Photography Center Quarterly #57

PHO TOG RA-PHY

This publication appears on the occasion of the 1993 exhibition Picturing Ritual, organized by the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, New York. The photography exhibition, curated by Cornelia H. Butler, and the accompanying video exhibition, Ritual Responses and Ritual Subversions, curated by Micki McGee, will travel to the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York, January 16-April 3, 1994.

The Center acknowledges support from the New York State Council on the Arts Visual Arts and Electronic Media & Film Programs, the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Organizations and the National Endounnent for the Arts and Advancement Programs.

This catalogue supersedes CENTER Quarterly "57. Vol. 15, No. I, 1993. ISSN 0890 4639. Copyright© 1993 the Center for Photography at Woodstock, 59 Tinker Street, Woodstock, New York 12498. TEL: (914) 679-9957, FAX: (914) 679-6337. SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you would like to receive the Center Quarterly, you may become a SubscribingMember for $25 a year U.S.A., $40 Canada & Mexico, $45 International. Call or fax the Center for a free brochure.

Catalogue essays© 1993, Cornelia H. Butler, Katherine Ware, Micki McGee,Jeanne Dunning, Doug lschar, Elaine Tin Nyo, Jack Pierson, Lorna Simpson, Caroli en Stikker. All photographs and artists' texts reproduced in this catalogue are copyrighted by the artists. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the Center for Photography at Woodstock. The opinions and ideas expressed in this publication do not represent official positions of the Center.

Printing by Kenner Printing Co., Inc., New York City, U.S.A. Design by Kathleen Kenyon. Text proofreading by Joan Munkacsi. Composition by Digital Design Studio, Kingston, New York.

The CENTER Quarterly is distributed by Bernhard DeBoer, Inc., 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 071 IO. The CQ is available in NYC at: Nikos Magazine Shop; Eastern Newstand ;;J and #2; Shakespeare & Company (Uptown and Downtown); Spring Street Books; St. Marks Booskstore; Coliseum Books; and the Gotham Book Market.

STAFF:

Executive Director, Colleen Kenyon; Associate Director Programs, Kathleen Kenyon; Executive Assistant, Lawrence P. Lewis; Program Assistant, Derek Johnston. Summer Interns: Cee Cee Marquette, Beldan Kurosman, and Pauline Hubert. Fall Interns: Kimberly Swierzowski and Galen Joseph-Hunter.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS: Norton Batkin, Susan Fowler-Gallagher, Ellen Handy, Rollin Hill, George Holz, Colleen Kenyon, Ellen K. Levy, James Luciana, Betty Marks, Elliott Meisel, Marc Miller, Joan Munkacsi, Jose Picayo, Lila Raymond, Alan Siegel. Film Advisors: John Pruitt and Peter Hutton.

ADVISORY BOARD:

Charles Biasiny-Rivera, Martin Bondell/JulieGalanr, Ellen Carey, Philip Cavanaugh, Allan Coleman, Penelope Dixon, Susan Ferris, Cheryl Finley, Beth Gates-Warren, Howard Greenberg, Sue Hartshorn, William M. Hunt, Norman Jay ltzkoff, Greg Kandel, Peter Kenner, Alan Klotz, Ronald Kurtz, Susana Torruella Leval, Peter MacGill, Robert Persky, Sandra S. Phillips, J. Randall Plummer.

Front cover:

© 1992 Elaine Tin Nyo, Untitled, (detail o( Mums) Catalogues: U.S.A. $5 donation/ $7 postpaid. International / Canada /Mexico/ $10 postpaid.

KATHLEEN KENYON CORNELIA H. BUTLER CHECKLIST AND ARTISTS' STATEMENTS

KATHERINE WARE MICKI McGEE

PEGGY AHWESH, PETER HUTTON, JOHN PRUITT

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Lorna Simpson, Untitled, 1992 Color Polaroids, plastic plaques, 98x 162" (Courtesy CollectionPaineWebber Group, Inc., New York)

BUILDING LINKS is the Center's educational initiative, created in 1991 during Phase I of the National Endowment for the Arts Advancement process, designed to bridge the gap between artists and audiences. We seek increased opportunity to strengthen existing connections and to make new ones between our artistic programs and our artistic home; among our education, exhibition, and publication programs; between our organization and other art organizations; and---our most challenging connection-between those who make art and those who can be enriched by it. Weplan to present BUILDINGLINKSas a special educational event each year to create necessary linkages between artists and audiences.

