Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Moonmilk by Ryan McGinley Moonmilk. We guarantee the condition of every book as it's described on the Abebooks web sites. If you're dissatisfied with your purchase (Incorrect Book/Not as Described/Damaged) or if the order hasn't arrived, you're eligible for a refund within 30 days of the estimated delivery date. If you've changed your mind about a book that you've ordered, please use the Ask bookseller a question link to contact us and we'll respond within 2 business days. Shipping costs are based on books weighing 2.2 LB, or 1 KG. If your book order is heavy or oversized, we may contact you to let you know extra shipping is required. Ryan McGinley. Moonmilk : Over a year, Ryan McGinley and his crew explored huge underground caves, venturing into unknown territory and seeking out spectacular natural spaces, -some previously undocumented. The title, Moonmilk, alludes to the crystalline deposits found on the walls of many caves; it was once believed that this substance was formed by light from celestial bodies passing through rock into darkened worlds below. The series, a departure from Ryan's iconic images of the past, firmly places Ryan as one of the most innovative and influential artists of a generation! Moonmilk was selected as photobook of the year (2009) by the New York Times Magazine! Fashion.Art.Books. New York based photographer Ryan McGinley exploded on to the art scene at the beginning of 2000 and quickly notched up a solo show at the Whitney Museum in 2003 and numerous awards. His work has a free, uninhibited, hedonistic feeling to it, often taking quirky indie kids and photographing them nude in nature. His projects were often turned into handmade or limited run books which were snapped up and have become true collectors items. One of his most recent books, Moonmilk, published by Morel Books, takes his subjects into huge underground caves in the North American wilderness. In a departure from his usual style, his subjects in these ethereal images almost disappear in to the landscape, the rock formations and the other worldly lighting are almost the stars. McGinley said he was inspired by the novels of Jules Verne and Mark Twain and the title of the project references the crystalline deposits found on the walls of the caves; it was once believed that these crystals were formed by light from celestial bodies passing through rock into the dark world below. Moonmilk was New York Time’s photobook of the year in 2009 and both print runs quickly sold out. The book itself, as with all books by Morel, is expertly produced; due to it’s tight binding I have had to cheat and take the inside images from Morel’s and McGinley’s websites so as as not to damage my copy! RYAN McGINLEY. “Myth . . . abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them a simplicity of essences . . . it organizes a world without contradictions . . . a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.” -Roland Barthes, Mythologies. Frequently lauded for capturing the essence of a generation, Ryan McGinley’s extraordinary images in fact do something more subtle and deft. Seamless and irony-free, they have created the myth of a generation for whom freedom and possibility consistently trump disillusion and doubt. Flesh may be temporarily bruised, but psyches remain unscarred. In McGinley’s world, the laws of gravity scarcely apply. Fantastic and ebullient, McGinley’s work enjoys an unusually widespread appeal among art-world insiders and lay fans alike. Today, McGinley is best known for dreamlike images of figures in natural landscapes, but his earliest work took place in the shabby apartments and dirty streets of downtown New York. His first major body of work, a series of photographs titled “The Kids Are Alright,” depicts moments from the lives of the artist and his friends on the Lower East Side. They come across as a diaristic chronicle of time spent spray painting graffiti, rolling joints, waking up in closet-sized rooms, having sex, swimming nude, and hanging out. First exhibited in 2000, in a self-produced show at 420 West Broadway, in SoHo—once the home of the Leo Castelli and Mary Boone galleries, the space was temporarily abandoned before the construction of luxury lofts—the photographs attracted widespread attention, leading to a solo exhibition of much of the same work at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art three years later. The images were hailed for their tantalizing similarity to the work of McGinley’s most obvious predecessors: Nan Goldin, Andy Warhol, and Larry Clark. And yet, there were differences: As one critic wrote of the Whitney show, “[T]he tone is relaxed and playful, as if the world were on recess. . . . The pictures have none of the after-hours decadence of Warhol’s snapshots, nor the grit of Mr. Clark’s work, nor the noirish narcissism of Ms. Goldin’s.” 2 A narrative quickly emerged: Post-AIDS, post-9/11, the subjects of Kids were immersed in an underground lifestyle unclouded by imminent doom. While others lamented the