Current Exhibition

On view in the SMFA Library until Monday, March 8:





















EUROPE IN PRINT 1968-1989 / Selections From an Alumni Collection
By Christopher Mark Robinson

Regardless of what ideological thrust one gives them, the years 1968 and 1989 are doubtless among the most politically momentous in Europe’s last half-century, bookends for two decades of polarizations, shifting alliances, as well as unprecedented experimentation at the intersections of politics and aesthetic production. This exhibition attempts to trace just some of those experiments through a selection of artists’ books, exhibition catalogues, art journals and vinyl LPs from this period.

Common to many works included is a criticism of the perceived formalism of prior avant-garde strategies. These critiques were themselves, however, polarized between an aesthetic of existentialist commitment and one of aesthetic autonomy. The first— represented here by musicians like Luigi Nono and Hans Werner Henze—not only elected for their works explicitly political subject matter, but also intended these works themselves as calls to action. The second, represented by artists such as Daniel Buren and the group Supports/Surfaces (many of whom were, nonetheless, committed Maoists) focused instead on the role played by art objects themselves within bourgeois cultural institutions; Rather than orienting viewers towards militant causes, these artists sought to produce objects capable of intervening in the alienating circumstances of production and display required by the normative aesthetic forms and genres.

Ironically, the same “formalist” avant-garde strategies that these Western European artists subjected to political critique, were, in the East, becoming themselves emblems of political resistance. Within the cultural regimes of Soviet states, the work of artists like Poland’s Tadeuz Kantor and Zygmunt Krauze offered a vision of an independent, cosmopolitan cultural sphere—one only unhappily tolerated by those in power. As well we might mention the unlikely combination of modernism of religious orthodoxy attested to by the scores of Estonian Arvo Part and other practitioners of so called “holy minimalism”—a phenomenon owing much to the role of religious authorities in organizing democratic reform movements.

Still other works exhibit a certain retreat from collective politics towards individualistic or countercultural social practices unconcerned with struggles over state power. Such were the personal revolts of artists such as Arnulf Rainer, Reindeer Werk, the “Korperklanger” of musician Mia Zabelka, as well as the nomadic performances of Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret.

What sense or relevance this period’s experiments may have for us is impossible to judge objectively; as their inheritors, survivors, or children our world is still too much shaped by them, even as we have passed beyond their horizon. But that they persist is as certain as it is visible, inscribed ineluctably on the surface of their productive forms.

New Book Highlights: Monographs

Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection
Kristen Hileman
D. Giles Limited, 2009

Anne Truitt (1921-2004) is a heroine of American Minimalism, an increasingly admired artist whose journals ("Daybook," "Prospect," "Turn") have a longstanding and devoted readership, but whose art has not previously been the subject of a substantial monograph. "Perception and Reflection" remedies this historical oversight superbly and decisively. The evolution of Truitt's sensibility is at once a classic Minimalist story and the tale of a truly independent spirit: following an encounter with the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt at the Guggenheim in 1961, she abandoned her earlier sculptural style and began to make stark, columnar works inscribed with bands of sometimes bright and sometimes quiet color. Truitt's account of this transition betrays her rare clarity and sensitivity: "I thought to myself, 'If I make a sculpture, it will just stand up straight and the seasons will go around it and the light will go around it and it will record time.'"


Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens

Carlos Basualdo
Yale University Press, 2009

One of the most complex and fascinating artists working today, Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) has assembled a mesmerizing body of work that encompasses video, installation, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and neon. In 2008, Nauman was unanimously selected to represent the United States at the 53rd Venice Biennale, in an exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The accompanying catalogue explores the interconnections among several specific themes that have recurred prominently throughout four decades of Nauman’s work. Linking the urban texture of Venice to the topological dimensions of his provocative art, the overarching project allows for an unprecedented occasion for the appreciation and exploration of Nauman’s undeniable creativity and influence. Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens includes texts by Erica Battle and Carlos Basualdo on the organization of the exhibition and the publication, featuring detailed discussions of the works in the show. Michael R. Taylor examines Nauman’s practice in an art-historical context, and Marco de Michelis explores the notion of space as deployed throughout Nauman’s oeuvre, with particular reference to the works on view.

