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 [email protected] For Immediate Release Contact: Elyse Topalian Alexandra Kozlakowski Everyday Epiphanies: Photography and Daily Life Since 1969 Wall Text Intro Since their medium’s birth in 1839, photographers have explored subjects close to home—the quotidian, intimate, and overlooked aspects of everyday existence. This exhibition examines the photographs and videos made by a wide range of artists during the last four decades. As the counterculture swelled in the late 1960s, daily life as it had been lived in Western Europe and America since at least the cookie-cutter 1950s came into question. Everything from feminism to psychedelic drugs to space exploration suggested a nearly infinite array of alternative ways to perceive reality, and artists and thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s proposed a “revolution of everyday life” that would cast off the shackles of deadened perception. Conceptual artists such as John Baldessari and William Wegman used flatfooted photographic imagery, often in tandem with language, to whimsically question conventions of both art and life. In the 1980s artists took a renewed interest in conventions of narrative and genre—particularly of the cinematic variety—composing highly staged or produced images that hint at how even our deepest feelings are mediated by the images that surround us. In the wake of the economic crash of the late 1980s, photographers increasingly focused on what is swept under the carpet—the taboo and the repressed—often in slightly sinister works tinged with dread. At the same moment, Gabriel Orozco traveled the globe using the humblest of cast-off materials to make fragile, economical sculptures that required photography to communicate their existence. He recycled the everyday into poetic objects that oscillated in the mind between reality and the imagination. Each of the recently made works in this selection combines process and product in novel ways and comments obliquely on the shifting sands of how we come to know the world in our digital age. Everyday Epiphanies: Photography and Daily Life Since 1969 Dan Graham American, born 1942 View from Highway Restaurant Adjacent to Housing Development, Jersey City, N.J., 1969 Silver dye bleach print Purchase, Robert and Joyce Menschel Family Foundation Gift, 2004 (2004.79) Graham made this photograph of a roadside diner three years after his photo essay “Homes for America” appeared in Arts magazine (December 1966). In that piece, the artist related the serial, repetitive patterns and primary structures of Minimalism to the postwar tract housing of Levittown, New York, and Fairlawn and Jersey City, New Jersey. These were the architectural emblems of the suburban alienation and social anomie described in magazines such as Esquire and sung about acidly by groups like the Beatles and the Kinks. Dated 69 in reverse on the restaurant’s advertisement for chicken dinner, Graham’s photograph also drops an ironic dose of late 1960s mysticism on the Establishment in the yin yang symbol seen when inside looking out. Mary K. Nickerson American, active 1970s Television Pictures: Apollo 13 Splashdown, 1970 Chromogenic prints Funds from various donors, 2003 (2003.309.4–.6) John Baldessari American, born 1931 Hands Framing New York Harbor, 1971 Gelatin silver print Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1992 (1992.5111) William Wegman American, born 1943 Dull Knife/Sharp Knife, 1972 Gelatin silver print Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 2011 (2011.314) Many of Wegman’s early photographs examine specific qualities of the medium and its technology—such as the transparency and reversibility of the negative or masking out the background with a vignette—to make broader points about the vagaries of knowledge versus vision, the ideal versus the failed attempt, expectation versus reality. These concerns were often structured in the works via visual puns, homonyms, and word play. In Dull Knife/Sharp Knife, the “selective focus” of camera-eye vision spills over humorously into second and third meanings of the words (for example, the sharpening of a knife and the focusing of perception). Erica Baum American, born New York, 1961 Buzzard, 2009 Inkjet print Purchase, Marian and James H. Cohen Gift, in memory of their son, Michael Harrison Cohen, 2012 (2012.306) Baum uses books and language as objects to be manipulated and transformed through photography. In Buzzard two disparate sections of text are brought into a chance alignment that 2 Everyday Epiphanies: Photography and Daily Life Since 1969 can be read in multiple directions. They also fit into the modernist tradition of concrete poetry (examples include Stephane Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice and the “cut-up” technique of William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin), with the play of verbal and visual signs becoming the raw material of the work of art that is a carefully