"We're probably doomed as humans if we don't start thinking in a posthuman way," Mary Mattingly posited during a recent "Art:21" documentary. Her grim assessment, a by-product of years spent independently studying the exploitation of workers and natural resources that propels consumption in the world's affluent areas, is accompanied by ambitious experiments in imagining more sustainable means of subsistence. In the highly inventive tradition of Buckminster Fuller, Mattingly has fabricated futuristic "Wearable Homes"—protective suits equipped to guard against extreme temperatures, flooding, insects and bacteria—and mobile geodesic domes. Several such domes were mounted on the "Waterpod," a retrofitted barge that carried the artist and her crew around New York City's harbor for six months in 2009 as they tried to live self sufficiently on the vessel (growing food, recycling rainwater, etc.).
"House and Universe," Mattingly's third solo show with Robert Mann, reflected the artist's environmental concerns in two sculptures and 15 photographs, many of which document her public projects. The photo Flock (2012), for example, features one of her floating structures. Atop a platform, two geodesic domes covered with white tarps and surrounded by containers of plants are engulfed by an expanse of sky and sea. Continent (2012) shows a barge and rafts subsumed in a murky fog; a sharp edge between the rippling waters and the solid background, among other Photoshopped aspects of the image, reveals the barren surroundings as an aesthetic frame. The unmoored vessel thus emerges as both a symbol of vulnerability and a privileged vantage point in these and several other of the show's photographs, which evince a romantic tendency eclipsed by sheer purpose and will in the artist's mobile environments. Yet, if Mattingly's intentions are resolutely political, her photographs nonetheless evoke the spiritual. Take the serene vision of escape in For a Week Without Speaking (2012), a photograph depicting the artist rowing in quietly rippling waters, her bundled possessions atop wooden shafts, in the autumnal glow of a forested bank.
Mattingly's combination of ecological engagement and otherworldly beauty is reminiscent of much Land art, and she knowingly interpolates herself into this tradition with Filling Double Negative (in collaboration with Greg Lindquist), 2013. Michael Heizer's Double Negative (1969), a vast trench on Nevada's Mormon Mesa, is pictured from its depths with a boulder in the foreground wrapped in a blue-green tarp and twine. Heizer's piece functions as an important reference for the show, in its paradoxical use of emptying to achieve scale.
Mattingly advances reduction as a Sisyphean task. In the 52-by-36-by-36-inch sculpture Terrene (2012), a hanging twine-wrapped ball of domestic sundries—purses, bedside lamps, paperback novels and art magazines—the artist has compressed her belongings into a burden. Rather than push this hodgepodge boulder up a hill, she pulls it across a city sidewalk in Pull (2013) and places it on top of a reclined nude male, seen from behind, for Life of Objects (2013). In the urban outdoors, the mass of intimate possessions seems to expose the shame of private accumulation; indoors, on a naked, anonymous man, it becomes a more visceral strain on individualism.
Accompanying these works, Mattingly created a website, own-it.us, that catalogues each of her possessions, tracing their constituent elements to mining and extraction operations around the world. In this way, she elegantly extends her work from the domestic to the global, proving her show's title a political injunction to understand how each house contributes to the making of our universe.
—Kareem Estefan
December 2013
Read the article online here.
David Vestal 1924-2013
David Vestal passed away this week at home in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Born in Menlo Park, California in 1924, Vestal studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago before becoming involved in photography in the late 1940s through the Photo League in New York. Rather than working in photographic essays like many of his New York School contemporaries, Vestal captured singular moments of life in the city through his emotive and atmospheric images—a lone figure passing along a snowy sidewalk, a twilight drive over the George Washington Bridge, or the bustling traffic in Flatiron Square at night.
Vestal received two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships in photography in 1966 and 1973. He wrote extensively for various photography publications, and published two classic books on photographic craft and printing: The Craft of Photography, 1975, and The Art of Black-and-White Enlarging, 1984. A lifelong educator, his illustrious teaching career included positions at Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and Pratt Institute, as well as numerous lectures and workshops around the country. His work is included in such notable public collections as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Portrait of David Vestal taken by Len Kowitz, 2004.
Mary Mattingly: House and Universe reviewed in ArtNews
Mary Mattingly's personal belongings, lashed together with rope, imagine the fate of society in the wake of environmental destruction. This show, "House and Universe," included two such aggregations: Gyre (2013), a hemisphere of the artist's cast-offs bound to a wagon wheel, and Terrene (2012), which hung from the ceiling like a wrecking ball. The strength of these masses intensified the mood of the 15 photographs situating Mattingly's sculptures in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. In Microsphere (2012), three women nestle inside a geodesic cocoon watching children swim in murky water near houseboats. Packing materials labeled "COSCO" (China's international shipping company" dominate the skyline.
