NELSON HANCOCK GALLERY

I’m still sifting through the materials I gathered recently at PhotoLucida in Portland, OR. The centerpiece of the event is an elaborately scheduled series of 20-minute meetings between reviewers (gallerists, editors, curators) and photographers. The upside of these events (Santa Fe Review is another, Houston FotoFest is the biggest) is that everyone gets to meet each other on a fairly level playing field. Minus the full-page ads and pr agents, people just put their work down on the table and we talk for 20 minutes. As networking events, they are hard to beat and when they’re run as well as PhotoLucida, they’re easy to navigate. Before I say anything more, I should say that I met a few great photographers there who I’ll probably be showing in the next year.

The downside? There’s something missing from these events, and it’s got to do with approaching the work as art. I know I know, (in fact, everyone knows now) that we live in a crass, commercialized society. However, it would seem that in an arena such as this, there could be a bit more attention paid to meaning instead of just marketability.

Also, I was struck by how difficult it was at times to respond the artists and their work. I later returned to the mother of all portfolio reviews, Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” and, reading it as a reviewer, was relieved by a few things. First, he initially disavowed any authority or special knowledge (I did this often). Then he points out the futility of hoping for a “review” to provide special insight (I often had trouble mustering the courage for this):

“In making contact with a work of art nothing serves so ill as words of criticism … Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people would mostly have us believe”

Having established that works of art aren’t so easily translated into words, and pointing out that they tend to “consummate themselves in a sphere where word has never trod,” he doesn’t hesitate to ask: … "May I just go on to tell you that your verses have no individual quality? … the poems are nothing in themselves, nothing independent, not even the last one…”

And what follows here is the sort of paragraph that makes you think that if Rilke were ever to show up at a contemporary art fair or portfolio review, he would probably faint:

“You ask if your verses are good. You ask me. You have previously asked others. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems … I beg you to give all that up … Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write … confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you…”

ok, that’s about enough (you may be thinking). Fair enough. I just though it presented an interesting point of comparison.

We're putting the finishing touches on Keith Johnson's new exhibition, gearing up for tomorrow night's opening.

Also in the neighborhood - tonight - is a reception at Prague Kolektiv to launch a new line of Czech Deco reproductions. I had a peek yesterday and they're great.

This weekend Dumbo will host the Brooklyn Designs Fair, showcasing furniture and industrial design by Brooklyn's finest. Check the website for info on seminars and other activities. The hightlight, in the midst of the fine furnishings, may be the couture skateboards made by FunkInFunktion.

I recently discovered a great gem in the online archive of the Tate. This link will take you to a program of lectures delivered in 2003 on the subject of Art and Anthropology. You'll need Real Player to watch the streaming videos. They pulled together an excellent array of scholars and artists to speak on the subject. Here's the Tate's blurb on the event:

Recent shifts in art and anthropology suggest an apparent overlap between the concerns and practices of those working in each field. The increasing use of ‘fieldwork’ by many artists and the ‘ethnographic turn’ described by art theorists, invite comparisons with anthropology. In anthropology, critiques of ethnography and fieldwork have raised fundamental questions about the nature of representation – questions which have implications for art. Can developments in each field illuminate the principles and practices of the other? What similarities and differences exist in how artists and anthropologists engage with and represent events, experiences, and others?

If you don't want to spend 150 euros to buy the complete box set from Herzog's website, you can see them one at a time in the coming weeks at the Film Forum

In recent reviews (like this good one by Eric Kohn), and interviews (like the Henry Rollins interview on youtube), Herzog discusses his enduring interest in devising innovative approaches to non-ficition filmmaking. To Eric Kohn he says:

Documentaries today are dated. I compare it to a medieval knight who would go to battle for centuries, and all of a sudden gets confronted with cannons and firearms. We have to ask questions about reality in a different way.

to Henry Rollins:

Everything is pointing towards a redefinition of reality. We have to start seeing and blocking and explaining and articulating reality in movies in a different way. Cinema verite was the answer of the 1960s. Today there is something else out there. I have always said ‘sure, reality has to be seen in a different way’ but that is not the interesting part. The interesting question is: Where is truth in all of this? Cinema verite is the accountant’s truth [but] I have always been after what I call an ecstatic truth, an ecstasy of truth … Facts do not create truth. Facts create norms but they do not create illumination.