corporate gentrification of the city’s once seedy locales, McGinley’s images seemed to prove that it might still be possible to be classless, artistic, and young and have fun in early twentyfirst-century corporate New York—margins of freedom were still there to be found. McGinley’s swift move from DIY exhibition to major museum show formed a parallel story of promise: A young artist no longer had to wait a decade or more to receive mainstream recognition. With little formal photographic training and no more than a graphic design BFA, McGinley, at age twentyfive, became the youngest artist to be given a solo show at the Whitney and was anointed an avatar of his generation. A decisive shift took place in McGinley’s work in the summer of 2003, when a collector loaned the artist a Vermont country house. McGinley installed a skate ramp and trampoline in the yard and began busing friends and acquaintances up from New York each week. Removing his subjects from their “natural” urban environment, he transported them to this bucolic setting, where he instigated large situations and setups that would trigger spontaneous actions and moments. The work became a matter of documenting “real life” as it occurred in highly constructed situations, and the resulting images are more deliberately cinematic. In 2005, McGinley embarked on a series of annual summer road trips that would result in new bodies of work, including “Sun and Health,” 2006; “I Know Where the Summer Goes,” 2008; and “Moonmilk,” 2009. He began formally casting models—not professional models but kids recruited from art schools and cities all over the world—and crew and staff numbers grew larger. Still, traveling around the US for three months, living mostly outdoors and naked, boundaries between McGinley’s subjects, the natural world, and each other seem to dissolve, evoking the halcyon 1970s when, unburdened by debt or career, countless young people simply traveled, and an “artistic life” could be lived without being professionalized. McGinley’s depiction of young and lithe nude subjects has been read as a celebration of youth, defined by rebellion, vitality, and positive energy. Yet youth—like the body’s unclothed, natural state—can also be read as an absence : a blank slate upon which psychic and physical qualities can be more clearly registered. The exhaustion of Ann (Sand), 2007; the expectantly wistful expressions of Ann (Windy Truck), 2007, Hanna (Blonde Meadow), 2008, and Brennan (Blue), 2007; the black eyes and bruises of Tim (Black Eye), 2005, and Olivia (Sparrow), 2010, would not be as apparent or striking were their subjects encumbered by age or identifiable clothing. McGinley’s subjects wear their bruises well, like tattoos. Aged bodies are marked by accretion, but Tim and Olivia are still young, and their bruised states are fleeting. Looking back, it becomes apparent that even the artist’s earliest images are not quite as “documentary” as theyfirst appeared. The artist has described his work as a “pseudofiction”—“because it did happen but it might not have happened if it weren’t going to become a photograph.” Instead of reality, he explains, “My photographs are really closer to a documentation of my fantasy life.” The images in “The Kids Are Alright” are iconic: Depicted while living within a familiar bohemian milieu, his subjects are clearly mobile and passing through time. Framed by a late twilit sky and the liquid halation of city lights, the figure in Dash Bombing, 2001, is captured mid-motion, spray painting the wall of a building—echoing later figures who catapult from ghostly buildings (Tom Fall Away, 2010) or gaze wonderstruck toward the sky through a barn door, surrounded by snowfall and Christmas-red lights (Jonas Barn Snow Disco, 2008). Cum, 1999, defies both its title and the 1980s East Village tradition of “transgressive” art by micro-framing smashed droplets that, if abstracted from soft, wrinkled pant folds, could be mistaken for milk. McGinley’s work can be seen as a series of mythic constructions that have become increasingly artful and conscious over the years. Myths are anomalies: Singular stories, personas, and things that appear to be emblematic, but only because they have paradoxically been abstracted from cause and effect; they appear to us as inevitable and eternal. In Mythologies, a 1957 collection of essays, Roland Barthes found a kind of euphoria in the image of Einstein’s brain—“at once magician and machine”—and in Omo detergent’s artful disguise of abrasive chemicals within delicious folds of white foam. Devised from material drawn from the cultural surface, myths seem to evoke limitless depth. Framed in the seemingly endless plentitude of time and the natural world, McGinley’s images offered a line of flight from the toxic mediascape of the Bush years, when the Saw films and Hostel, exemplars of the “new sadism,” played at the multiplex. As one critic observed, McGinley’s “vision of golden youth scampering through fireworks or tumbling through the air is exhilarating and determinedly optimistic.”5 Or, as the