Specifically, in 1992 we showcased Encountering Difference, an exhibition of work by contemporary photographers from Mexico, guest curated by Elizabeth Ferrer, that traveled to Pennslyvania, California, and Arizona; this year we present Picturing Ritual. BUILDING LINKS exhibitions are tied to a catalogue (in the form of this special issue of our magazine), film and video screenings, and an educational panel, open to the public, free of charge. Panels are composed of curators and program artists. They provide curators and artists the opportunity to have a conversation with the local, regional, and rural community audiences. This is a time for the audience to "meet the artist," exchange new ideas, and explore historical precedents. It is an opportunity for the Center to develop new and bettereducated audiences for the field. Panel discussions are designed to "invite the audience in" by focusing not only on issues in the visual and media arts but also on larger questions pertaining to the culture.

For example, with Picturing Ritual, a panel investigating concepts of three photographic genres will serve as touchstones for discussion that travels from art to cultural movements, "the personal-as-political," and "the-old-made-new." What are the boundaries between photography and art? Curator Butler suggests that distance between very different peoples can be bridged by artists who have special passion for their subjects. In this educational forum the underlying question is one of re-defining the subject of art, defining new artistic strategies, and this is why we believe BUILDINGLINKSserves as an entryway program for a new community, and for audience development. Center film programs in 1993 will be hosted at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York) to increase our reach to a regional assembly. In addition to the educational initiative for the local community-the panel-we are traveling Picturing Ritual to another venue, the Neuberger Museum, in order to inform a larger audience and to share our resources with an additional visual arts agency.

The Center's mission, to support professional, creative, and educational advancement of living artists and their audiences, has led to the following service programs offered to the local, national, and international community: Travelling exhibitions, Workshops, Visiting Artists' Lectures Series, Library, Permanent Print Collection, Slide Archives, Video Archives, Portfolio Review, Gallery Talks, Slide Registry, Educational Panels, Workshop Internships, Arts Administration Internships, and Artists' Fellowships. Thousands of artists, students, curators, and the general public use these services each year; some are free to the public and available year-round except for January when the Center is closed for renovations.

For many, photography offers the challenge to see and experience anew the world they have always lived in, to press through old notions, and to create new visions. It is a tool to be used in the process of self discovery, for creative expression, to enhance socialization skills, and to build self esteem. We give acknowledgment to the crucial role our visual sense plays in the process of learning. As a natural extension of this sense, photography, film, and video are catalysts in the development of communication, perception, and an appreciation for who we are in the world.

-© Kathleen Kenyon, Associate Director, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, 1993.

Elaine Tin Nyo, Untitled from Gorsynski Portfolio, (Parsnip), 1992, Gelatin silver print, 20x 16" (Counesy of the artist)

Center for Photography at 1-Voodstoch, Woodstoch, Neu, Yori., No·ve,nber 13 - Deceniber 17, 1.993 / Reception: No·ve,nber 13, 3-5 ptn

Pictu,in9d?ituaf

Photography exhibition curated by Cornelia H. Butler: Gregory Crewdson, Jeanne Duni;iing, Doug lschar, Elaine Tin yo, Jack Pierson, Lorna Simpson, Carolien Stikker

R i l u a I cf?£.1poni~1 & R i l U a I dub<JE.Hion,

Video exhibition curated by Micki McGee: Michael O'Reilly, Linda Montano, Zeinabu irene Davis, Meena Nanji, Barry Ellsworth, Peggy Ahwesh, Video Data Bank

Exhibitions travel to Neuberger JWuseum, Purchase, Ne'lV Yori;, Janua.ry 16 - April 9, 1994