In Life of Objects (2013), a ball of detritus rests on top of a naked, fair-skinned boy who bears the weight of human possessions. Other works seemed straightforwardly documentary. Flock (2012) captures one of several floating domiciles designed and inhabited by the artist from 2011 to 2012. Mattingly takes photographs all over the world, but refuses to divulge their locations, adding to our overall sense of disorientation. Alongside Andrea Zittel, Mel Chin, and other utilitarian art activists, she participates in an expanding forum that proposes alternative solutions for living in a society transformed by floods, was, and economic collapse. A Ruin in Reverse (2013), a sarcophagus-shaped bundle tossed into a freshly dug grave, recalls Ana Mendieta's Silvetas.
The poignancy of Mattingly's environments is their vulnerability. They are imperfect solutions that question humanity's chances for survival in a post-consumer age. Gathering together her own belongings, she asks, "Why did I own them? How did they get into my life? And what's my responsibility?" The success of Mattingly's work rests, perhaps, on whether it actually moves us to action.
—Johanna Ruth Epstein
Julie Blackmon interviewed by Tcqvar Webcast at Paris Photo
Click the image to view the section about Julie Blackmon. To see the full original webcast please click here.
Fred Stein at The Jewish Museum in Berlin
In an Instant: Photographs by Fred Stein
Libeskind Building, Eric F. Ross Gallery
Jewish Museum, Berlin
November 22, 2013 - March 23, 2014
An instant can make the difference—whether in life or in photography. For the photographer Fred Stein, it was those brief moments that determined his life, both personally and professionally. Fred Stein was born in Dresden in 1909, the son of a rabbi. When the Nazis came to power, the committed socialist was forced to give up his job as a lawyer and leave Germany. Under the pretext of taking a honeymoon trip, he escaped to Paris with his wife Lilo in 1933. There he faced the challenge of building a new livelihood from scratch. Inspired by a Leica 35mm camera—Fred and Lilo Stein's wedding gift to each other—Fred Stein chose photography as his new profession. The exhibition is Germany's first comprehensive retrospective of Fred Stein's work. With more than 130 black-and-white photos, it presents street views of Paris and New York along with portraits. Personal documents, original prints, and contact sheets offer further glimpses of the photographer's life and work.
Read the full press release here.
Robert Mann Gallery in L’Oeil de la Photographie
Robert Mann Gallery is featured in French magazine L'Oeil de la Photographie as one of the exhibitors not to miss at Paris Photo 2013. This year's program highlights rare vintage prints by Joe Deal and Aaron Siskind, among others, as well as new work by standout contemporary photographers like Julie Blackmon.
Read the complete article in French and English here.
Mary Mattingly: House and Universe reviewed in Artforum
Flock, 2012, the first of fifteen photographs in Mary Mattingly's exhibition "House and Universe," shows two geodesic domes set atop a raft adrift in the ocean. Like Mattingly's Waterpod Project, 2009, and her current Triple Island, 2013, these domes, part of Flock House Project, 2012, have functioned as temporary, self-sufficient shelters in New York's parks and plazas. Variously outfitted with hydroponic gardens, water-filtration systems, and buoys, they are public-art prototypes for the small-scale floating communities that Mattingly predicts will become our collective dystopian norm should global warming and corporate privatization continue unabated. Thus, the photograph doesn't chronicle the Flock House domes' past installations, but instead stitches them into a projected, distinctly Ballardian future.
As art historian (and Artforum contributor) Eva Díaz has noted, Mattingly is one of several artists who have recently resuscitated the geodesic domes patented and popularized by Buckminster Fuller. This new turn in "dome culture," however, jettisons Fuller's oracular ebullience. The aims of Mattingly's shelters instead come closer to those of Krzysztof Wodiczko's Homeless Vehicle, 1988. Wodiczko's souped-up shopping cart was purportedly purely practical, equipped to satisfy the stated needs of New York's homeless population—a bin for collected aluminum cans, an enclosure for secure sleeping, etc.—through the resemblance it bore to a missile on wheels was hardly accidental. Like Homeless Vehicle, Mattingly's prototypes are seductive warnings: charming as single unites, but foreboding when their proliferation is earnestly contemplated. Whereas Fuller's domes radiated technocratic confidence, Mattingly's betray skepticism toward design solutions that accommodate a deleterious status quo without addressing root causes.
In "House and Universe," Mattingly acted convinced that her imagined future and the present day were converging. Can you blame her? In the context of New York alone, consider the ongoing recovery from Hurricane Sandy, the encampment-as-protest of Occupy Wall Street; or even the trendy ubiquity of sustainable living measures, such as home gardens, solar panels, and dry compost. As if to prepare for imminent catastrophe, Mattingly has been divesting herself of personal possessions by bundling her books, clothes, keepsakes, and electronics into boulder-like clumps bound together by twine. Two such overstuffed amalgams, Terrene, 2012, and Gyre, 2013, were presented here as discrete sculptures; in photographs, others appeared in less pristine settings, such as an unidentified shantytown, suggesting a connection between Mattingly's haphazard constructions and the improvised architectures at the outskirts of cities worldwide.
