scott sforza, wh producer – Page 9

Sgarbian Backdrops

The near-universal consensus from the VIP opening was that the Italian Pavilion exhibition curated by art critic/Berlusconi apparatchik Vittorio Sgarbi was an unalloyed, over-politicized disaster. Yet so far, I have seen very little substantive criticism or engagement with it. Rome-based art theorist Mike Watson’s column in Frieze is a so-far-rare exception:

…the show appears to have resulted unwittingly from the congruence of a cultural elite who lack political power and a political elite who lack culture, highlighting the negative aspects of both – although ultimately it is the clumsy Berlusconian presence which comes off worse here.
In Italy, a country with a deep cultural heritage, the fine arts are the final refuge from a philistine tendency that affects everyday life with an alarming pervasiveness. Yet it appears that the systemic contradictions which plague the Italian political and cultural sphere – and which serve to keep the powerful grinning their stricken grins – have now invaded the fine arts.

Oddly, when I first started liking this quote last week, it was partly because I’d read it as “the fine arts are the final refuge for a philistine tendency,” an Italian play on patriotism as the last refuge of scoundrels. I imagined a demagoguing, pseudo-populist media mogul’s flailing administration wrapping itself in a fresco at Venice. But apparently not.
Instead, Watson maintains the notion of art as a “refuge from,” a world apart from the [real] world. Watson says this philistine affront occupying “the centre of the most prominent cultural event in the art world’s calendar,” demands “an appropriate response.” But what? A sternly worded petition? Some scathingly derisive remarks over dinner in Basel? Art world folks can tweet their outrage all they want, but when the smoke from Sgarbi’s stinkbomb of a show clears, they’ll still be inside their gilded ~~cage~~ refuge.
The Physiognomy of a Nation [frieze]

Police Action Painting

Police spraying protesters in Kampala, Uganda, May 10, 2011 [image james akena/reuters via cfr.org]
I haven’t been able to get these images out of my head since Brian Sholis pointed to them; they’re stunning and disturbing at once.
As Time Lightbox’s Ishaan Tharoor put it,

We’re used to protest movements that come in colors–the yellow of people power in the Philippines, Ukraine’s orange, the green of Iran’s brutalized democrats. We’re less accustomed to seeing protests quashed with color. But in Uganda, security forces sprayed opposition leaders and activists with a vivid pink dye–a mark intended both to humiliate dissidents and make it easier for police to nab them.

The first publicized use of dye cannons was in Cape Town, South Africa in 1989, in a fiasco that became known as the Purple Rain Protest [image below via wikipedia] An anti-apartheid demonstrator seized the cannon and turned it on the white-painted buildings in the square, including the National Party headquarters. “The purple shall govern” became a rallying cry for the democracy movement.

In 2008, after Indian police painted protestors purple in Srinagar, Slate’s Explainer put together a concise history of the dye cannon. Which is, well, ironic, considering how aesthetically similar the police painting images are to the Indian Holi Festival, where crowds bombard each other with powdered pigment as part of an equalizing, anarchic celebration of religious joy.
Clearly this is not art; but it is painting. And the sobering political implications and power dynamics depicted in these incredible–even, I hate to say it, beautiful–images makes me question the glib, benign assumptions I hold for that word, that action.
For a long time, I’ve been fascinated by the military definition of ‘painting,” the use of laser sighting and guidance systems to target weapons ranging from guns to missiles. It made me wonder what other seemingly paradoxical contexts “painting” has found its cultured, refined way into. I guess I can add one more to the list.
Color in the midst of protest [time lightbox]

Masterpieces From The Getty Collection: The Unknown Gingrich-Brooks Sforzian Master

Holy smokes, this has to be the greatest photo of David Brooks and Newt Gingrich anyone has taken or ever will take. Will the uncredited Getty Images photographer who was in the Russell Building stairwell last week please step forward to claim your prize? [via andrewsullivan]
UPDATE: Congratulations, Chris Somodevilla!

Sforzian, Deleuzian. Deleuzian, Sforzian.

