From the Collection: New York, New York through March 23

Chronicling Faith: Maksim Dmitriev and the Renaissance of Orthodox

Monasticism in Late Imperial Russia through June 15

Wait Until Dark: Night Photography from the Collection of Jay Richard

DiBiasio through July 6

Williams College Museum of Art

by David Brickman

Though the majority of the work on view is historic (hence, not in

itself part of photography's current moment), the curatorial graduate

students who participated in the creation of each show are likely aware

that their choice of medium is particularly timely. In fact, the shows

are extremely diverse in concept and execution, which makes the trip to the

free-admission WCMA that much more worth it for providing the opportunity

to compare and contrast.

From the Collection: New York, New York, which has been up for

months and will remain through March 23, includes a handful of pieces that

are not photographs, but the core of the show is built around solid bodies

of work by three important figures in American photography: Aaron Siskind,

Louis Faurer and Garry Winogrand. In addition, there are six fairly

disjointed pieces by Walker Evans and one each by Berenice Abbott, Diane

Arbus, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Ormond Gigli, Alfred Stieglitz and Paul

Strand, as well as an oil painting, a watercolor, a drawing, a lithograph

and several etchings.

The premise of the show seems very forced: that, due to the 9/11

attacks, "the New York that artists will present in the 21st century will

change radically from [that] on view here," but that "on the other hand,

the character of the people and buildings ... remains as vital as ever."

It is totally unnecessary to try to justify or explain the value of

assembling these artworks, or to write text that appears to be trying to

rally audiences around future generations' pictures of New York. These

works of art speak eloquently for themselves - and so, surely, will those

yet to come.

Actually, the strength and sensitivity of Siskind's, Faurer's and

Winogrand's pictures is such that it becomes somewhat irrelevant that they

were even taken in New York - like most great art, they transcend the

subject matter to take on more universal themes. What makes the show work

as a whole is that these three photographers' works come from isolated

periods in history - Siskind the '30s, Faurer the post-war '40s and

Winogrand the '60s - and that we can reconstruct these times in our minds

by looking at the photographs.

All three are wonderful craftsmen with unique personal vision and a

knack for capturing poignant moments. Faurer, the least known, will be a

very pleasant discovery for some visitors. He was rescued a couple of

decades ago from almost complete obscurity by photography dealer Howard

Greenberg and is only recently getting the kind of attention he deserves.

The 16 pieces assembled here are as good a place as any to start

appreciating his work.

Winogrand's series of 10 photos includes a few of his most famous,

but also has a surprise or two. My favorite is a 1968 shot (titled simply

New York City) that homes in on a shabbily dressed but proud black man

receiving a handout from an anonymous outstretched white hand. The camera

is tilted just enough to throw the viewer off balance, and the edges and

background go dark, surrounding the pained pauper in a halo of sympathy.

Siskind, best known for groundbreaking abstract photographs created

in the '40s alongside the painters of the New York School, preceded that

work with documentary street photography, much of it depicting Harlem

during the Depression. Seventeen of those photos are presented here, and

they reveal the compelling sense for design that eventually would lead

Siskind to remove all recognizable subjects in favor of pure form.

Most noticeable is Siskind's tendency to shoot from either a very

low or very high angle; though his subjects remain undistorted by his

perspective, they are changed enough to render a freshness to the point of

view.

For the exhibition Wait Until Dark: Night Photography from the

Collection of Jay Richard DiBiasio , a small gallery's walls have been

painted a deep gray to set the proper tone for the 16 pictures selected.

With a title borrowed from the cult-favorite Audrey Hepburn film, the show

evokes mystery, but also emptiness and suburban bloodlessness through

masterful sequencing of the installation.

Though not exactly a who's who of recent photography, a number of

big names - such as David Levinthal, Richard Misrach, Michael Kenna and

Lewis Baltz - are included. The time frame is fairly tight (all but four of

the entries were made since 1989), and the exceptions to that rule are

presented in a somewhat isolated fashion to reflect this fact.

The result is that the viewer is given a coherent, nearly seamless

experience of the collection as a story with solid pacing to the narrative.

References to cinema are there in both black-and-white and color images.

