Performed live at Maxwell's in Hoboken, NJ, on the 4th night of Hanukkah, 12/7/07
April 29, 2009
William Eggleston: Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain [4 April - 21 June, 2009 Paris]
William Eggleston
Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
[4 April - 21 June, 2009 Paris]
William Eggleston, born in 1939 in Memphis, is one of the most important contemporary American photographers. From the 1970s onwards, his work has significantly contributed to the recognition of color photography as an artistic medium. Eggleston has published his work extensively, and it has been shown in many major exhibitions around the world. He continues to live and work in Memphis, and travels considerably for photographic projects.
City homage ... Untitled, Paris series, 2006-2008
At the Cartier Foundation, you enter William Eggleston's new exhibition by descending the stairs into a big red room lit by hanging lampshades and furnished with a large leather sofa, two matching armchairs and a baby grand piano. It is a quintessentially Parisian homage to Eggleston's most famous - and strangest - photograph, Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973, otherwise known as "The Red Ceiling".
Last Wednesday evening, as the last of his photographs and drawings were being hung, Eggleston arrived at the gallery for a walkabout. Thin and dapper in a dark suit and polished Oxfords, he made straight for the baby grand and, oblivious to the flurry of activity around him and, indeed, the photographs in the adjacent gallery, sat down and started playing. For a good five minutes or so, he was utterly absorbed in the music he was making, his long, manicured fingers picking out a series of fitful, often fractured, classical extemporisations. When he finally arose, and placed an unlit cigarette in his mouth, he seemed momentarily startled by the burst of applause from those present, bowing and smiling mischievously like a surprised child.
Eggleston, as his images often attest, is a one-off, an American aristocrat from the Deep South with a wild streak and a singular ability to capture in his colour photographs all the often overlooked beauty, strangeness and intensity of the commonplace. His groundbreaking work from the early 70s, collected in books such as William Eggleston's Guide and The Democratic Forest, confused people at first with its capturing of what might be called the heightened mundane, but he is now regarded as the maverick genius who made colour photography the serious art form it is today. Eggleston is, among other things, a supreme colourist. The saturated intensity of those early photographs has given way to a more muted approach of late, but he retains an unerring ability to render the everyday surprising and sometimes surreal.
As he approaches his 70th birthday, Eggleston has finally turned his "democratic" gaze on Paris, perhaps the city that has been most iconised through photography. Three years ago, the Fondation Cartier commissioned him to photograph the city, which he has been doing ever since on regular extended trips from his native Memphis. "I'm taking over where Atget left off," he tells me, laughing. Eggleston's Paris, though, is perhaps as far away from Atget's Paris - or Cartier-Bresson's Paris or Brassaï's Paris - as one could imagine. It is, in fact, closer to Eggleston's Memphis, in so far as it emerges as a place that is both oddly recognisable and utterly alien. "I approached it and am still approaching it as if it is just anywhere," he says in the exhibition guide. "You're not quite sure: is this Paris, Mexico City, elsewhere?"
With Eggleston, though, it is nearly always elsewhere. And yet, Paris - or Parisness - leaks into these images in the most mundane ways. His image of the Bastille is taken from what looks like a wall mural of the same. Silhouetted, it looks like a mosque, the unreal sky around it covered in a graffiti scrawl. His photograph of the famous brasserie la Rotonde shows it empty and gutted, surrounded by metal shutters, awaiting a makeover. In another image that plays with the visual iconography of the city, he frames a stack of chrome chairs outside a cafe, their purple fabric matching the even more lurid tones of a film poster for Batman, le défi
Eggleston's Paris is a messy, often makeshift place - who else would be drawn to the milky water in a cement mixer? - which could indeed be any early 21st-century city. Graffiti is a recurring motif - on walls, vehicles, windows, billboards. He is drawn, too, to the garish - the hyper-bright colours of a children's funfair ride, the unreal pinks and yellows of neon shop signs. The quotidian sublime is glimpsed too, though, in the mossy green haze of street light reflected on a wet pavement or the familiar blue sky, clear and clean, that appears above buildings and treetops throughout his work. Not for the first time I was left wondering whether Eggleston possesses some innate ability to tap into that soft, opaque, unreal otherworld that the rest of us glimpse only in moments of intoxication or chemical realignment. Is he always elsewhere?