“One idea could be using mirrors so photographers could do their jobs out of the president’s sight line, the White House’s Earnest said.”
My mind is blown and I am still picking up the pieces after contemplating the possibility that White House photographers might be instructed to shoot using mirrors so as not to disrupt the president’s line of sight.
I mean, the compositional challenges pale in comparison to the artistic compositional goldmine that such an environment would provide. I mean, just imagine. Here’s one AP shot I didn’t post the other day about Sforzian backdrops at Fort Campbell. Check out how the floating reflection of the camo netting draped over the crowd barrier, which is picked up in the teleprompter:

With mirrors, photos of the president would be like rainbows, visible only from the single specific angle that aligns the lens, the mirror, and the face.
Street photographers would suddenly have an edge. Lee Friedlander, traveling with the President:

I’ve slowly been making my way through Kierran Horner’s analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror in relation to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘time-image.’ I had just gotten to this part when I found the AP White House photo policy story:

Left alone, Alexei locates and sits in front of a large mirror hung on the wall. The next shot begins stationary behind Alexei, facing his reflection in the mirror, and the camera slowly pans in over his shoulder, focusing ever more tightly on his reflection, until, gradually, the reflection becomes the sole image of the frame, staring back toward the actual Alexei.

There is then a sharp cut to reveal a medium close-up of Alexei sat contemplating his reflection from the opposite angle. This shot/reverse shot dynamic and the ‘eye-line match’ are common to most conventional cinema, establishing an object, or person, as perceived by a character from their point of view.

As David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson describe it ‘shot A presents someone looking at something off-screen shot B shows us what is being looked at’ (2004: 303). However, as in this case, the ‘eye-line match’ refers conversely to an interaction between two characters, here, the actual Alexei and his virtual counterpart. It is as if he is reacting to/with his reflection. This dialectic can be read as representing the Deleuzian ‘crystal-image’:

‘In Bergsonian terms, the real object is reflected in a mirror-image as in the virtual object which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects the real: there is a ‘coalescence’ between the two. There is a formation of an image with two sides, actual and virtual. It is as if an image in a mirror, a photo or a postcard came to life, assumed independence and passed into the actual, even if this meant that the actual image returned into the mirror and resumed its place in the postcard or photo, following a double movement of liberation and capture.’ (Deleuze 2005b: 66-67)

I see Barack Obama as Alexei. And a virtual presidency. Can you begin to imagine what kinds of images this would produce? Forget the stunning conceptual aspects for a minute; has anyone at the White House thought through the political implications–should we call them the optics?–of not permitting the cameras’ eyes to gaze upon the President directly?
Maybe not mirrors, then, but what about one-way mirrors? Is that what they’re thinking? Put the photgraphers on the darkened side of a one-way mirror. Fortunately, there’s only 225 hours of Law & Order-related programming on basic cable each week to communicate the absolute trustworthiness of anyone speaking on the mirrored side of the glass.

Before getting too fixated on the complications of presidential imagemaking, though, it’s worth remembering that the White House is already a supremely weird place for photographers to work. Go back to 2009, just days after President Obama’s inauguration, when the NY Times’ Stephen Crowley pulled back the curtain on the surreal and utterly staged 12-second tradition known as the “pool spray.” These are the images whose authenticity is suddenly, apparently, of such great concern.
Previously: WH beat photogs upset at staged photographs they don’t take

It’s All Done With Mirrors

So long, Sforzian Replays. After Reuters photographer Jason Reed went all meta about it on his blog last week, the White House has decided to do away with the longstanding practice of re-enacting speeches for reporters from different media.

“We have concluded that this arrangement is a bad idea,” Obama spokesman Josh Earnest said late Wednesday. He said the administration is open to working out some new arrangement with photographers.
…
There are conflicting accounts on whether technology exists to take photographs without distracting the president. One idea could be using mirrors so photographers could do their jobs out of the president’s sight line, the White House’s Earnest said.