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A discussion for the com,ffiunity with panelists Gregory Crewdson, Elaine Tin Nyo, and Lorna Sirnpson. Moderator: Cornelia H, Butler

The Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York Tuesday, March 15, 4:30 pm., free

d!1 Emo, i a f/L ANDS CAPE /Pod, a it Filtn exhibition presented by Peggy Ahu,esh, Peter Hutton, John Pruitt Preston Theatre, /Jard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, Neu, Yorh Dece,nber 3, 4, 5, II ptn, admission $5, seniors/students/Center nrntnbers $2.50

PicturingRitualbackedits way into beingan exhibitionabout the practiceit critiques.The bibliographycompiledin preparationfor the wr!tingand theorizingaboutthephotographicallybasedwork in theshowincludedprimarytextsdocumentingthehistoryof photography,secondarytextscritiquing thatdocumentation,anda gooddoseof culturaltheorywithoutwhichit now seemsimpossibleto think aboutart in general.

Theseareartistswhosework iscool,and whosestrategiesandsubjectsarerichand passionate.Their carefullycontrolledand sometimesobsessivemethodsoften includeobject-making,the hunting, gathering,and choreographyof materials,and a senseof the workin spacewhichis now commonto work in almostall media.Eachcreatespictureswhichchallengeacceptednotionsof beautyand the hierarchyof traditionalphotographicpractice,while addressingcomplexsub-textsabout cultural heritage,gender,death,andpersonalpolitics.What is theconstructionof sexualor culturalidentity? How doesthe readingof the pop or historicalmeaningof landscapeimpactour understandingof its definition?Negotiatingcomplicatedsubjects,eachfrom a positionof authority,theseareartistswho resistthe roleof "photographer"and employphotographyto achievelayeredconceptualimages.

The titleof the exhibitionevolvedout of somesenseof ironyaboutthe approachto makingan image versusitsfinalform. "Picturing"ormakinga pictureisa differentactfrom takinga picture.It implies, perhaps,an inclusiveor provocativeapproachto a subjectthat is a slowread. The distancebetween theseartistsand theirsubjectis imposedby a processwhichcamouflages,howevertemporary,their stancein relationshipto it. Contraryto themoreexplicitorovertlysubjectivenatureof thevideowork, the ritualhereis in the makingratherthan on the sleeve.

-© CorneliaH. Butler, Curator, Picturing Ritual, 1993

Jack Pierson, Jellyfish II, I 993, Ektacolor print, 40 x30"

(Courtesy Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York)

An exhibitionof work by GregoryCrewdson,JeanneDunning,Douglschar,Jack Pierson,LornaSimpson,CarolienStikker,and ElaineTin Nyo.

Soperhapswe havebeenlookingin the wrongplacesfor the typesof imagesthat we can believe in, that can induce change in our lives. Perhaps it is not the event or documentary or propagandisticimage that we seek, but the seeminglyinvisible:the image that allows slippage, excess, difference,lacunae,one that returns us to the everyday, but addressesits contradictions and not just its familiarity.1

Snatchedfrom my reveries,I said, "Beauty," and then, morefirmly, "The issueof thenineties will be beauty"----a totalimprovisatorygoof-an off-the-wall,jump-start, free-associationthat rose unbidden to my lipsfrom God knows where. Or perhapsI was beingironic, wishingit so but not believingit likely. I don't know, but the totaluncomprehendingsilencethat greetedthis modest proposallent it immediatecredencefor me. 2

Ritual is perhaps too culturally loaded a term to codify the array of photographic strategies this exhibition seeks to inscribe. The initial impulse for the project evolved out of a feeling that something had been left out of recent exhibitions that have gathered work that deploys references to the domestic as a way of deconstructing inherited and sacrosanct notions about gender, class, and their attendant power. Culminating in the recent plethora of exhibitions that explore the symbology of clothing in contemporary practice, the majority have focused almost exclusively on sculpture, installation, and, occasionally, painting. The exception might be Pleasures and Terrorsof DomesticComfort at the Museum of Modem Art, which, in the end, adhered to traditionally inscribed notions of the documentary, or "snap shot," approachthe belief in the photograph as record of reality falling safely within the sanctioned category known as straight photography. 3

