"Catherine Opie: Portraits and Landscapes" at the Wexner Center for the Arts

I think that Thomas Edison has already been installed to replace William Allen as an icon of Ohio in the Capitol's Statuary Hall. Had I only known that ours is Catherine Opie's home state, I'd have done something to see her enshrined instead next to James Garfield as the a representative of Ohio's glory. Move over, second-tier presidents, when we have artists of true stature and vision.

Catherine Opie, Miranda, 2013. Pigment print, 33 x 25 in. ©Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist  and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

 Catherine Opie, Miranda, 2013. Pigment print, 33 x 25 in. ©Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist

 and Regen Projects, Los Angeles 

Certainly Opie's photographs in Portraits and Landscapes, showing at the Wexner Center in Columbus until August 2, would be at home in the proudest marble and columned traditional setting. If we were in the 17th century galleries of a great European museum, surely our feelings would be much like the ones we experience as we move at considered pace through this show.

Each of Opie's sitters appears before a background of profound, impenetrable black. Whether we register that as a blankness or as infinite depth, the effect is in either case the same. It places the subject in a timeless  three-dimensional space entirely his or her own, unrelated to any other place or moment.

The effect is to sculpt the figure out of this medium of black. The light not only defines the subject's features, emphasizing some over others, but frees the form from the darkness as sculptures are said to free figures from great pieces of stone. So, through two galleries of portraits, each figure is captured at a second birth, born not of flesh, but of mind, effort, and imagination These are individuals sprung like Athena from Zeus's head, fully grown and mature. ( An interesting comparison can be made at http://www.modigliani-drawings.com/nude%20in%20profile.htm .)

In her portrait, Miranda wears a gown of almost Quakerish simplicity and understatement. Its claret color and her red hair mediate between blackness and the luminous skin and blue eyes that shine from her steady, resolute expression. Beauty can be a poisoned gift. Here, beauty is neither disguised nor avoided; its possessor can carry the weight with chin slightly lifted, directly returning the viewer's gaze. The image portrays the strength, stature, and balance of a flawlessly beautiful woman with nothing—not even her perfect face—to hide.

Miranda, a three-quarter standing portrait of a woman of noble bearing, is clearly related to a long tradition of Western portraiture, evident in any museum one cares to visit. While this particular woman captivates us with her seriousness and beauty, we also know that, individual, her photographer places her among a class of persons demanding our highest respect. The setting, the attention to details, the lighting all tell us so. Do we really need to know who she is? Here is a distinguished individual who is also a participant in the centuries-old tradition of women posed for posterity. She is one; she is another one.

When we visit museum galleries hung with grand and stirring portraits of Renaissance, Enlightenment, or nineteenth century royalty, clergy, poets, and concubines, how often do we know who those portrayed persons were, or what they accomplished in the world? Certainly not as often as we'd like. King George? Henry? And what number? Not a clue! Yet we interpret the images through our understanding, general knowledge, and imaginations via the art itself, through conventions and deviations from them; from our own reactions to images of luxury, eccentricity, and beauty. We react to the story the artist has told and we create the central figure to satisfy our use of the painting. Ahistorical? Anachronistic? Yes. Utterly commonplace? Yes again.

In fact, we do the same thing with contemporary portraits simply because we don't know everyone who is thought to be important to image-makers. Nor are we supposed to. In this series of portraits, Opie identifies her subjects by first names only. How they were posed appears to have been largely up to the artist, who received lovely testimonials from many of her subjects for the generous or enlightening experiences they had with her. As recounted in gallery notes, the artist Kara Walker remarked that before many scheduled portrait sessions, she has been less than at her best: "There are a handful of images by well-known artists out there of me at my darkest, lowest points. Cathy's manner and the resultant images show me feeling cool, collected, showing my muscles…I felt a rush of ownership or at least fellowship—that we were going to endeavor to correct this past."