Before parting with her personal items, Mattingly systematically documented them in photographs and 3-D scans, though this component of her project was nowhere in evidence. Overall, "House and Universe" raised anew the question of how the gallery context condenses and filters practices as holistic as Mattingly's (or, say, Andrea Zittel's). Almost to a fault, the photographs bristle with art-historical references: Their square format and centered compositions loosely follow the conventions of Bernd and Hilla Becher's deadpan typologies; titles allude to Robert Smithson and Titian; one photograph was taken in Nevada from the bottom of Michael Heizer's Double Negative, 1969, and another, of an overburdened rowboat disappearing into mist, borrows wholesale from Caspar David Friedrich, The elegant, elegiac tone of Mattingly's "art" photography seems at odds with the scrappy, madcap mood of her urban interventions. Then again, there is a grim site specificity to Mattingly's exhibiting work in Chelsea, a district badly damaged by Sandy. Furthermore, Gyre points out how even art's discursive apparatus contributes to a culture of overproduction and waste. Tucked behind its twine netting are several bulky periodicals bearing on their back covers the Swiss pastorals and red lettering of Bruno Bischofberger advertisements—unmistakably, old issues of Artforum.
Jennifer Williams: The High Line Effect in Artinfo
The term "High Line Effect" typically refers to the international phenomenon in which global cities, having seen the park's transformation of a previously derelict stretch of train tracks into a thriving public space, seek to recreate its powers of resurrection by building one of their own. The High Line's other effect, when viewed more closely, is its magnetic draw to tourists and developers. Jennifer Williams "The High Line Effect," an installation of photo collages opening at Robert Mann Gallery Thursday, focuses on the latter.
Williams's non-linear (pun intended) approach to collage is uncannily appropriate for the subject matter. Photographs of cranes, construction sites, architecture, and the Standard Hotel are going to radiate from images of the lush tourist-trodden path and spill out of the constraints of the walls and onto the gallery's floors and ceilings. The immersive presentation has the potential to convey what the park's fans may fail to grasp in real life: The High Line is a living thing, a catalyst for what the gallery refers to as "multifaceted and mutating urban change." And it just keeps growing.
See the full article here.
Artslant reviews Mary Mattingly: House and Universe
For her show of new photography and sculpture at Robert Mann gallery in Chelsea, Mary Mattingly first created a number of "man made boulders," which were made by amassing her possessions and binding them together with light brown twine. Measuring about five feet in diameter, these boulders consist of clothes, journals, keys, bottles, wires, and other miscellaneous items that Mattingly found kicking around her home. Two of these boulders are on display at the exhibition, as well as fifteen digital photographs in which she explores the push and pull between the destructive excesses of consumer culture and the utopian potential of DIY asceticism. Weaving together themes of sustainability and balance, buoyancy and weight, Mattingly's work provokes a reassessment of our relationship with inanimate objects in a rapidly changing world where survival and destruction, waste and renewal, are the twin poles of orientation.
For instance, in Pull (2013), the artist drags a comically massive boulder down a city sidewalk. It looks like strenuous work, instantly evoking an experience familiar to anyone who has ever schlepped their every belonging from one apartment building to another. The same boulder (or one which looks just like it) also appears in The Life of Objects (2013), where it balances precariously on top of a male nude figure who lies dwarfed beneath it, curled up in the fetal position with his back to the camera. These works prompt us to reconsider the age-old truism that we don't own our possessions so much as they own us. Sometimes the cumulative weight of things threatens to drag us under, as in A Ruin In Reverse (2013), in which a coffin-shaped boulder lies in a freshly dug grave—inviting comparison to Christo's Red Package (1968)—or as in Floating A Boulder (2012), in which a row boat carries a dangerously tall tower of garbage bags while drifting towards an indistinct grey horizon. Floating A Boulder is one of the many photographs in the show with an aquatic theme; another is Microsphere (2012) in which a floating globe populated by three passengers is buoyed by a collection of plastic bottles. Flock (2012) depicts one of Mattingly's "flock houses"; these are self sufficient floating homes that resemble Andrea Zittel's "living units" crossed with Kevin Costner's Waterworld.
Mary Mattingly's forays into water-borne sustainable living serve as a light-hearted counterpoint to the oppressive weight of her man made boulders, although there is a levity to the boulders as well: it must have been cathartic for her to clean out her home and repurpose her clutter as art. Mattingly's work suggests that the accretion of consumer products and man-made waste clogging up the arteries of our planet and our lives can be put to new uses, and that there is hope for us yet.
Read the complete article by David E. Willis here.
The New Yorker reviews Mary Mattingly: House and Universe
In a show of color photographs that touch on consumerism, waste, and the environment, people turn up only here and there, and they're always overwhelmed or absorbed by their bundled-up belongings. Mattingly is seen pulling a huge ball of her own lashed-together stuff (clothes, books, headphones, shampoo) down the sidewalk; two similarly dense accumulations of household goods, held together by twine, occupy the gallery floor. In photographs, other bundles have turned into ad-hoc shelters, gigantic backpacks, or boulder-like masses that look like Christo's rope-bound sculptures. In Mattingly's world, we're all refugees dragging our overstuffed lives around. Through Oct. 19.
Read the article online here.