A brief look at the implications of this term, which must be terribly confining to those who actually practice it, is helpful as a way to articulate what the artists in this exhibition do not do. Coined by Beaumont Newhall in his Historyof Photography,"straight photography" implies first a spatial location that is inextricably linked with pictorialism and Alfred Stieglitz in the nineteenth and twentieth century. 4 The artist, like the pleineairor easel painter, is situated somewhere in front of his or her view and records it with faithful earnestness. Technical manipulation of any kind is disdained and disallowed, particularly in order to preserve the crucial link with landscape (read nature) in the hierarchy of genres.

"Straight" would also seem to imply some brutal honesty or integrity in the form of photography's burdensome relationship to the documentary. There is, apparently, relief contained in the conviction that the photographer (as opposed to the artist who uses photography) is giving it to us straight-that we can count on the image to tell us something about reality which is perhaps otherwise invisible to the "naked" eye. The camera serves as a sort visual aid, "to expand and colonize the territory of the visible." 5

But "straight photography" can now also be read as a term that suggests a much weightier agenda. If the practice of revisionist history or common sense has shown us anything in the last twenty years, it is that the "straight" of the nomenclature is indeed a sign for the often invoked white male heterosexual canon that has rigorously buttressed the trajectory of modernist painting and has dictated that the history of photography hurl rather awkwardly alongside painting's forwardly mobile evolution. It is through the persistent deployment of feminist and cultural theory that artists during the eighties used photography and alternative 6

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Dead Bird Burial Ground), 1993, Ektacolor print, 30x40" (Counesy Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York)

media such as film, video, and projection to create work that infiltrated the status quo, "alternative" again being the operative other to the straight mainstream of the ever-morecommodifiable painting and sculpture. This methodology has been amply documented by journals such as Afterimage, so I will not recite it here. However, it is worth restating that the most rigorous Reagan/Bush-era subversion and protest was and is continually forged by artists of color, women, gays, and lesbians. This dismantling of the hegemonic discourse has taken many forms. For its pitch and agitation, one might site Barbara Kruger's recent work as a sort of visual incantation akin to the elegiac rants of Karen Finley. The entire body of work by David Wojnarowicz is emblematic of unrelenting confrontation that demands res:ponse. The pussy-in-your-face strategy that had been previously mediated by artists' savvy use of text and popular imagery has become the activist battleground of the nineties. It is an imagery of the reasserted body and bodiliness that insists on action.

The area outside or other than "straight photography" might be said to exist in the potent space of marginality as theorized by bell hooks. 6 Rather than reacting against centrist positions in a way that remains subject to them, these artists invent a new language that is potentially more deeply unsettling, more empowered because it is more controlled, more penetrating because more personal. We are forced to understand the work through its slippery but unmistakable subjectivity.

Its odd that while Picturing Ritual began with the curatorial shorthand that stratifies oeuvres and ideas-in this case, sweeping categories based on the classical hierarchy of genres, landscape, still life, memorial, and portraiture-in the end these artists are done the most service when their rich and complicated subject matter is addressed. Formally they each make multiple images or a single image that is the culmination of obsessive preparatory labor of collecting, building, harvesting, and more. Temporality is foregrounded both in the making and reading of the images. It is as if the exaggerated Big Time of the making or looking is punctuated by the image. The aggressive interiority of the process yields economic pictures that act like riddles or whispers of some persistent meaning, protest, or potential eruption. These residual traces tum the cliche of the photographic trace on its head by presenting evidence of something that is unspoken either because of political oppression, as in the case of Loma Simpson, Jeanne Dunning, and Doug Ischar; stifling cultural ideology, as in the case of Gregory Crewdson; or because the subject itself is vast or shifting, as is that ofStikker, Tin Nyo, and Pierson. Each of the artists constructs a narrative to which meaning accrues through the ambiguity of the signifiers or, rather, their open-endedness. Suburban scenes, hallucinogenic anonymous moments, swimming anthropomorphic abstraction, and powerfully inert isolated still-life objects function through implied lack and belie a covert symbology. lt is not surprising perhaps, that at a time when the cynical co-option of symbols is rampant, artists would rearm in a way that somehow characterizes the instability of the end of the century.