Catherine Opie, Mary, 2013. Pigment print, 50 x 38.4. ©Catherine Opie.  Image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

So, yes, Opie's subjects are eminent people, contemporary artists working in the avant garde of visual arts, literature, performance, and music. Even though many will be recognized by a relatively small audience, they are nonetheless constantly imaged. Miranda, above, is the filmmaker/performance artist/writer/actor Miranda July. If you haven't seen her before, just Google for her image: There are pages of them. It's a worthwhile exercise in understanding the difference between a picture and a portrait.

In the present day, pictures are everywhere by accident and by design. The tradition of grand portraits in which Opie places this series derives from times in which images of the great were rare and precious. A painted portrait of Voltaire would become the basis for engravings, which could be printed and disseminated at low cost. But the world was not saturated by an infinite flow of unique images of a single eminent person who was redecorated and whose personality was recast daily. There was a constancy about the central identities of intellectuals and artists.These portraits, in this form, reclaim that idea of constancy. 

To the extent that Opie's portraits help define and settle identities, she uses visual tradition as a structure upon which she arranges the ideas, works, and core identities of the individuals portrayed. The black background, the exquisitely controlled lighting, the dignity of the posing, the shapes of the portraits: These form the traditional framework that assure a place of honor. Within that framework, the individual is exactly as portrayed—nude or clothed; regal or workmanly; facing forward or back to us; looking into the distance, or daring us to return a gimlet gaze.

Catherine Opie, Idexa, 2012. Pigment print, 50 x 38.4. ©Catherine Opie.  Image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

While Miranda's classicism provides studied definition to a woman whose image is ubiquitous and casually broadcast, in Mary and Idexa,  Opie uses conventions to bring the temperature of uncommon images down. Tradition soothes expectations and we are eased into accepting the differences in purpose and outlook revealed in these portraits. Formality does not stifle outrage, but it is a leveler; it brings discussion back to a home base.The women depicted here are not women with traditional self-awareness or lives. But who they are and who they wish to reveal are who we will see in the same dignified ways we would see queens and saints and famous lovers portrayed. 

These two portraits will hang comfortably in haughty halls centuries hence, among the late Maries and Georges and Voltaires; the images will command respect beyond our period and, like all historical images, will require the acts of research and imagination that we are asked to give to the past from our own present. The question cries out: Can we understand the genius of difference in our own time with the acceptance we grant to heroes of the past? Can we imaginatively condense the years it takes gradually to achieve understanding through the mediation of formal visual traditions?

Catherine Opie, Untitled #5, 2012. Pigment print, 40 x 60 in. ©Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

 Catherine Opie, Untitled #5, 2012. Pigment print, 40 x 60 in. ©Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles 

The Portraits in Opie's show are so intense, so detailed and personal that the curator, Bill Horrigan, made the interesting decision to divide the portraits into groups of three or four separated with single, large scale landscapes the artist's. Some of these, like the one above, I am sorry to feel obliged to call a landscape, as I think it is so very open to—so inviting of—free interpretation. But their use is fascinating, contrasting as they do with the entirely unfocused with portraits in which every detail is in sharp focus. Neither is realistic, of course. But the effort the portraits compel from the viewer, with a degree of focus that only incites us to come ever closer—sends one into the landscapes as if suddenly lifted out of stress and sent into cool reverie. It is both relaxing and disorienting, for there is no middle between the two photographic approaches. I like this arrangement better in the first floor gallery, which is larger than the narrow upstairs room. With lots of room to stand back and to take in a whole long wall, the effect of the combination is lovely and its meaning is clear. The closer one is to the works, upstairs, the harder the effectiveness of the contrast is to grasp.

If there is any problem with this show, it's that any single work in it could stand alone as a show in itself. It's an embarrassment of riches to be sure. The portraits are of a size and degree of detail that each is a map of the world, a voyage out far beyond anything you can notice at the outset. Every well-crafted detail is surrounded by a field of more and more subtle and revealing manipulations of Opie's medium. They are captivating and fulfilling—and absurd to present in miniature, in a blog. Don't miss a chance to see them.