Yes, by all means, mirrors. Pick mirrors, ohpleaseohpleaseohplease.
White House Announces End To Re-Enactments For News Photographers [ap/huffpo]

Sforzian Job Well Done!

The death of the Sforzian Backdrop has been greatly exaggerated.

They may not show it off every day, but it turns out that the Obama White House’s advance team speaks fluent Sforza. As these AP photos from the President’s congratulatory address to the soldiers at Fort Campbell, KY clearly demonstrate.
For starters, there’s that Patton-esque flag up top, plus the small bleacherful of racially diverse soldiers for the wallpaper effect,

a motif that was so popular in the Bush era [and so hilariously screwed up in the brief McCain phase.] Check out all the cell phone cameras in the photo above. Don’t recall that ever happening in the wallpaper before.

Looks like they used camo netting instead of regular bunting or blue curtain to cover the barricade there.

And check out that fresh new banner, hung on the side, so that:

Here’s a nice wide angle shot to see how the staging comes together:

But if there’s a difference, besides the frequency, I guess, between staged military events in the Bush and Obama eras, it’s this: you just never know, so save yourself a peck of trouble down the line

and don’t stand under the banner.

[all Ft. Campbell images via ap]

Sforzian Replay

Photographers take pictures of U.S. President Barack Obama after he announced the death of Osama bin Laden live on television from the East Room of the White House on May 1, 2011.

So I was looking at Reuters White House photographer Jason Reed’s side view of a scrum of other photographers getting all up in the President’s grille while he was giving his Osama Bin Laden speech, and thinking, “But I saw him walk away. How the hell did that happen?”
And holy smokes, now we know. The Sforzian Backdrop has been retired in favor of the Obamian Re-enactment:

As President Obama continued his nine-minute address in front of just one main network camera, the photographers were held outside the room by staff and asked to remain completely silent. Once Obama was off the air, we were escorted in front of that teleprompter and the President then re-enacted the walk-out and first 30 seconds of the statement for us.

On the one hand, that’s no more staged a photo than any photo these guys take in the White House; think of those handshake photosprays with visiting leaders. They’re definitely not the kind of photo staging that WH photojournalists complain about, just the opposite, in fact, it’s standard operating procedure.
But if Reed hadn’t pulled back the curtain, I don’t think many people would have understood that from Reuter’s technically-accurate-but-now-somewhat-dodgy caption.
Ready To Record History [blogs.reuters.com via @markdubya, no relation, I assume]

Pakistani Camo Landscape

These people are not wearing their videoconference faces.
According to the EXIF data, White House photographer Pete Souza took this photo at 4:05 PM, or 1:05 AM Abbottabad Time, five minutes in. They’re watching it as it happened. Which people already know, since it has ~~garnered 455,000 views~~ been blogged and retweeted and facebooked 455,000 times in a matter of hours.
Souza also asks us to “Please note: a classified document seen in this photo has been obscured.” Indeed, there it is. Funny how unobscured it looks at this size.

Let’s take a closer look:

Didn’t I just post something about collecting all the seals and emblems of government agencies?

Because that’s the seal for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency sticking out from underneath there. As you’d expect.

And that corner of landscape does look like the image of left sideyard of OBL’s compound. [image via ogleearth]

And now that you mention it, the pixelated image does look like the front gate area of the compound, just at an as-yet-unacknowledged high resolution. Of course, from here, it also kind of looks like a painting. I’ll get right on that.
Previously: Google Maps & the everchanging Dutch Camo Landscape

Partly In Jest

NPR interviewed former National Intelligence Director John Negroponte this morning. Steve Inskeep asked a too-long question about the multi-year intelligence work that resulted in yesterday’s attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan:

Did some of this happen while you were National Intelligence Director? Would this be the kind of level of detail that would get to the desk of some of the highest people in the intelligence hierarchy, of someone in the White House, if you just had a bit of information like, we think we might have a courier, would that be the kind of thing that–
Well, let’s put it this way: the President, President Obama said, and certainly President Bush before him, said that this was the, uh, highest, uh, priority. Very often when representatives or leaders of the intelligence or law enforcement community would come in to brief President Bush, one of the first questions he’d always ask, partly in jest, but also deadly serious, “Have you found him yet?”
I mean, this has been a major preoccupation of our leadership ever since 9/11 occurred.