Let me begin with the invisibility and blindness of the suburbs. Between classes, a fundamental slippage-the absence of the landscape of voyage. The suburbs present us with a negation of the present; a landscape consumed by its past and its future. Hence the two foci of the suburbs, the nostalgic and the technological. Here is a landscape of apprehension: close to nature, and not consumed by her; close to culture, close enough to consume her . In these overapparent arrangements of interior space, confusion and distance mark the light.7

Carolien Stikker, Untitled, 1993, Cibachrome print, 20 x 24" (Courtesy of the artist)

An appropriate beginning is the overdetermined suburban scenes of Gregory Crewdson. Ahistorical and disturbing, these carefully staged interior/outdoor dioramas have an arresting childlike awe to them. Crewdson works for months gathering and arranging his props to then create one faux-documentary image which, despite its painstaking specificity, is located nowhere in particular. These images are deeply subversive because they embrace the documentary mode to the point of strategic artificiality. The low, close camera angle of B horror films is one of the only overt clues that all is not right in the middle of the road. The paradoxical sense of safety and consumption-articulated as apprehension by Susan Stewart in the above text on the structure of narrative-is where the tension is located in these untitled Orwellian images. Nature is benign and as distanced as the Wild Kingdom of home insurance fame, and as surreal and terrifying as the killer bunnies in the B classic Night of the Lepis.

In his most recent images Crewdson collapses two spatial and temporal continuums. In Untitled(Dirt Mound), the eerily lit background is framed by a ranch-style home and rolling hills. The house is anchored in the distance and isolated by a low wall. Downstage, where we are, is a bizarre mound with chirping birds overhead; the mound is too neat and large to be a compost heap or sandbox. We are reminded instead of the satanic rituals apparently rampant in the nation's suburban enclaves or, perhaps, a natural burial ground on the verge of engulfing the tranquility. What lurks here? These are constructions within constructions. The subtle reference to late sixties and early seventies Earth Art in these dirt forms that echo heroic land, movers like Smithson, Heizer, or de Maria-the rock-and-rollers of contemporary sculptureresonate within these images as well. The current nostalgia for this peculiarly American brand of art-making, which includes sculpting craters, rerouting lightning, and carving canyons, is also a yearning for a greater connection to process and, perhaps, the raw spirituality it implies. Crewdson's images at once mock and embrace the religiosity of the American mythology of landscape. The tamed and untamed find an unlikely coexistence here among the claustrophobic wilderness panorama. 8

The "fascination with American imagery and iconography" 9 that locates Crewdson's work is expressed very differently by Jack Pierson. Critical to Pierson's work as well is a longing or expression of absence, but the ceremony and order is less theatrical and more a sort of ongoing, hazy drama that undulates lazily between the highly personal and the tragically anonymous. Akin to Nan Goldin's or Philip-Lorca Dicorcia's interiors, these oversized prints are casual in their execution but poignant in their implication of human drama. The flowers, abandoned bedroom, and backstage two-shot, provide evidence not so much documentary but cultural. The flat, sometimes deadpan, titles are also bits of cultural detritus: "I really don't know clouds at all," from the sixties Joni Mitchell ballad BothSidesNow, or "He played real good for free," a fragment of American vernacular that exposes its sexual subtext.

Pierson's position behind the camera seems haphazard. He is implicated as an archiver/maker of/participant in the youthful gay culture he excerpts. Like found Polaroids or album covers, both part of the visual array of New York street life, these images function like lyric fragments from a rock-and-roll record. The acrid colors and intentional manipulation of focus or exposure at once filter the cultural icons that signify gay identity, and critique the camouflage

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Dirt Mound), 1993 Ektacolor print, 30x40"

(Courtesy Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York)

Jack Pierson, Jerry in the dressing room, I993

Ektacolor print, 30 x 40"

(Courresy Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York)

Jack Pierson, Dan's bed, rue de Seine, 1993

Ektaco Ior print, 30 x 40"

(Courresy Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York)

.• imposed by straight or mainstream cultural symbology.