calibrated mix of chance and intention. The act of scavenging that the title suggests is also purposefully ambiguous, referring not only to the artist’s picking over a dying world but also to the rapacious way in which a rapidly advancing digital culture colonizes how we process information and perceive reality. Stephen Shore American, born 1947 Selections from American Surfaces, 1972–73 Chromogenic prints Gift of Weston J. Naef, 1974 (1974.602.1–.229) As a teenager in the 1960s, Shore was one of two in-house photographers at Andy Warhol’s Factory. During his first crosscountry photographic road trip, Shore adopted the catholic approach of his mentor, accepting into his art everything that came along— what he ate, the rest stops he visited, the people he met. He then processed his color film as “drugstore prints”—the imprecise, colloquial term for the kind of amateur non-specialized snapshots that filled family photo albums. The entire series of 229 prints was shown for the first time in 1974 and acquired by the Metropolitan from that exhibition. Sally Mann American, born 1951 Jessie at Five, 1987 Gelatin silver print Purchase, Ronald A. Kurtz Gift, 1989 (1989.1007) Mann’s frank images of her children, in which they often appear undressed and sometimes aping adults by posing with candy cigarettes or dressing up, courted minor controversy during the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Seen in retrospect, however, her works can be seen more as collaborations with her subjects to capture something of their untamed interior life and imagination—reminiscent of both Julia Margaret Cameron’s psychologizing portraiture and Lewis Carroll’s tableaux vivant of Victorian youth in costume. Although worry over the corrosive effects of culture on the sanctity of childhood innocence is at least as old as Romanticism, Mann’s photographs of her children are remarkable for the artist’s assured handling a potentially explosive subject with equanimity and grace. Sophie Calle French, born 1953 The Bathrobe, 1988–89 Gelatin silver print Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 1994 (1994.348a, b) Malerie Marder American, born 1971 Untitled, 1998 Chromogenic print Promised Gift of Norman Dubrow (L.2001.31.1) 3 Everyday Epiphanies: Photography and Daily Life Since 1969 Gregory Crewdson American, born 1962 Untitled, 1988 Chromogenic print Gift of the artist, 1991 (1991.1173) Crewdson made this image while in the MFA program at Yale University, when he went door-to- door in small towns in Massachusetts with just his camera and a few lights and asked the strangers who answered if he could take their pictures. The resulting photographs hover somewhere between the documentary and the cinematic—the area that the artist continues to explore nearly three decades later. Nikki S. Lee American, born Korea, 1970 The Yuppie Project (2), 1998 Chromogenic print Purchase, Gary and Sarah Wolkowitz Gift, 2000 (2000.588) This photograph is part of a series of projects in which Lee has immersed herself in American subcultures—punks, tourists, yuppies, lesbians, club kids, drag queens, senior citizens—observing and adopting the dress, behavior, and body language of each for weeks or months at a time. After transforming her own appearance, Lee approaches members of the group, explains her project, and has a friend or a passerby photograph her with a small automaticfocus camera. Part Zelig, part Cindy Sherman, Lee cleverly explores the mutability of social identity as well as the immigrant’s desire to blend into a new culture. Philip-Lorca diCorcia American, born 1953 Brian, 1987 Chromogenic print Purchase, Charina Foundation, Inc. Gift, 1990 (1990.1035) Svetlana Kopystiansky American, born 1950 Igor Kopystiansky American, born 1954 Incidents, 1996–97 Single-channel video; color; sound; 14 min., 49 sec. Anonymous Gift, 2010 (2010.458) In this video, the husband-and-wife team of Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky follow all manner of discarded items—cups, cartons, bags, newspapers, broken umbrellas, a pipe, unspooled audiotape— as they are blown around by the wind on the street. The results are balletic, whimsical, and even filled with pathos. Each piece of trash becomes anthropomorphized, so that when two bags or wrappers collide, are intertwined, and separate, the viewer cannot help but project a human drama onto the proceedings. Incidents is filled with such incidents, and part of the pleasure of the piece is seeing how the artists pile on example after example and yet are able to imbue each found object with an irreducible individuality and silent poetry. Brandon Lattu American, born 1970 Not Human, 2013 Single-channel video; color; silent; 51 min. 4 Everyday Epiphanies: Photography and Daily Life Since 1969 Purchase, Henry Nias Foundation Inc. Gift and Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2013 (2013.233) In this video, Lattu fed thousands of his photographs into facial recognition software and let it go to work.