Reminds me of GWB pretending to look for WMDs under the table at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
Also reminds me just how little we actually know of the hunt for OBL between Tora Bora and Abbottabad. The media likes to call itself the first version of history, so we should expect that large chunks of it will be fact-checked, corrected, or thrown out entirely.

Tuymanmatic

Apparently the first footage released from inside Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound was shot on an iPhone with Hipstamatic’s new Luc Tuymans filter.

Mission Accomplished

Previously, besides basically everything: Errol Morris talking about the Bush era with Stockholm Syndrome-afflicted WH photo editors.

1,000 Or 1 Chairs

Though there was some buzz about the “Chinese Embassy” on 42nd Street, which is actually the UN Mission, I wasn’t seeing anything in the twitterstream about the protesting the arrest and detention of Ai Weiwei by restaging a global version of his installation, 1,001 Chairs at the actual Chinese Embassy in Washington DC.
So we set out, with a toy high chair, just in case. Good thing.

We rounded the corner, and the street in front of I.M. Pei’s imposing limestone structure was as empty as the rest of the closed-off, empty embassy loop. We took a picture.
Then we decided to head closer, and a good thing, too. Because there was another chair after all.

And a couple being sat in, by five protestors, including two in Free Ai Weiwei t-shirts and two in funny hats. We stopped, added our chair, checked in on the protest [“there’ve been a few”], took some pictures, and took off. A few minutes later on the walk home, the t-shirted pair passed us on their bikes and waved.

Donald Trump Will Not Be President.

I went to the groundbreaking ceremony for MoMA’s new building. It was held in a large tent in the Sculpture Garden. The time came when all the VIPs were supposed to don ceremonial hardhats, and take their ceremonial shovels, and then take their first ceremonial photo-op scoops in the sandbox in front of the dais.
I was sitting on the far edge, and Mayor Giuliani’s security detail was standing next to me.
When a MoMA operative began putting the helmets on the VIPs’ heads, they tightened into a panic. “Oh, shit, not the hair,” they stage whispered. “NOT the hair.” Maybe they were praying, because no one could hear them but the Good Lord and myself, and I was actually praying for the helmet.
I was reminded of that extreme combover encounter as I watched this clip of Donald Trump nuzzling his mug into Giuliani’s drag queen cleavage. Trump’s part is somewhere on the back of his neck, just high enough that the rest of his hair looks like those stubby, shaving brush ponytails that were all too common in the early 1990s [insert mea culpa here].
I just point this out because at least Giuliani lost the combover before he went on his own ego- and business-prospect inflation tour by pretending to run for President.

On War-Era Murals

The question or theme or whatever hadn’t crystallized for me, but when Tyler linked to the previous two posts about Lt. Comm. Edward Steichen’s wartime propaganda exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, he noted that “there’s a lot of art historical work yet to be done on the impact World War II had on art and artists.”
It’s an interesting way to consider my fascination with the aesthetics and paradoxes of photomurals: their apparent historic status as something other than artwork, much like the photographic medium they’re derive from; their powerful scale, which creates a certain kind of all-encompassing viewing experience that is typically associated only with the later works of revolutionary “high art,” namely the Abstract Expressionists; and of course, the abstract and modernist aspects of the images themselves.
I’m not ready to go beyond the grand theory of “this looks like that,” but I keep seeing and finding resonances between photomurals, which were born in the Depression and came of age during WWII, and some of the major developments of postwar art.