One or two of these new images contain echoes of earlier photographs, his own and other peoples. A row of teddy bears in a Parisian shop window recalls the row of dolls on a car bonnet that he shot in Memphis in the early 70s. (It was used on the album cover of Like Flies on Sherbert by Alex Chilton, another Memphis maverick.) A polythene bag packed with used paper cups recalls Robert Frank's photograph of a polythene bag packed with dolls' heads. Eggleston's eye for the heightened mundane may have mellowed of late - there is nothing here as ominous as "The Red Ceiling" or as deathly as, say, his portrait of a pale young woman lying prone on the grass, holding a camera - but he still goes his own way when it comes to composition. He famously only ever photographs a subject once, and his "shotgun" approach whereby a subject is targeted, then shot, accounts for the odd angles and seemingly off-kilter point of view. The shot of a young girl's outstretched leg is pure Eggleston. It is a portrait of sorts - her red shoe, the comic resting on her knee, the sense of childhood reverie caught, too, in that outstretched leg - even though he has done nothing as obvious as training the camera on her face.
At the Fondation Cartier you can also see a series of Eggleston's drawings, busy, colourful abstracts that nod to Kandinsky. They are what they are: involved, often intricate, doodles in pen that seem like spontaneous explorations of colour. Some of them have been placed alongside photographs and sometimes the juxtaposition works. More intriguingly, though, many of the photographs themselves tend towards the abstract in their arrangement of shapes and colours. That suggests that Eggleston, as he enters old age, may have found yet another way of seeing the everyday anew.
For the last three years, American photographer William Eggleston has photographed the city of Paris as part of a commission for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.Taken throughout different seasons, these new images by one of the fathers of color photography portray the local and the cosmopolitan, the glamorous and the gritty, the everyday and the extraordinary.This exhibition also provides an exceptional occasion to bring together William Eggleston’s distinctive pictures and his recent paintings, an unknown aspect of his work that has never before been presented to the public.William Eggleston, Paris
A book created specially by William Eggleston on the occasion of the exhibition, which presents his photographs next to his drawings, published for the first time.Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Paris
Steidl, Göttingen
Hardback, 22 x 28 cm, 184 pages,
70 color photographs,
50 drawings
Steidl, Göttingen
An exceptional limited edition of 100 books in a box set,
numbered and signed by the artist
JEAN PAINLEVE: ɒktəpʊsɪz (SURREALIST MATING) [Yo La Tengo Score: 4PD]
Image via Wikipedia
315 min
Color & Black and White
1.33:1
Jean Painlevé’s “Ten Commandments”
Next week, we release a definitive, three-disc set of the short documentaries of Jean Painlevé (1902–89), the pioneering French scientist-educator-filmmaker (and sometime Dadaist) whose mesmerizing studies of marine life, especially, have been attracting wide audiences and new fans for decades (including the rock band Yo La Tengo, which regularly performs with the films, and whose eight-film score is included on the release). By way of an introduction to this truly unique artist, we present his “Ten Commandments,” originally published in the notes accompanying his touring “Poets of the Documentary” program in 1948. On first glance, they may seem simple enough, but once you’ve watched the films, many more layers of meaning will become evident. On the second commandment, for instance, “one might wonder how scientifically informed nature films can be said to express convictions,” film scholar Scott MacDonald muses in his essay for the release, “but it is precisely Painlevé’s implicit (and sometimes explicit) reasons for selecting the organisms he does and his manner of presenting them that reveal his attitudes.” Among those attitudes seems to be an interest in confronting conventional ideas about gender, MacDonald writes, evident in his films on sea horses (male and female collaborate on child birthing), daphnia (self-reproducing females), starfish (hermaphroditic), and the stunning AceraFantasia.”
