Go-Go Guggenheim!

Sorry for the long hiatus. It's not right for a new blogger to take a week off, but life is busy for me and time tends to run away. I work an 8 hour day, study painting every day for 5 hours (give or take) at the Art Students League and then, I'm young. I want to go out and have a good time. As my father constantly points out to me, I'm burning my candle at both ends. Eh, burn away.

This week has been especially busy. I've been at a three day conference called, "Contemporary Photography: Digital Prints." We learned, discussed and had free coffee, bagels and muffins. It was nice to get away from my desk and learn a thing or twelve about printing processes both digital and analog. The conference culminated last night with a reception, gallery visit and panel discussion at the Guggenheim (fancy, I know).

The evening started with some delightful finger sandwiches, nuts, olives (no place to put my pits, thank you very little!!) and a some wine. We weren't allowed to view the show of Spanish paintings thats on view right now, but we were allowed to see two other exhbitions that were much more pertinent to our conference: The Hugo Boss Prize and Family Pictures.

I'm not going to talk about the Hugo Boss Prize. It was four pieces total and I was really only interested in one.

Family Pictures, on the other hand, was amazing. For people who like contemporary photography you are probably familiar with the names in the show. For people who don't like contemporary photography or just aren't familiar, go. If you've uttered the phrase, "Who cares?" or "I can take a picture!" GO!! And also- you may be able to push the shutter button on your Kodak EasyShare900T, but you can NOT make pictures like these.

One of my favorite pieces was Catherine Opie's self-portrait. In it she's nursing a child. She sits against a deep red, fabric background. Across her breasts are scars that read, "pervert." It has an overt look of a Madonna and Child mixed with a reformed criminal. It was also pointed out to me that the child looked a little old for breast feeding. It wasn't something that I thought of right away, I'm just putting it out there. There's another Catherine Opie in the Guggenheim's collection, another Self-Portrait, which is very different. I thought it made for interesting comparison.

Another work that really struck me was Gillian Wearing's "Self-Portrait at Three Years Old." At first it looks like a picture of a sad, doll faced little girl. She stares at you with an oddly penetrating, almost glaring stare. On closer inspection her eyes aren't a little girl's. It's a mask. It starts to feel like a huge copy of Linda Blair's first grade, class picture. All this in an electric orange frame. Love it.

The rest of the show is pretty great. With artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Loretta Lux, Rineke Dijkstra and Thomas Struth to name a few, it's hard to go wrong.

After all that we had a panel discussion with the curator of Family Pictures, Jennifer Blessing and two artists; Vic Muniz and Collier Shore. ; I'm now a Vic Muniz fan. Seriously. He drew pictures with sugar and chocolate and string and wire, but not all at once. Great.

In conclusion, go see Family Pictures at the Guggenheim. Something I thought about during a conference on archival properties of prints is, although we put so much stock in our technological advancements and although these photos have the feel of a permanent record, they're far from it. They are far more fragile and ephemeral than, say, those dusty old paintings. A photo may be able to capture a specific moment, but they may not be able stay around a heck of lot longer than that. Also, don't ask me about printers, I know too much now and come back tomorrow. I've neglected to post a bunch of pictures from Fountain.