NELSON HANCOCK GALLERY

All you photographers out there should know about the Magnum Photos Portfolio Review. It looks like a great opportunity. The reviewers are all Magnum photographers. It's part of the Magnum Festival Celebrating the Art of Documentary.

If you don't want to spend 150 euros to buy the complete box set from Herzog's website, you can see them one at a time in the coming weeks at the Film Forum

In recent reviews (like this good one by Eric Kohn), and interviews (like the Henry Rollins interview on youtube), Herzog discusses his enduring interest in devising innovative approaches to non-ficition filmmaking. To Eric Kohn he says:

Documentaries today are dated. I compare it to a medieval knight who would go to battle for centuries, and all of a sudden gets confronted with cannons and firearms. We have to ask questions about reality in a different way.

to Henry Rollins:

Everything is pointing towards a redefinition of reality. We have to start seeing and blocking and explaining and articulating reality in movies in a different way. Cinema verite was the answer of the 1960s. Today there is something else out there. I have always said ‘sure, reality has to be seen in a different way’ but that is not the interesting part. The interesting question is: Where is truth in all of this? Cinema verite is the accountant’s truth [but] I have always been after what I call an ecstatic truth, an ecstasy of truth … Facts do not create truth. Facts create norms but they do not create illumination.

I recently discovered a great gem in the online archive of the Tate. This link will take you to a program of lectures delivered in 2003 on the subject of Art and Anthropology. You'll need Real Player to watch the streaming videos. They pulled together an excellent array of scholars and artists to speak on the subject. Here's the Tate's blurb on the event:

Recent shifts in art and anthropology suggest an apparent overlap between the concerns and practices of those working in each field. The increasing use of ‘fieldwork’ by many artists and the ‘ethnographic turn’ described by art theorists, invite comparisons with anthropology. In anthropology, critiques of ethnography and fieldwork have raised fundamental questions about the nature of representation – questions which have implications for art. Can developments in each field illuminate the principles and practices of the other? What similarities and differences exist in how artists and anthropologists engage with and represent events, experiences, and others?

We're putting the finishing touches on Keith Johnson's new exhibition, gearing up for tomorrow night's opening.

Also in the neighborhood - tonight - is a reception at Prague Kolektiv to launch a new line of Czech Deco reproductions. I had a peek yesterday and they're great.

This weekend Dumbo will host the Brooklyn Designs Fair, showcasing furniture and industrial design by Brooklyn's finest. Check the website for info on seminars and other activities. The hightlight, in the midst of the fine furnishings, may be the couture skateboards made by FunkInFunktion.

I’m still sifting through the materials I gathered recently at PhotoLucida in Portland, OR. The centerpiece of the event is an elaborately scheduled series of 20-minute meetings between reviewers (gallerists, editors, curators) and photographers. The upside of these events (Santa Fe Review is another, Houston FotoFest is the biggest) is that everyone gets to meet each other on a fairly level playing field. Minus the full-page ads and pr agents, people just put their work down on the table and we talk for 20 minutes. As networking events, they are hard to beat and when they’re run as well as PhotoLucida, they’re easy to navigate. Before I say anything more, I should say that I met a few great photographers there who I’ll probably be showing in the next year.

The downside? There’s something missing from these events, and it’s got to do with approaching the work as art. I know I know, (in fact, everyone knows now) that we live in a crass, commercialized society. However, it would seem that in an arena such as this, there could be a bit more attention paid to meaning instead of just marketability.

Also, I was struck by how difficult it was at times to respond the artists and their work. I later returned to the mother of all portfolio reviews, Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” and, reading it as a reviewer, was relieved by a few things. First, he initially disavowed any authority or special knowledge (I did this often). Then he points out the futility of hoping for a “review” to provide special insight (I often had trouble mustering the courage for this):

“In making contact with a work of art nothing serves so ill as words of criticism … Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people would mostly have us believe”

Having established that works of art aren’t so easily translated into words, and pointing out that they tend to “consummate themselves in a sphere where word has never trod,” he doesn’t hesitate to ask: … "May I just go on to tell you that your verses have no individual quality? … the poems are nothing in themselves, nothing independent, not even the last one…”

And what follows here is the sort of paragraph that makes you think that if Rilke were ever to show up at a contemporary art fair or portfolio review, he would probably faint:

“You ask if your verses are good. You ask me. You have previously asked others. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems … I beg you to give all that up … Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write … confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you…”

ok, that’s about enough (you may be thinking). Fair enough. I just though it presented an interesting point of comparison.

Adding a blog to my gallery’s refurbished website seemed like an odd choice. I opened my gallery two years ago, with little first-hand experience, and instantly began to pay very close attention to how it’s done by the seasoned pros. One thing you notice quickly is that galleries don’t tend to blog, or to talk at all. In fact, with the exception of the rather dry and pat press release, galleries have no public voice. Museums talk a lot but galleries keep their mouths shut in public.

One simple explanation is that galleries say everything they need to say through their exhibition choices (or their p.r. people). Even the advertisements that run in the art mags are free of ad copy. It is a strange form of mute promotion. It’s buzz without … something. Content? Argument? Specificity? Conviction?

Part of it, of course, is that too much talk calls attention to the art scene’s most embarrassing feature – the money. Too much talk from a gallery seems like too much effort, a desperate sales pitch, the kiss of death. In the strangest of markets, the art market, you’re always safe making disparaging remarks about the fact that it’s a market. Alec Soth recently offered a diplomatic summation of the recent Art Chicago fair:

As usual, the toxic mix of money and decontextualized art was nearly devastating. For the record, I think these fairs have a lot of good work and I’m grateful for the business that gets done. I’m just not sure it is healthy for artists to spend much time watching this business get done.

Jerry Saltz, in a different mode, mocked the “hippy dippy” statements made by P.S. 1 director Alanna Heiss about her recent group show “Not For Sale.” Claiming an “allergy” to the marketplace , Heiss organized a very large show consisting of works that are not on the market [right now]. Saltz rather hilariously goes to town on this naïve premise, suggesting the show should have been called “Journey to the Center of My Rolodex,” and musing that many of the works are not for sale simply because no one wanted to buy them. Read the whole article

I promise to keep this blog in the space between “toxic” and “hippy dippy.” That's where I keep the gallery. Gerhard Richter, who should know, mused in his diary that the art scene has "virtually nothing whatever to do with art" and likens it to stamp-collecting and cat-breeding (because it "satisfies our need for communication").

Nonetheless, here, I promise, you will find something to do with art.

We've just launched an updated version of our gallery website. While the layout is similar to that of our old site, the new site has been completely re-written for reliability and ease of use. We'll also be filling in many of our early shows which were missing from our previous site. Have a look around and let us know what you think.