People are almost entirely absent and, except in the one truly odd picture

out (a 1940s cowboy scene), are not the subject, at least not literally.

The success of the installation as a whole is such that I hesitate

to mention individual pictures, but if I had to I would single out two

color images of suburbia by William Greiner as the most potent (and a new

discovery for me). Other standouts are Henry Wessel's smoky-gray doorway,

titled Night Walk, Los Angeles #28, and a 1974 image of a phone booth by

George Tice, who distinguished himself in that decade with many fine

black-and-white night shots.

But the credit for this excellent exhibit should go to the

collector (a Williams alumnus) and the curator, history of art graduate

student Patricia Hickson, for assembling a fascinating slice of American

art that says something strong about American life.

In an even smaller space near the museum shop, one finds the dimly

lit and somewhat clumsily titled Chronicling Faith: Maksim Dmitriev and the

Renaissance of Orthodox Monasticism in Late Imperial Russia. This

photographic study of the resurgence of female monasticism in the late 19th

century is presented as an aid to understanding the content of a Williams

College course on Russian history; that is, the 33 modern prints from

original glass-plate negatives are not intended as art but, rather, as

educational artifact.

Material that accompanies the exhibit says that Dmitriev was a

pioneer in photojournalism and the use of photography as a medium for

social criticism, but it is not readily apparent from these mostly staged

shots why that is so. While it is true that there is a tremendous tradition

of such photography in that part of the world, and these pictures may fill

a gap in that history for scholars, I found them to be well made but rather

dull.

Even taken strictly from the standpoint of study, brighter lighting

and specific dates would have been a great help in allowing one to examine

and appreciate these carefully rendered time capsules.