Mural, Jackson Pollock, 1943, collection: UIMA
I mean, I’m re-reading Tyler’s interview with Pepe Karmel about Jackson Pollock’s Mural [above], which was painted in 1943, and there are moments where I can’t help thinking about the 15- and 40-foot images in Steichen’s 1942 Road To Victory show:

It’s an important painting for Jackson Pollock because it’s the moment that announces his future as a painter of large, mural-scale paintings that become environments, and furthermore paintings that are in this distinct, all-over style that changes people’s idea of what a painting might be.
…
It’s like Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis or Pollock’s own Number 1, 1950. You have to be there. You have to be standing in front of it and feel it filling up your field of vision and feel it wrapping around you and feel yourself falling into the field of the painting. If you don’t have that experience first-hand, you won’t get the feeling of the painting.
…
MAN: You talked about how important the painting was in terms of Pollock’s oeuvre. Can you detail why it’s so important to what came next in American and modern and contemporary art?
PK: The next step is off the wall and out into space. In contemporary art that deals with installation as an art form, which comes out of those paintings in 1950 and that comes out of this painting in 1943. It just doesn’t get more historic than this.
It’s truly a kind of unrecognized monument of American art.

Which isn’t to say that Pollock was referencing or even influenced by photomurals, just that both Herbert Bayer’s installation of Steichen’s photos and Pollock’s first epic-scale painting create an overwhelming spatial experience.
Photomurals were out-and-proud propaganda which had connections to filmmaking and the cinematic screen and to world’s fairs, [See Alvar Aalto’s Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair and the Japanese pavilion at the Golden Gate Expo that same year].

Which is one of just a handful of references to photomurals in LIFE magazine’s archives. In a moment of greg.org confluence, LIFE’s most prominent depictions of photomurals are not in museums or world’s fairs, but in political rallies–they are the ur-Sforzian backgrounds. For example, In 1949, FDR Jr. has a giant wall of smiling children behind him at a UAW convention. A chorus line of garment workers kick in front of a selection of “union heroes.” And when he spoke in Boston in 1949, Winston Churchill stood in front of an aerial photomural of the MIT campus [above] which reportedly “confused [the] television audience.”

The Road To Victory And Beyond

So in my ersatz zigzagging through the history of photomurals, I kind of skipped from Edward Steichen’s landmark Family of Man exhibition in 1955, where Paul Rudolph deployed enlarged photo prints for content and experience, as well as architectural elements in his exhibition design; to Capt. Steichen’s 1945 exhibition Power in the Pacific, which featured the work of the US Navy photography unit he commanded; to Steichen’s participation in MoMA’s first photography exhibition ever, a 1932 photomural invitational, which was intended to serve as a showroom for American artists, who faced stiff mural competition during the Depression from south of the border.
Sensing a trend here? Wondering what I missed? Wow. Michael from Stopping Off Place just forwarded me the link to MoMA’s bulletin for Road To Victory, a stunning 1942 photo exhibition that rolls up so many greg.org interests, it is kind of freaking me out right now. And the man who is bringing it to me? Lt. Comm. Edward Steichen.

I mean, I kind of stumbled onto the photomural trail last October, when a vintage exhibition print of Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion came up at auction. Its size, scale, and iconic modernist subject suddenly made the photomural seem like a missing link in the contemporary development of both photography and painting. And yet it’s also seeming like not many of these pictures survived, because they were merely exhibition collateral, functional propaganda material, no more an artwork than the brochure or the press release.
And yet these things existed. Is it possible at all that any of these prints still exist in some art handler’s garage?
Anyway, it’ll take me time to process this Road To Victory show, so I’m just going to skip across the most stunning parts: the show’s awesome, explicit propagandistic objectives; the utterly fresh painterly abstraction of these giant prints; the spatial, experiential design of Herber Bayer’s installation; the texts surrounding the exhibit, which traveled around the country in 1942 to apparently wild, patriotic acclaim; and the ironic, complicating aspects of authorship of the show and the work in it.
[Hint: they barely identify, much less mention the actual photographers at all. I, meanwhile, am happy and grateful to credit PhotoEphemera for these small versions of much larger scans of MoMA’s 1942 documentation of the show. Definitely worth diving into.]

Continue reading “The Road To Victory And Beyond”