing time zones. By juxtaposing man-made national and temporal boundaries, Oppenheim opened to question the relative values of the ordering systems by which we live. Douglas Huebler (American, 1924-1997) Duration Piece #31, Bradford, Massachusetts, 1969 Gelatin silver prints and typescript Purchase, Anonymous Foundation, Marian and James H. Cohen, in memory of their son Michael Harrison Cohen, Saundra B. Lane and The Judith Rothschild Foundation Gifts, 2004 (2004.51a, b) Huebler, who began his career as a Minimalist sculptor, explained his reasons for abandoning the making of traditional art objects: "The world is more or less full of objects, more or less interesting. I do not wish to add anymore. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and place." The results—typewritten, bureaucratic-sounding texts accompanied by deadpan black-and-white photographs—were divided into three decade-long series: Duration, Variable (in which he attempted to photograph everyone in the world), and Location. This work was made in Bradford, Massachusetts, where the artist taught at a liberal-arts college for women. Focusing hypnotically on a snow-laden bush of spiky branches, the artist changed his humdrum subject—photographed twelve times from a fixed position at fifteen-minute intervals— into a readymade sculpture undergoing organic transformation, the various stages of a densely worked drawing, and a mirror in nature on the tonal reversal (from snow white to brush black) that underlies the negative-positive process of the medium. With disarming simplicity, Huebler slyly redrew the parameters of the work of art to efface the traditionally elevated positions of the artist and the art object in favor of an elegantly conceived and simply communicated idea that exists fully only in the viewer's mind. Wall Labels Gordon Matta-Clark (American, 1943-1978) Splitting, 197 A Chromogenic prints Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1992 (1992.5067) Like his contemporaries Ed Ruscha and Dan Graham, Matta-Clark was instrumental in introducing architecture and public space as important subjects of Conceptual Art. Using abandoned buildings as his medium and wielding a chain saw as his instrument, he cut into structures, creating unexpected apertures and incisions. In 1974 Matta-Clark operated on a two- story home in New Jersey that was slated for demolition, effectively splitting it down the middle. The light from the incision invaded the interior and united the rooms with a swath of brilliance. The artist photographed his work and created a collage of prints, the unconventional disposition of which re-creates the disorienting experience of the unprecedented destruction. Charles Ray (American, born 1953) Untitled, 1973; printed 1989 Gelatin silver print Purchase, Robert Shapazian Gift, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, and Harriette and Noel Levine Gift, 1995 (1995.474) Unnoticed except for a few passersby, Ray spent an afternoon bound to a tree branch. Coming on the heels of the coolly inhuman Minimalist art that reigned during the preceding decade, the artist's gesture (executed to be memorialized as a photograph) inextricably binds the human body to the medium of sculpture. It is also a witty self-portrait of the artist as hapless prisoner to his own creativity that, in the manner of a good joke, leaves the viewer somewhere between amusement and concern. Trisha Donnelly (American, born 1974) Satin Operator (11), 2007 Inkjet print Purchase, Joyce F. Menschel Gift, 2007 (2007.336) Exhibition print courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan Donnelly is best known for her performances, which are novel partly because they are rigorously undocumented—meant to exist for whomever is present and to be communicated to those who are not by word of mouth, with all of the accretions and distortions of subsequent legend. To further complicate matters, she has also performed without informing the audience, as when she waited on tables at the dinner for the opening of the Fifty-fourth Carnegie International (in which her work was included) like a ghost visiting her own funeral. This withdrawal of the camera from the event points to her own ambivalence about the medium, as can be seen in the series of twelve unique prints collectively entitled Satin Operator. The artist created each image by manipulating a rolled photograph on a flatbed scanner during exposure. The resulting variations are like individual performances that are then presented by the artist without mat or frame, pinned directly to the wall so that the work protrudes into the space of the viewer like a character in an unfolding drama. Wall Labels Rodney Graham (Canadian, born 1949) Welsh Oaks #1, 1998 Chromogenic print Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2002 (2002.381) Graham, an artist from Vancouver who works in a variety of media, built a giant pinhole camera and parked it in front of twelve different trees for one month in 1979. The public was invited to enter the camera to view the luminous image of the tree cast upside-down on the camera's back wall. In the early 1990s he again approached the subject, this time photographing ancient oaks in the English countryside. Inverted on gallery walls, the impressively large prints suspended the trees as if in the mind while insistently recalling the constructed aspect of all artistic representation. In 1998 Graham produced his definitive work on this theme, a series of seven monumental images of Welsh oaks printed on color paper to produce warm deep sepia and charcoal hues. The almost hallucinatory transformation wrought by the inversion of these images is profound, as disorienting as if the ground were to become transparent, branches become roots, and the sky fall. Felix Gonzalez-Torres (American, born Cuba, 1957-1996) Untitled (Sand), 1993-94 Photogravures Purchase, Joyce and Robert Menschel Gift, 1995 (1995.263) Gonzalez-Torres first came to prominence in the early 1990s with his interactive site-specific installations of candy stacks and printed paper. These "antimonuments" parodied the coldness and rigor of Minimalist sculpture while actively encouraging participation by the audience.