Ruth Leonard: Paintings and Drawings Albany Center Galleries through August 29 by David Brickman The summer season of longer-term exhibitions is upon us, and Ruth Leonard's just-opened collection of paintings and drawings at Albany Center Galleries will do the space proud for its three-month run. Sadly, it will also mark the end of gallery director Pam Barrett-Fender's too short time at the helm of this struggling but crucial area venue. The Leonard show exemplifies what ACG's 25-year mission has mostly been and what Barrett-Fender succeeded in revivifying for the gallery over the last two years: a concentration on larger selections by working artists, usually in solo exhibitions, so as to provide an opportunity for the public to really delve into and understand the artist's process and purpose. Opportunities for such comprehensive displays at the professional level by regional artists are somewhat rare - I, for one, hope that Barrett-Fender's replacement will understand the importance of retaining that emphasis. As a case in point, Leonard's show accomplishes the tricky task of communicating her message to one who's never seen her work (i.e. me), which the usual four or five pieces in a group show couldn't have done. Leonard is a mature and complicated artist; she paints and draws with great facility, often mixing the two methods, and she approaches a variety of subjects with an equal variety of styles. But there is a cohesion to the work, a point of view that is uniquely Leonard's and is well expressed in the majority of the pieces on display. If there were a theme to the show, it would be gardens. In some cases, they are literally gardens full of domesticated plants, in others nature's own garden is the subject, and in still others the garden depicted is a product of a more personalized process of collection and cultivation. Altogether, what unifies the work in this show is Leonard's way of taking off from direct observation into the area of direct creation - plein air painting meets easel painting. Of the 16 works on view in the gallery (several others are visible in display cases elsewhere in the library that houses the gallery), 11 are oils; the rest are mixed media on paper. In size, they range from 12 inches by 16 inches to just under 4 feet by 5 feet; most are nearer the larger end of the scale, and all but two are horizontal. This matters, because there is a sweep to Leonard's compositional sense - she uses the length of the canvas to delineate separate pockets of space within the overall space presented, something like a stage with multiple scenes visible simultaneously. One such canvas is titled White Tulips. In it, the titular flowers are in the lead role, enveloped in an otherworldly yellow glow, and accompanied by a supporting cast of other garden specimens, each lovingly observed, each given its own little space. Within those separate spaces, the plants are drawn and painted in separate ways - some using outlining, others skumbled, one with thickly built-up paint, another brought out with an eye to the negative space around it. In spots around the painting there are shadowy mists obscuring the clarity of the subject, or nearly abstract paint marks rendering it nevertheless visible. In the midst of all that, the tulips gracefully tilt and nod in their regal self-absorption, analogous perhaps to the artist/stagemaster behind the creation. A number of other paintings in the show flirt with abstraction and/or impressionism, including a 2003 watercolor titled Melting Pond, which is appropriately watery-looking but has a great degree of attention paid to the surface - of the pond and of the painting. Also from 2003 are Nature Study, in which attention is again paid more to the way things feel than the way they look (and which has a glow of its own); Young Pine, where gesture and surface texture compete for supremacy; and the less successful Woods and Stream, in which Leonard may have taken on one more plane than she could handle. Among the earlier works in the show are pieces that remain more in the realm of description, such as 1999's Vegetable Garden, Rock and Foliage of 1996 and the 2000 painting Wild Columbine, where the aforementioned glow begins to make itself apparent. But it comes fully alive in a small piece titled Pussy Toes and in the larger Tulips painting, both of which are dated 2002. Figure in Garden is another 2002 painting that introduces a distinct difference - the figure. Though unclear whether she is a person or a statue, this character has a similar central role as the white tulips; it is as if the rest of the shapes in the composition - flowers, an empty walkway, a coiled hose - exist merely to welcome this mysterious figure or to herald her arrival. Yet another concept is represented by a group of still lifes, two of which have the same title and subject: Notions. Again dated 2002, this duo describes a collection of sewing notions - buttons, thread, thimbles and the like - along with flowers, a fragment of broken ceramic and a tiara, all arrayed on a large, flat plate. The plate is festooned with a rope design around its border and is presented tilted up in an unnatural perspective. One painting is a watercolor with a lot of charcoal drawing in it and is relatively realistic while still being sketchy and expressive, and the other is very polished and colorful, yet out of scale, with a distinct folk-art look to it. The first painting could be taken as a study for the other, but they are more like variations on a theme - peculiarly similar and dissimilar, but each fascinating in its own way. And that goes for the show as a whole - each piece holds its own but, like the characters in a well written play, they also relate to each other in interesting, revealing ways. Kudos to Leonard the creator - and to Barrett-Fender, the director. --------------------------------- Strangely Familiar: Approaches to Scale in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York New York State Museum through June 29 by David Brickman It's probably not a coincidence that nearly a third of the pieces in Strangely Familiar: Approaches to Scale in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York are untitled, considering that so much of the work in the show succeeds by purporting not to be art at all. The tenth installment of the Fleet Great Art Series at the New York State Museum, Strangely Familiar features about 30 pieces from the collection of the Modern that all date from the last four decades of the 20th century. The bulk of the work comes from the '80s and '90s, a period in which a movement often referred to as postmodernism held