Catherine Opie, Hamza, 2013. Pigment print, 33 x 25 in.  ©Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects,  Los Angeles

Call It Something or Call It Nothing: Maika Carter's Progress

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.

View of gallery wall in Maika Carter's Call
It Something or Call It Nothing

In the small Project Room in the Gallery at Columbus College of Art and Design, recent graduate Maika Carter is having her first solo show, Call It Something or Call It Nothing, up through February 20. I haven't seen a lot of publicity for it, but I'm delighted to recognize this work of questioning beauty and maturity.

The show is arranged like eight
chapters of a photographic narrative. Its progression from subject to subject is clearly delineated; the content of each unit is presented in distinct, striking images, and the movement from section to section feels organic. Best of all, the last chapter constitutes a synthesis up of all that has come before. What has it added up to? Something essential and true packed into the the mundane and happenstance? Or an affirmation of meaning in life's trivial accumulation? 

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.

The first photographic grouping—of images large and small, matted and pinned in well-considered groupings to the wall—features shoes, mostly empty. The black and white photograph of ballet flats facing one another across a break in the asphalt has the punch of confident simplicity. We've begun a march or a tour, but there's a question of direction and purpose from the first step. How will we fill the shoes, what is the purpose, where will we go? Carter's photographs, black and white mixed with others of saturated, strong color, don't suggest to me ambiguity so much as they suggest the very human condition of eagerness and determination even in want of a map. The images are all bold. Does the confusion of direction among the shoes indicate folly or indecision? Or simply the fact that life offers little direction?

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.

We walk to chapter 2 only to find us in the place of the Missing, where things have vanished or are fading from our sight. This is a grouping of photos that arrest you not with a pounding message, but with an ache of sorrow that accumulates as you have to move up close to the many small images gathered around the larger ones. Many of the photographs on these walls are no larger than 3 inches square. When Carter blurs the content, it increases the intimacy between viewer and picture, leading to heightened emotional impact. The picture of the yellow warning tape leading across the unadorned pavement square causes by suggestion more sorrow than would a lurid, graph crime scene shot.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing. Group
photo including the artist.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It
Nothing.

But the next section of  colorful photographs moves us in the way we respond to the scrapbook of a big, happy family. Carter brings us to a large, rambling spread of smiling relatives and friends of several generations—people happy to be together, happy to do what they are doing, feeling special and loved. I feel certain that this passage of the exhibition will leave no viewer unmoved. Carter's casual arrangement works beautifully here, where we feel the high spirits and warmth including us too. I think that it's partially the scale of the pictures and the fact that we have to approach them closely—as if we were indeed perusing a scrapbook—that makes it feel so inclusive. I reacted to these not as to pictures of strangers, but as to people whose happiness I shared. I felt no barrier. The viewer is one of the company, and happy to be be there as a familiar of these people.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.
Collection of friendship photographs.

Are we reading an autobiography or are we a character in the artist's? Are we following a tale of Everyman? The question cannot help but come to mind at many points, but especially as the narrative descends from confident, social well-being to a chapter of literal effacement—a Slough of Despond if you will. 

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing

Carter gives us many alluring images of humans, but with their faces or head blurred out or cropped from the frame. The smiles, the friendly connections are gone in a new milieu of isolation and anonymity.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something
or Call It Nothing.

The narrative continues through several more chapters that alternate roughly between presence and absence, between happily socialized security and images of vacant, drifting society. 

A chapter focused on the photographer herself is particularly arresting. It would be poignant were the pictures not so bold and frank. As usual, many pictures—large and small—are assembled, but the viewer has to think twice to grasp that the subject is the artist, so they must have been staged. Every one of them has the air of complete spontaneity: funny faces, dramatic poses, but of artistic quality far beyond the photo booth. They are so natural, in fact, that they raise doubts about everything that has come before. Maybe the show really has been the work of an anonymous third party.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.