artist himself states, “I have absolutely no interest in creating depressing images.”6 And this is myth: a conjuring trick that turns reality into enchanting essence. In Days of Heaven (1978), Terence Malick abstracts his subjects from a dire photomontage of industrial poverty to play out a drama against the endless Texas wheat fields and sky. Myths, according to Barthes, feed on an instant reserve of history that can be called and dismissed: “all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from.” The photographs that comprise “I Know Where the Summer Goes” are gorgeous and dreamy, presenting a group of young people finding themselves over the course of one endless summer, through each other and boundless natural landscapes. In Coley (Running), 2007, a naked boy runs through bleached fields, racing toward a car as if it’s the future. The iconography is pure Americana: the spirit of Andrew Wyeth as channeled through Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger ads. But McGinley’s use of amateur models imbues the work with a fragile integrity that will always elude commercial campaigns. His subjects offer not only their bodies but a presence informed by their real lives. Over time, McGinley’s interests during these road trips moved toward a greater, often breathtaking athleticism. In Coco’s Cliff, 2007–08, the model’s lithe figure seems to glide horizonally from the cliff across a cyclorama blue and pink sky. Cyclone, 2008, captures a tiny blonde-bobbed nude body catapulting upside down and headfirst into the gray, limitless space of gathering clouds. In 2009’s Moonmilk, naked figures virtually disappear within the extravagant contours of caves and canyons. As one of McGinley’s models, Dakota Goldhor, has observed, “His work shifted into creating not just one single moment but a poetic and dreamy macro-landscape. The question became: How does the individual fit into the grander stage?” The photographs taken these years are dramatic and visually stunning: In Jack (Blue Mass), 2009, a small naked boy seems to support a massive, phosphorescent green boulder on his shoulders. Red rock smolders like liquid ore in an interior chamber behind him. Evoking a pre-Raphaelite painting of the Narcissus myth, the model in Marcel, 2009, seems to merge with his reflection in the depths of a cave’s underground pool. The small figure in Jack (Hanging Rock), 2009, sits on the ledge of a red turreted rock—the kind of formation usually seen towering over a southwestern desert mesa, but here the landscape’s been flipped: The stones line a canyon deep underground. All of McGinley’s photographs since his 2001 debut exhibition have presented “ordinary” subjects in extraordinary situations, from the achingly archetypal languor of “Summer” to the athleticism of “Moonmilk.” In 2006, McGinley embarked on a new project, taking photos of fans at Morrissey concerts, which he would later reprise and expand at the Tennessee Bonnaroo Music Festival in 2011. The first series, “Irregular Regulars,” almost didactically proves the persistence of individual experience within the mass. Comprised of a nearly equal number of wideangle shots, medium shots, and portraits, “Irregular Regulars” moves from a blue-lit, standing crowd that could have been shot at a political rally or sporting event to close-ups of individual fans. Some are transfixed; others seem poised to catapult out of themselves in excitement. Each portrait depicts a unique, deeply personal flight into ecstasy. Photos of music and sports fans taken by artists such as Candice Breitz and Andrea Bowers have powerfully refuted the grim uniformity of mass spectacle proposed by Andreas Gursky’s crowd photographs. Their singleframe portraits portray the fans as individuals, but McGinley goes further than this: He shows us their souls, in transport. McGinley further abstracts his photographic subjects in the 2010 series “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” a group of black-and-white portraits taken entirely in his studio. In this empty space—devoid of personal effects, natural elements, transporting music—his models are forced to interact with the one thing that remains: McGinley’s camera. They are almost all medium closeups or mid-shots, and the photographs are remarkably intimate. More often and more explicitly than in the artist’s previous work, here his subjects make direct eye contact with viewers. “I wanted the viewer to really feel that they’re engaged with the person,” McGinley explains. “The feeling of that brief look that you share with someone at a restaurant, on line at the supermarket, on the subway—that one second that feels like an eternity, and then it’s over.”8. Photographed from the waist up, Michael W, 2010, hides his face behind his hands, fingernails painted with chipping black polish. His face is concealed except for three soft, wavy folds above his eyebrows, and his torso is naked except for a safety-pin pendant, a burn near his elbow, and some homemade tattoos—yet he projects a vulnerability that transcends any single emotion. As