sway, resulting in hordes of people either being won over by or totally alienated from contemporary art. This show is as good a demonstration as any as to why that happened. Because, among the names - both revered and notorious - in this selection, there is much to delight in and much to just look at and scratch your head in wonder (and then read the curator's notes and perhaps scratch again). Part of the fun, though, is that you will probably make a completely different list of the delights and debacles than I did - and that's what good ol' postmodernism glories in. Take No. 1 bad boy Jeff Koons, for example. Much reviled in his heyday, and for pretty good reason, this icon of the Me Decade seems to have held up surprisingly well through the test of time. His rather tame Baccarat Crystal Set shown here is a stainless steel casting of decanters, ice bucket and drinking glasses, somewhat out of scale to each other, displayed together on a steel tray. Not too kitschy, not too shocking, just a solid re-presentation of the Dada idea for found objects as art, and a pretty elegant one. By subtly introducing the element of scale, Koons exemplifies a core issue that the show's curator, Lilian Tone, emphasizes in her essay and the cogent, nicely written text accompanying the artworks. In fact, Koons does two key things to the crystal set - by altering the material, he transforms it, and by altering the scale, he slightly disorients the viewer. His purpose, one might assume - and that of the exhibition as a whole - is to get us to see things in a new way, which is largely the purpose of high art in general. Time and again in this exhibition, the artists take everyday objects or archetypes and transform them. Many of them go to very extreme degrees of reproduction to accomplish this, which is ironic but nevertheless effective: If you create, say, a wooden facsimile of an art book so realistic as to be nearly impossible to distinguish from the real thing (which Steve Wolfe's 1999 Untitled (Cubism and Abstract Art) is), but let the viewer know it's a reproduction, you've undermined the viewer's basic position vis a vis reality. After experiencing that faux book, one just might become a bit skeptical in the face of other accepted facts for the rest of the day (or longer). Other examples of this technique of disorientation include Kiki Smith's 1999 Yolk, where three yellow-orange glass lozenges perfectly imitate egg yolks; Robert Gober's 1989 Cat Litter (a bag of same reproduced in plaster and paint) and 1992 Newspaper, in which Gober has created a bundle of what look just like newspapers ready for recycling, but which are in fact painstaking reproductions with changes in content and imagery; Robert Therrien's No Title 1993, in which part of an ordinary wooden table has been recast as a monumental architectural element; and Things from the Room in the Back, in which Swiss artists Peter Fischli and Robert Weiss have recreated in polyurethane and paint objects unworthy of such attention, like orange peels, peanut shells, discarded video and cassette tapes, junky wooden pedestals and paint buckets. In the same vein, but less effective, is another Gober piece from 1986 (this one untitled) which has recreated the artist's idea of the prototypical child's bed, such as the one that Goldilocks may have slept in. The gallery text makes much of the fact that the (male) artist sewed the sheets and pillowcase, thus appropriating traditional woman's work. To that, I say big whup! It ought to take a lot more than being a guy who sews buttonholes to get into the Modern, and this boring bed is exactly the sort of work that reinforces many viewers' beliefs that modern art isn't very creative or impressive. Which continues to be a big problem with art from Pop to Conceptualism, and particularly the "bad painting" of the '80s (represented here by forward-thinking Neil Jenney's 1970 piece Trash and Trashcan). Because, ultimately, art needs an audience - not just other artists and critics and so on, which is who most of this type of work tends to appeal to, but regular folks too. The irony is that artists like Andy Warhol (who has four silkscreened boxes from 1964 in the show) used everyday objects in their work in order to popularize art and demystify the process of making it, not create a subculture of people in on the joke. In a nutshell, people want art to be about life as they know it, not about what goes on inside certain overeducated people's heads and in the pages of esoteric publications. Go ahead, transform, confound, nullify, they might say - but do it in a way we can relate to. That's why certain other works in this exhibition succeed where Gober's bed doesn't. Laurie Simmons is one example. Her two black-and-white photographs from 1976-7 and 1989 are tours de force of efficiency and communication. The first, an 8-inch-by12-inch closeup of a doll in her dollhouse kitchen succeeds in making the mundane potently meaningful without trivializing it; the other, titled Walking House, is similarly created (here, a doll's legs support a miniature suburban-style plastic house) but presented on a tremendous scale. It has rightly become one of the best-known images of the post-feminist generation of artists. Simmons also contributes a set of 10 color photos made in collaboration with Allan McCollum in 1985. Titled Actual Photos, they are only about 6 inches by 9 inches but are extreme enlargements of their subjects, which are very tiny (about one-eighth-inch high) plastic figures made for train layouts, and which turn out in the enlargements to be horrifying grotesques. McCollum also provides a piece of his own that is outstanding. His 1982-4 40 Plaster Surrogates recalls Malevich with its careful geometric arrangement of enameled hydrostone "paintings," all of which are entirely black where the picture ought to be. Despite pulling the rug out from under our expectation of seeing an image inside each frame, McCollum's piece is a tremendously satisfying esthetic experience - you end up not caring that the imagery is missing, because the installation shows you something else worthwhile. Another very strong piece in the show is a trio of wooden crates from 1994 by Richard Artschwager. This untitled sculpture at first appears to be the package, not the art. But the ascension from simple rectangular box on the floor, to more complicated and mysteriously shaped box leaning against the wall, to improbably angled box attached to a wall some three feet above our heads, helps us make the conceptual journey of discovery that the artist made before us. And that, I believe, is what art is really all about.