The cluster of self-portraits focus on large, matter of fact images in full color and in sepia, of the artist in the hospital, recovering from abdominal surgery. The brilliantly-well lit hospital room with the bloody tubing emanating from her belly is unnerving except that she faces the camera as if she were in conversation with you, the friend close enough to be visiting. Throughout the show, you have been reeled into her world and point of view and now, here you are, paying a post-op visit, the kind you wouldn't be able to stomach with any but your very best friend.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or
Call It Nothing.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or
Call It Nothing.

By the time I arrived at the last section of the show, everything that came before had prepared the way for a rich consideration of the title proposition, Call It Something or Call it Nothing. The photographs in this area switch back and forth until their messages of anxiety and hope at last intuitively merge. The artist wonders, given where she's been and what she's experienced so far, what life is? Something or nothing? Love or anomie? Do we invest in the future? Or do we lie down and see what hits?

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.

The landscape Carter has chosen for this final reverie is far from dreamy, bucolic, or reassuring. The images are urban, spray-painted, tattooed, and seem remote from the reassuring sense of middle-class order and safety many of us associate with a life and with a future meaning "something."

I'm not sure that Carter is acquainted with John Bunyon's The Pilgrim's Progress, but in this show I feel a connection with that tale of moral trial and resilience. The artist takes us through eight passages of pleasure, doubt, and grief. Without denying beauty, she doesn't stop to lament when it's absent. A calm, even-handed air of acceptance runs throughout the show, whether we witness happy camaraderie or pictures of lost of identity.

I think Maika Carter's first solo show is a knock-out. She shows her powers as a photographer, as a story-teller with an excellent editorial sense, and as an individual with the wisdom and intuition that make her skills important. I, for one, will be following with great interest an artist who shows such maturity straight out of the box.

Maika Carter, from Call It Something or Call It Nothing.

"The Art of Sports" and Andy Warhol's "Athletes:" A Very Interesting Pairing

Until September first, one can visit an entertaining and illuminating pair of shows that the Dayton Art Institute has mounted on the general topic of sports. Andy Warhol's Athletes, his 1978 suite of portraits celebrating sports heroes of the day, is installed in a gallery next to The Art of Sport: Highlights from the Dayton Art Institute Collection. The second show is encyclopedic and well-chosen, dealing with many aspects of sport in society, from games of skill for mental sport, to demonstrations of individual physical strength, and man's domination over nature.

James E. Butterworth, Yacht Race Between Two Small Cutters,
ca. 1850. Oil on academy board.

The Art of Sport includes works from many media, epochs, and cultures to create a lively and engaging show. I found everything in it interesting. Over and over again, I was reminded how many major genres of art exist around sports motifs—and that most of these depictions of sport, until well into the twentieth century, represent upperclass pastimes, like James E. Butterworth's elegant "Yacht Race." 

Caldonyian Boar Hunt: Fragment from a child's sarcophagus. Marble. Italy, 
2nd century AD,

While hunting can land anywhere along the social spectrum, in fine art, its structured or ritualistic pursuits are more likely to be pictured than stalking by men in camp gear with high-powered rifles. In this show we see a painting of the goddess Diana, "queen and huntress," relaxing with her entourage after the hunt, her catch—deer, rabbits—lying bloody at her feet. And though it is only fragmentary, this marble carving of a boar hunt from Roman times is filled with the excitement, the muscularity, and daring of the hunters, and the shocking size, defiance and ferocity of the boar on the right. The hunt is a gripping story, a drama in which man may or may not prevail over formidable Nature.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Oniwakamaru Fighting
the Giant Carp, color woodblock,
ca. 1825-1830.

In another fight against a beast, the eleventh-century Japanese scholar, Oniwakamaru, fights the giant carp that ate his mother when she fell into a pool. The thinking man becomes the fighter. It's a fascinating lens for Westerners to look at fishing, a sport we see as a combination of contemplation (the scholar) and hunting (the scholar wrestling with knife between teeth). The image is not only dynamic, rhythmic, and saturated in color, but it charged with ideas about the nature of sport versus survival, physical and mental effort.

The Art of Sport gives the viewer not only artistic representations of sports in action, but it includes works of art that enhance sports.