This ambiguous subjectivity, where the authorial voice (hand) of the artist is part of the logic of the image either as subject or residual of process, is about power. In an essay about documentary photography Brian Wallis talks about contextual repositionin~ as a pro-active stance:

Photographytakespart in an institutionof powerwhichat everypoint-from thesnapof theshutter to thefile in the archive-involves a subtlenarrativeof selection,segregation,definition, and denial: and second, that understanding the terms of photography'sdiscoursemight providea criticalmeans to interrupt that smooth narration of power at the points where it is confining, misleading, or exclusive.10

Trained as a documentary photographer, Doug lschar's practice scans and disrupts the narrative of popular imagery as it inflects the construction of gay identity. The ritual of American Love, the title of the piece in this exhibition and of his current body of work, brings his career-long investigation out of the fifties and up to the last two decades. In complex wall installations that fluidly combine projected, video, and still imagery, he collages found and made pictures, recontextualizing them to unpack multiple readings.

Like Pierson, lschar has a frank fondness for the images of oppression, allowed by his critical distance from them, but his is a process of explicit reframing. lschar's own relationship to his appropriation is often disarmingly close. In a recent piece called Executorfrom an installation called Bystander at Nexus Center for Contemporary Art, he explored the tragic and alarmingly homophobic response of a community to a young man murdered by Atlanta's "Handcuff Man," the serial maimer William Bennett, Jr., who harmed gay male victims. Always ferreting out the complicity of his audience in the production and apprehension of meaning, lschar inserts the viewer into the conflagration by reporting his own actual role as bystander. The artist met the victim at a gay bar shortly before his death.

lschar is interested in the synapses of memory, Proust's involuntary memory. He sees photography as" an adaptable practice" that can be used to shape the gestation period between the origin of an image and the origin of its meaning. American Love, once an airy disco jingle, can now be read as describing a region of signposts insinuating the erotics of a violent and repressive culture. A slowmotion image of two men wrestling is projected onto a beat-up garage door. The drama of sex/violence, contact/repulsion, is played out repeatedly while the dirtied symbol of hearth and home lends texture to the

Qeroticized physicality of the men's bodies. "Underneath each picture there is always another picture." 11

Artists of color have employed appropriative methodology to reassign power. Lorna Simpson's formulaic dismantling of the stronghold of dominant white culture is through an invented vocabulary that is both personal, stark, and clear. Her sectioned constructions, which combine photography and text, demand to be taken as evidence. As portraits they are effective because the black body is specifically truncated, symbolizing racist assumptions about black physicality (skin, sex), but also as a way the woman of color/woman artist can assert herself rather than be projected upon. We somehow want the figures to come forward as the artist herself, but the works ultimately deny identification as anything but generic emblems that speak about identity through resistence. They interrogate notions of black beauty and transcend their constant physicality to dislodge colonial constructions of African American identity. By reversing the power of the gaze, Simpson disturbs the voyeuristic and transitive linguistic relationship of viewer and gazed upon. This she does as a woman and as an African American.

This linguistic and physical "space in the margins" to which I referred earlier in terms of the configuration of the "other" by the mainstream, in terms of the mainstream, is articulated by cultural critic bell hooks. Simpson questions the absolutes of language like lschar screens the subtexts of images. Each emblematic piece is a kind oflacanian moment where identity

Doug lschar, Executor, 1992 mixed media inscallacion

Nexus Center for Contemporary Art, Atlanta (Courtesyof rhearrisr)

Doug lschar, Surrender, I99 I detail from mixed media installation, Artists' Space, New York City (Courresyof ,he arrisr)

occurs at the instant of visual recognition of oneself in the mirror, though the figures refuse projection. One names oneself as separate from other bodies and the world. This act and its concealment is a trope within the history of African American experience-"doubleconsciousness, alienation and invisibility blues." 12 Simpson excavates this history and the present feminist condition.