Gabriel Orozco
Gabriel Orozco
Museum of Modern Art, 2009











Gabriel Orozco emerged at the beginning of the 1990s as one of the most intriguing and original artists of his generation, one of the last to come of age during the twentieth century. His work is unique in its formal power and intellectual rigor, resisting confinement to one medium and roaming freely and fluently among drawing, photography, sculpture, installation and painting. Orozco deliberately blurs the boundary between the art object and the everyday environment, situating his work in a place that merges art and reality, whether through exquisite drawings made on airplane boarding passes or sculptures composed of recovered trash. This publication examines two decades of the artist's production year by year, from 1989 through 2009. Each section is richly illustrated and includes a short text, based on interviews with the artist, that combines biographical information with a brief and focused discussion of selected works. Critical essays by Ann Temkin, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Briony Fer supplement these foundational and chronological explorations, providing new insights and strategies for grounding Orozco's work in the larger landscape of contemporary art production. Gabriel Orozco(born in Mexico, 1962) studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas in Mexico City, and at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain. He has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Venice Biennale. Orozco lives and works in New York, Paris and Mexico City.


Liza Lou
Liza Lou
L & M Arts, 2009











Famed for the labor intensiveness of her works, Liza Lou here attains new levels of technical mastery and thematic complexity with a series developed over the past three years. The formal beauty of Lou's beaded pieces is often underscored by themes of injustice or violence. This book includes texts by Linda Nochlin and Robert Pincus-Witten.

When Women Rule the World: Judy Chicago in Thread
Judy Chicago
Textile Museum of Canada, 2009

This survey of some of Chicago's most important contributions in cloth highlights both key and lesser-known works dating from 1971 to the present. From macrame to needle point to airbrushed quilts, Chicago employs technique as content in her major projects featured here including The Birth Project (1980-1985), The Holocaust Project (1993), Resolutions: A Stitch in Time (1994 to present) and Chicago's most recent work If Women Ruled the World (2008). Essayists discuss the labour-intensive nature of Chicago's textile work as a metaphor for investing in the ideas, values, histories and provocations in her artwork.Five artists who take this not ion to heart are also profiled, underscoring Chicago's ongoing influence and creating an intergenerational dialogue with : Orly Cogan, (New York, New York), Wednesday Lupypciw (Calgary, Alberta), Cat Mazza (Troy, New York), Gillian Strong (Halifax, Nova Scotia), and Ginger Brooks Takahashi (New York, New York). Co-published with the Art Gallery of Calgary.

Process Recess 3: The Hallowed Seam
James Jean
AdHouse Books, 2009














"The Hallowed Seam" collects the sketches of renowned artist James Jean, who has documented his life in drawings and paintings. From beautiful figure drawings to experimental paintings, Jean demonstrates a keen eye for humanity and a virtuosic handling of any medium.

New Book Highlights: Photography

Look at me: Photographs from Mexico City
Jed Fielding
University of Chicago Press, 2009











Sight is central to the medium of photography. But what happens when the subjects of photographic portraits cannot look back at the photographer or even see their own image? An in-depth pictorial study of blind schoolchildren in Mexico, "Look at me "draws attention to (and distinctions between) the activity of sight and the consciousness of form.

Combining aspects of his earlier, acclaimed street work with an innovative approach to portraiture, Chicago-based photographer Jed Fielding has concentrated closely on these children's features and gestures, probing the enigmatic boundaries between surface and interior, innocence and knowing, beauty and grotesque. Design, composition, and the play of light and shadow are central elements in these photographs, but the images are much more than formal experiments; they confront disability in a way that affirms life. Fielding's sightless subjects project a vitality that seems to extend beyond the limits of self-consciousness. In collaborative, joyful participation with the children, he has made pictures that reveal essential gestures of absorption and the basic expressions of our creatureliness.