Kuba People (top), Kuba/Ngongo People (bottom), Democratic
Republic of Congo, 20th century. Raffia cloth, dye, with
embroidered designs.

The show exhibits two raffia dance skirts from the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Raffia is cloth made from a fibrous palm leaf.) I was happy to see that dance is included in this show's catholic definition of sport, as an enterprise of simple physical prowess. Both skirts are from the Kuba people. They are worn for traditional dances, the notes explain. Presumably, these are non-competitive and focused on the body in motion, performing either abstract or representational figures with costumes enhancing their beauty and meaning.

The work in The Art of Sport that focuses directly on athletes themselves is work that emphasizes their physical effort, their power, their exuberance, their transcendence. Even when athletes are captured at their most heroic, either sweat or exhilaration emanates from their portrayal. "Heroic," too, does not, in this exhibition, mean "famous," for the images of athletes that I found the most impressive were of anonymous individuals whose work defined them, not their well-known bodies or faces.

Ron R. Geibert, Pick-Up, Rodeo, Dayton, Ohio, 1983. Type C color
couple photograph.

The red-eyed horse running right at the camera in Ron R. Geibert's photograph communicates the hazard and fear of the rodeo, and does it from the perspective of the horse that's being pursued. The red eye marks its wildness, which splits our reaction between sympathy for the creature and respect for its power and its potential to do damage to humans. 

Jane Wenger, Weight Lifter, 1978.
Silver print.

The cowboy's job is to subdue the untamed horse, unsentimentally. By framing the image around the horse and giving us only a glancing view of the cowboy, Geibert emphasizes the magnitude of the man's task—the quickness of body and wit he must possess, the physical strength, and the courage it takes to be where he is, controlling his own galloping horse while balancing himself at top speed to capture the other. It's a great athlete portrait.

As is this actual, full-face portrait of a weight lifter, defined by brilliant cropping. Photographer Jane Wenger chose the athlete's face to tell the story of his effort without any reference to the apparatus of weights or the interior of a gym. The definition of the athlete is her/his work and how this work is made visible.

Which brings us to Andy Warhol's Athletes. At the Art Institute, this show actually precedes the general show. In either order, the two provide a tremendous contrast that any viewer will have to respond to as either funny, absurd, unforgivable—or simply as testimony to the nature of contemporary American culture (that is, funny, absurd, unforgivable?)

That DAI is able to show this full set of ten painting-silkscreens is quite wonderful. The series is among Warhol's least known work. He made ten sets of the ten portraits. This set, lent by Richard Weisman, the West Coast investment banker who commissioned the project from Warhol in 1977, seems to be one of the few that remains intact.

Andy Warhol, American (1928-1987), MUHAMMAD ALI, 1978.
Synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas, 40 x 40 inches
(101.6 x 101.6 cm.). Collection of Richard Weisman
© 2013 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
 / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Weisman is a major art collector and a lover of sport. This was the basis for his commission and for his selection of subjects, all of whom he visited with Warhol. These were: Muhammad Ali, O. J. Simpson, Chris Evert, Tom Seaver, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Pele, Rod Gilbert, Willie Shoemaker (jockey), Dorothy Hamill, and Jack Nicklaus.The artist took hundreds of Polaroid photos of each and had long conversations with them. He apparently left Jack Nicklaus deeply puzzled and Kareem Abdul Jabbar fascinated. Warhol had no prior idea of who his subjects were: he was entirely ignorant of and indifferent to sport.

The images of Warhol's Athletes that I include here are, alas, not the same as the ones in Weisman's collection, which hangs now in Dayton. Matters of reproduction rights allow the Art Institute to release only these versions, which are from other sets. While I regret being unable to comment on some extraordinary aspects of the Weisman collection—which I think is overall deeper and subtler than these pictures—still, certain things are clear. 