Here are all ten of Painlevé’s filmmaking convictions, practiced over six decades and more than two hundred luminous films:
1. You will not make documentaries if you do not feel the subject.
2. You will refuse to direct a film if your convictions are not expressed.
3. You will not influence the audience by unfair means.
4. You will seek reality without aestheticism or ideological apparatus.
5. You will abandon every special effect that is not justified.
6. Trickery will be of no use unless the audience is your confidant.
7. You will not use clever editing unless it illustrates your good intentions.
8. You will not show monotonous sequences without perfect justification.
9. You will not substitute words for images in any way.
10. You will not be content with “close enough” unless you want to fail spectacularly. (bisexual), which, when mating, “do a kind of ballet during which the cloaks that encircle their bodies fly open, evoking tutus.” Painlevé’s film about these last creatures, notes MacDonald, is “reminiscent of moments from Oskar Fischinger films and from Disney’s
Jean Painlevé(1902-89)
Going Beneath the Surface
Yo La Tengo
The Sounds of Science
[Original Score]
Probably no substantial dimension of film history has been so thoroughly ignored by American film critics, historians, and theorists as the nature film (or wildlife film): These short documentaries of Jean Painlevé (190289), the pioneering French scientist-educator-filmmaker (and sometime Dadaist) whose mesmerizing studies of marine life, especially, have been attracting wide audiences and new fans for decadesSurrealist-influenced dream works that are also serious science.The French filmmaker-scientist-inventor had a decades-spanning career in which he created hundreds of short films on subjects ranging from astronomy to pigeons to, most famously, such marine-life marvels as the sea horse and the octopus.The mesmerizing, utterly unclassifiable science films of Jean Painlevé (1902-89) have to be seen to be believed: delightful, surrealist-influenced dream works that are also serious science. The French filmmaker-scientist-inventor had a decades-spanning career in which he created hundreds of short films.New and improved English subtitle translations from the eight-part television series, "Jean Painlevé: Through His Films"Directed by Denis Derrien and Hélène Hazera
When OCTOPUSES reproduce, males use a specialized arm called a hectocotylus to insert spermatophores (packets of sperm) into the female's mantle cavity.The hectocotylus in benthic octopuses is usually the third right arm. Males die within a few months of mating. In some species, the female octopus can keep the sperm alive inside her for weeks until her eggs are mature. After they have been fertilized, the female lays about 200,000 eggs (this figure dramatically varies between families, genera, species and also individuals). The female hangs these eggs in strings from the ceiling of her lair, or individually attaches them to the substrate depending on the species. The female cares for the eggs, guarding them against predators, and gently blowing currents of water over them so that they get enough oxygen.The female does not eat during the roughly one-month period spent taking care of the unhatched eggs. At around the time the eggs hatch, the mother dies and the young larval octopuses spend a period of time drifting in clouds of plankton, where they feed on copepods, larval crabs and larval starfish until they are ready to sink down to the bottom of the ocean, where the cycle repeats itself. In some deeper dwelling species, the young do not go through this period. This is a dangerous time for the larval octopuses; as they become part of the plankton cloud they are vulnerable to many plankton eaters.
Phylum: Mollusca
Class: Cephalopoda
Subclass: Coleoidea
Superorder: Octopodiformes
Order: Octopoda * Subclass Nautiloidea: nautilus * Subclass Coleoidea o Superorder Decapodiformes: squid, cuttlefish o Superorder Octopodiformes + Order Vampyromorphida: Vampire Squid + Order Octopoda # Genus †Keuppia (incertae sedis) # Genus †Palaeoctopus (incertae sedis) # Genus †Pohlsepia (incertae sedis) # Genus †Proteroctopus (incertae sedis) # Genus †Styletoctopus (incertae sedis) # Suborder Cirrina: finned deep-sea octopus * Family Opisthoteuthidae: umbrella octopus * Family Cirroteuthidae * Family Stauroteuthidae # Suborder Incirrina * Family Amphitretidae: telescope octopus * Family Bolitaenidae: gelatinous octopus * Family Octopodidae: benthic octopus * Family Vitreledonellidae: Glass Octopus * Superfamily Argonautoida o Family Alloposidae: Seven-arm Octopus o Family Argonautidae: argonauts o Family Ocythoidae: Tuberculate Pelagic Octopus o Family Tremoctopodidae: blanket octopus
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vMGb5N_lWF-Z3gSzYU3EkdH_iG99qWAh_YB0EsF720n-d-Y9yXOvmD2LfgG5w0viyTICK1AMdsroOEOkAyoZB6cF0LN1WKVMW2LJQ2LuxEeiqrI5C60nwH3R3Cvdiwm5OQwiY2qElYkM_1W37ciuU-=s0-d)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)