Fielding's work achieves what only great art, and particularly great portraiture can: it launches and then complicates a process of identification across the barriers that separate us from each other. "Look at me" contains more than sixty arresting images from which we often want to look away, but into which we are nevertheless drawn by their deep humanity and palpable tenderness. This is a monograph of uncommon significance by an important American photographer.

John Gutmann: The Photographer at Work
Sally Stein
Yale University Press, 2009

John Gutmann (1905–1998) was one of America’s most distinctive photographers. Born in Germany where he trained as an artist and art teacher, he fled the Nazis in 1933 and settled in San Francisco, reinventing himself as a photo-reporter. Gutmann captured images of American culture, celebrating signs of a vibrant democracy, however imperfect. His own status as an outsider—a Jew in Germany, a naturalized citizen in the United States—informed his focus on individuals from the Asian-American, African-American, and gay communities, as well as his photography in India, Burma, and China during World War II.

This handsome book acknowledges Gutmann’s place in the history of photography. Drawing on his archive of photographs and papers at the Center for Creative Photography, it presents both unfamiliar works and little-known contexts for his imagery, linking his photography to his passionate interest in painting and filmmaking, his collections of non-Western art and artifacts, and his pedagogy. In addition to a major essay by Sally Stein, the volume includes an introduction by Douglas R. Nickel, and an overview of the Gutmann archive by Amy Rule.

In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of loss from an unnatural disaster
Chris Jordan
Princeton Architectural Press, 2006








While many may argue whether the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was the direct or indirect result of global warming, infrastructural neglect, inadequate preparation, or an incompetent governmental response, nobody will deny the heartbreak it wrought, the homes, businesses, and history washed away, the landscape uprooted, or the lives lost.

Renowned photographer Chris Jordan went on assignment his own to capture the tragedy of the aftermath of this, the greatest natural disaster in the history of the United States. In Katrina's Wake, his series of 50 photographs, layer, the horror of ruin with the uncanny beauty of nature, even in its most savage incarnation. His images show how the remnants of a place from Mardi Gras beads to church pews, from computer stations to swing sets recall the essence of a place. Essays by Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Royte, and Susan Zakin explore the causes and effects of global warming, noting that we are all responsible for the future of our planet.

The Theatrical World of Angus McBean: Photographs from the Harvard Theatre Collection
Fredric Woodbridge Wilson
David R. Godine Publisher, 2009

The photography of Angus McBean encompasses more than three decades of the history of British theater. His work includes most of the memorable productions of the Old Vic Company and of what is now the Royal Shakespeare Company; opera productions at Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; ballet and operetta at Sadler's Wells; and West End productions of plays and musicals both old and new hundreds of productions in all. He was the favorite photographer of Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and Edith Evans, and he photographed countless plays starring John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Alec Guinness, not to mention younger stars such as Audrey Hepburn, Richard Burton, and Elizabeth Taylor. In fact, McBean photographed virtually every great actor of his era, perhaps the most brilliant years in the annals of British theater.His studio was active and eclectic; among his patrons were not only actors, singers, and dancers, but also playwrights, producers, composers, artists, and writers. In his early career, McBean had been a pioneer of surrealist photography, with a highly popular series of "surrealized" portraits that appeared in The Sketch, and, later, of montage and multiple-exposure photography in a long-running series for The Tatler.In 1969, McBean approached Harvard University to initiate the sale of his collection, and in the following year his archive of glass plate negatives, index prints, and programs, together with the copyrights, became a part of the Harvard Theatre Collection, where it remains the most often-requested collection of visual material. The photographs in this book, selected and captioned by the archive's curator, Fredric Woodbridge Wilson, have been carefully reproduced from the original negatives.


Hotel LaChapelle
David LaChapelle
Little, Brown, 1999











An all-new selection from the outrageous "enfant terrible" of contemporary photography.