Despite the postponements and cancellations of upcoming public events, art-related or otherwise, I’m happy to say that the coronavirus didn’t seem to thwart the art fairs this late winter/early spring. Travel prevented me from catching all of them, but let’s do a quick overview of what I was able to see!
Photo LA
I was out of town for the Winter Show at the Park Avenue Armory, but instead visited Photo LA, my first time attending an LA art fair. While there has been much talk of LA’s growing art scene (bummed my timing didn’t work out to see the second annual Felix Art Fair), overall Photo LA did not knock my socks off. Many of the offerings seemed to me to lean more decorative or amateurish, but there were some nice diamonds in the rough. Here were a few highlights:
Tom Blachford’s midnight photographs are emotive and striking: with a true technical grasp of his medium, Blachford shoots retro architectural sites around the world at night, using nothing but ambient light and moonlight to light the scene. The resulting images have the beautiful eeriness of a Gregory Crewdson without all the gimmicks or theatrics. Blachford shows with Toth Gallery in New York.
A few years back, French photographer Chantal Stoman visited a suburb of Tokyo called Ōme, a small hamlet frozen in time with paintings of classic movie posters all over town. Ōme was once a cinephile’s dream, with several theaters showing national and international movies. Decades after its decline as a movie mecca, the town decided to honors its cinematic past and one of its citizens, an artist by the name of Bankan Kubo, who painted reproductions of the movie posters. As a child, Kubo could not afford to attend the movies, so he satisfied himself with the movie posters; after a show closed, he would take the poster home and copy it. His passion led him to change his name from Noboru to Bankan, a reversal of the word kanban, or poster. Stoman’s photographic series, Ōmecittà (merging the Italian cinecittà with Ōme) “is based on absence, absence that creates our imagination and helps to transform it…Photographing the city of Ōme is like searching for lost time.” Stoman’s work was presented by Galerie Sit Down of Paris.
One particularly intriguing gem at Photo LA was a collection of male physique photo collages from, as the accompanying text noted, the “Golden Age of Physique Photography, 1945–1970.” Crediting World War II with a new liberation and celebration of the male body, male physique took on new visibility in the arts and popular culture, and the physique photographic genre blossomed in Southern California (particularly LA). Exhibited by Photosique, these homoerotic images are a fascinating historical display of masculine identity, sexuality, and objectification at a time most of us associate with the classic female “pin up.” (Apologies for the glare in the photos.)
Last but not least, one installation that moved me to tears was Danziger Gallery’s installation of Paul Fusco’s series The RFK Funeral Train. Fusco, who, with other journalists, road on the New York to Washington train that hot summer day in June of 1968, captured the throngs of people who came to the tracks to pay their respects to the fallen politician. Perhaps it is our current political atmosphere that is taking its emotional toll, but I found the diverse array of mourners very poignant.
Avant-Garde 