Warhol's portraits bear scant relation to the world of sport we strolled through, above. In all his work, the face of the athlete is front and center. In each, there is some trapping symbolic of her or his game, but sweat there is not. This portrait of Muhammad Ali is as close as he comes to any subject looking athletic: Was Ali capable of looking otherwise? The face, though, is beautifully realized while the hands—one bare, one gloved?—are more hastily rendered. A boxer's assets, his hands, are secondary here to the smooth face, the cocked brow and the direct gaze. It's a face that could be surrounded by anything glamorous, like an Armani suit for sale. It's a pose, and poses are what models and actors assume.

Andy Warhol, American (1928-1987), CHRIS EVERT, 1978. 

Synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas, 40 x 40 inches 

(101.6 x 101.6 cm.). Collection of Richard Weisman.

 © 2013 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

 / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Chris Evert, too, is pictured as a girl's girl, with emphasis placed on her Cupid lips, the hint of well-shaped brows, and lovely lashes that bring attention to her eyes. She looks like Chloe Sevigny, perfectly made up, in an advertising campaign. For what? Does it matter? Although Warhol has included Evert's tennis racket, what he's really included is its shape: the stringing is barely hinted at. Anyone with as little knowledge of sport and sport figures as the artist could interpret this as a beauty shot—a young woman in contemplation while she holds a hand mirror. The picture takes the viewer not into a world of a ferocious competitor (125-match winning streak on clay courts; a Grand Slam victory in each of thirteen years), but into the reverie of a fairy-tale princess. Glamour is the lens through which Warhol looked. Which is not to suggest, either that he saw what wasn't there.

The Evert portrait in Weisman's collection is, to my eye, more intriguing than the one pictured here, for its palette is entirely pinks and yellows. It is radiantly feminine. While it emphasizes the "girly" face of this sports heroine, it suggests the goddess too, luminous.

Andy Warhol, American (1928-1987), KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR, 1978.

 Synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas, 40 x 40 inches (101.6 x 101.6 cm.).

 Collection of Richard Weisman. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the 

Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The officially released image Kareem Abdul Jabbar that I reproduce here is the one in this set most like what hangs in Dayton's show. I find amusing and intriguing the huge blue blob where one assumes a basketball is held. What if the viewer has no more idea than Warhol what the subject's job is? How would that area read—flattened out by the paint strokes that lie on the surface?

Kareem's bright eyes pop forward from the graphite gray background and the dark circle of his hair and beard. The application of paint that flattens the mysterious purple circle can, seen another way, seem almost reflective. It could be a sorcerer's magical globe, some source of power--like a basketball to a pro athlete, perhaps? Indeed, I am enchanted by this work. Its mystery and zaniness both appeal to me. Whoever else Abdul Jabbar may be, I'm convinced by this portrait. Warhol got something big right.

Clearly, Warhol's portraits of athletes have precious little to do with their professions. They are portraits of celebrities whose faces outshine any props, who are figured for their appearances and whatever has transpired between them in discussion. Warhol believes in the superficial: Looks are in themselves sufficient accomplishment. He could have surrounded Willie Shoemaker's sly, inviting face with any costume other than a jockey's cap and colors and the man depicted would remain special.

None of this detracts at all from Athletes. His portraits are eye-openers. It is to these that many observers date the current epoch in which athletes have become celebrities and media figures, purveyors of luxury watches and personal products. We easily see all of this foreshadowed in these paintings. 

But there are no brands, red carpets, or potentially compromising actions in these. Maybe they discovered some truths revealed in their ten portraits—or even some wishes fulfilled. What happens to people in the process of sitting for a hundred photos and having ten portraits made by an eccentric artist? Everyone is looking for insight, for interpretation, for the accidental illumination that untangles an unspoken inner tangle or repairs a shredded ego. 

Celebrity advertising has come to stay and sports heroes move with Hollywood stars. While Warhol may have tripped big changes in the culture with this series, he also made us see what he saw. Was he looking at these people in terms of a cultural phenomenon, or as a man with his particular eyes and his own definitions and responses to beauty?

______________________________________________

Photographs of The Art of Sport by the author. Some works photographed are under glass.