usual, McGinley’s studio subjects are young, but again, “youth” isn’t the subject of these remarkable portraits; the physical youth of his subject’s bodies acts as a blue screen. Like McGinley’s earliest work, these studio portraits feature models whose bodies and presences are still untouched by signs of visible age. What are wrinkles and bulges of flesh if not marks of a past that can no longer be shed? Myth, let us remember, is free of all past. Consequently, what emerges in “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” is less a “celebration of youth” than a use of young bodies to transform the human form into pure essence. Free of permanent marks (except those, like tattoos, that his subjects have chosen themselves), the bodies of McGinley’s models are clear pools that reflect fleeting and universal emotions, attitudes, moods. As “pseudo-fictions”—moments arrived at by placing real people in extraordinary situations—McGinley’s images offer us enchanting but credible narratives. Like Barthesian myths, they convey a sense of the “real” that is larger than life by simplifying and purifying their subjects. Informed by complex psychic and physical situations that exist just outside the frame, his images use the haphazard elements of everyday life to create an incandescent illusion of freedom and beauty. “Art students always ask me what my work is about,” McGinley once remarked. “I’m always like, ‘Fuck, I don’t know.’ We have adventures; that was always my answer. But at one point I broke it down and realized that it’s about contingency.”9 In McGinley’s world, freed from history, these chance moments are forever foregrounded—as Barthes writes, “making contingency appear eternal”—and caught between lightness and weight. Tyler Mitchell in Conversation With Ryan McGinley. As Mitchell’s first monograph I Can Make You Feel Good arrives, the two photographers – who each explore the idea of liberation in their work – discuss image-making, skateboarding, and subverting masculinity. The American photographers Tyler Mitchell and Ryan McGinley have risen to global acclaim for their dream-like imagery of youth and possibility. Their photographs are mesmerising meditations on a utopian state of bliss, offering the understanding that liberation from all that constrains us is not only possible but a fundamental necessity of existence. It is a viewpoint that led both artists to prominence at the outset of their careers: in 2018, Mitchell, then 23, was the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of American Vogue; 15 years earlier, McGinley, then 25, became the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The July 28 publication of I Can Make You Feel Good , Mitchell’s debut monograph, is an intimate and powerful vision of Black utopia, bathed in the rich sun-soaked light which has become the photographer’s signature. It stands alongside The Kids Are Alright (2002), McGinley’s first handmade book, which captured the exploits of the artists, skaters, and graffiti writers populating New York’s downtown scene at the turn of the millennium, in an ongoing conversation about the power of beauty, freedom, and truth. On a Friday in July, McGinley met with Mitchell in his Brooklyn home to discuss the joys of coming of age as skaters, artists, and authors in the new millennium. Ryan McGinley: When I came in, we were talking about your library. You’re building up your book collection. What are the spots that you hit? I call bookstores drug shops because I get high from buying photo books. Tyler Mitchell: I’m all over the place. It’s whatever I grab and find anywhere. I miss the obvious books; the totems that I probably should have, I don’t have. I’ve gone for the ones that are harder to get or are more in the moment. The Kids Are All Right and Viviane Sassen’s Umbra were like calls to action; they are both delicate, amazing revisions of what I’ve thought a photography book was. RM: Books are the most important part of photography for me. They let me know that there was a community of other like-minded artists. Sometimes you don’t look at them for few years, but you can revisit it and it always gives you something different every time. There’s this idea of feeling recognised and really being seen when you have a book. TM: From that starting point to having a published book, there’s something psychically that happens, like I exist, I’m alive. Like even if I like died tomorrow, there would be this book that would live on. Books are even more important than a show, which seems to be the marker of success. The book lives on in people’s homes. I feel good that people can now experience the work in book form rather than on Instagram ‘cause that’s how it started. RM: Let’s start in the beginning. Where are you from? TM: I’m from Marietta, Georgia. I probably wasn’t myself for like the first 13 years of my life. I hadn’t found the thing that I really loved; I was just doing things like basketball and soccer. Skateboarding was the first thing that I found that was like, OK, this is a community that I love. RM: What got you into image-making? TM: I started to understand image-making style through skate videos. Spike Jonze was a huge inspiration to me. Everything he did with Fully Flared , taking the more cinematic approach, down to Baker Three , which is just raw, fuck-shit-up destruction. RM: For me, skateboarding was important because it brought me out of the suburbs of New Jersey into a community of people where it didn’t matter what the colour of your skin was, what your economic background was. You show up at the skate spot and if you’re cool and if you’re good, you can hang. TM: And even if you’re not good, if you’re just cool and you want to learn, that’s alright. RM: It’s the antithesis of team sports. Skating is about individuality. TM: But also it’s you against yourself. The only dialogue you’re having is with yourself to get better. RM: Skateboarding is tied to the street. It’s dirty and gritty. There isn’t this idea of entrepreneurship that you can take this art form or sport and turn it into like a career, and seeing Spike [Jonze] do that was inspiring. It created a new path. TM: It woke me up to things. Over time it was a natural portal into what I’m doing now. Music also was foundational in this. Skate, rap, music, photography, and filmmaking are all intertwined. RM: What was your video camera? TM: It was the Canon 70; it has that flip mode between the video and the photos. I would literally be taking photos while I was doing videos. My brain really conflates those two into one. In a similar way, I’ve always I focused on the mundane images of Black folks, just being like: how can I conflate those feelings into a work? That’s what I hope to make the book about. The book doesn’t place importance on one thing over the other. I like that there’s fluidity between film stills and photographic stills. There is a still image from my film Idyllic Space that I made in Atlanta. Then on the next page there’s a photograph that I made in a park in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn next to a photograph that I made for a magazine. RM: One of the most important things as a photographer making art and shooting for magazines, films, and fashion is to keep your style consistent. TM: That’s definitely a big part of it. Whether that’s photographing Beyoncé, Spike Lee, skaters in Cuba, or friends – it’s about making it all feel like my work. RM: When people ask me how I started taking photos, I say I was the kid with the fisheye lens and the Handycam that was filming everyone. At that time I didn’t think about it as like photography. I was drawn to the in-between moments where like everyone was just chilling. I gravitated to people being like their authentic selves. TM: What was it like coming from New Jersey into New York? RM: The New York that I saw was like a Scorsese film. One of my mentors is Jack Walls, a poet and who was the lover of Robert Mapplethorpe. We’ve been friends since 1998, so for 22 years, and it’s amazing to have his insights on art, photography, being photographed by Mapplethorpe. It helps me as an artist. TM: The New York I came to in 2013 and the experience I had in those first two years dictate what this book has become for me. There were people who I saw making Black folks the protagonists of their images in uncompromising yet widely seen ways that reminded me that I can be that as well. My work is like a series of inspirations, you being one of them. Seeing those images as a teenager through Tumblr and being like that looks fun – that’s what I want to do and live but also what I want to make. RM: Yo, film or digital? TM: Digital is too easy. RM: Why does everyone who is young shoot film? TM: I think it’s the fact that our generation is obsessed with nostalgia. There’s no denying my own personal relationship with nostalgia and film. RM: I’m excited that film is coming back. I’m also excited about movies like Moonlight winning Best Picture and other works of art kind of expanding our notion of masculinity. What does masculinity mean to you? TM: I don’t think it means much of anything. I’m interested in taking down or subverting masculinity. RM: Masculinity is an interesting word for me. I immediately identify it with sexuality because growing up with queer masculinity, being masculine was like passing. Your generation has so much more language for that, which I admire. TM: I don’t identify as queer so when I think of masculinity, I’m thinking about it from the point of view of growing up Black in the South. If I wear a certain hoodie, my mother is concerned that I’m going to be pulled over, stopped, killed, et cetera. Those kinds of preventions from expressing oneself are passed down generational laws or rules around masculinity and what it should be. RM: It has to do a lot with presentation – what that role means or who represents it. TM: I’m in fashion because those things are linked: identity, dress, masculinity, and personhood. Images have a powerful way of changing associations and making all of these things irrelevant so we have new notions of what life could be.