All the work in this exhibition describes an encoded but irrepressible body. While Simpson's black female presence is posed and adopts a stance that bears an oblique relationship to the text, Jeanne Dunning's bodies are further abstracted in a strange and elusive group of works that conflate landscape, still life, and portraiture. Biomorphic and anthropomorphic parts are fetishized with equally implied perversity and attention. Of this group of artists, Dunning's practice is by method the most directly photographic: they are, at some level, pictures of things. In their physicality they are perhaps the most removed, however. Irony is heightened by Dunning as a conceptual artist rather than as a photographer. Details, samples, flaws, cracks, and holes: they are constructed (peeled, cut, clipped); photographed, laminated, or mounted; and carefully installed in relationship to one another like objects, each layer of process further distancing and depersonalizing the image and making it less readily available for consumption. They are always just out of reach.

There is no question, I think, that these images resonate in part because of the political climate in which they were made. To return us to the heated conservatism of the eighties for a moment, we might remember that 1989 and 1990 were the height of the Mapplethorpe/Serrano/Helms craze. The implied prurience and eroticism ofDunning's images is a function of mimicry and association and is as oblique as Andreas Serrano's ambigous yellow fluid that buoyed the submerged Christ. The decontextualization of bodily parts which became a favorite fear tactic, used effectively against photography in particular (again, the threat of potential truth), functions as an empowering way of speaking through the authority of images.

Caroline Stikker abstracts to the point of nonrecognition. In an evolution that began with her early rephotographed excerpts from family photographs to the recent work, which involves manipulation of the image in the darkroom, she intuitively selects moments that congeal into de-centered fragments. These mute petri-dish landscapes are actually a composite portrait of a friend. Though Stikker's subject died of cancer, the topography of these floating discs reference AIDS and memory to viewers too accustomed to understanding evil in anaesthetizing images of microorganisms. Like pictures of the AIDS virus by Donald Moffet, they are seductive and elusive. Stikker searches in these images for resolution and solace. In the vertiginous experience of the darkroom, she finds a metaphor for the ungraspability of her subject.

It is useful to reference Stikker's subsequent series of images, titled WelcomeHome, Boys. Again, her relationship with her subject, the GulfWar, was extremely enmeshed. Caught off guard, perhaps exaggerated as a European living in the United States, Stikker self-defensively aimed her camera at the anaesthetizing media blitz to realign her own position vis-a-vis (mis)information. 12 What was the real meaning of blurry news images of hysterical fireworks which, filtered through the matrix of the television screen, appeared only as slightly more orderly version of Scud missiles? Stikker takes back the power by emptying the images and, onto them, collapsing her own ambiguity. Like memorial photographs from the late nineteenth and now late twentieth century, these images offer some presence of absence, some "chilly solace."

Coming full circle, we might conclude with a look at the strangely pro-active ritual of Elaine Tin Nyo, the artists and practicing composter. The photographic evidence provided by the black-and-white pictures titled variously Radish,Parsnip,Compost, or Mums is at once the residual and foundation of an artistic enterprise that involves painting, documenting, eating, feeding, harvesting, composting, and most recently, planting. Tin Nyo began rescuing discarded vegetables from the green-market heaps out of an empathic response to the organic objects as exoticized forms that were outside the realm of popular demand and supply because of some aspect of their physical character. She gleaned fascination from the "imperfections." This generous act is part of a series of interventions that the artist makes to right the environmental havoc in the urban environment around her. Also as part of her ongoing project, and absolutely related to how we decode her photographs, Tin Nyo has made a functioning ecological system with the worms that are her photographic subject. The most recent addition ro the cycle is The SpiritProject,in which the artist will plant grain and distill it in a public space.

The implications of Tin Nyo's Asian Americanness, while not foregrounded in the work, lends richness to the subversions of the formal reference to Edward Weston's famous still-life images. The work is about assimilation on a global scale and, by extension, the potentiality of things to come. Her oblique and sly reverence for her subject, like Dunning's mock Breck girls, rivets our attention while the rug of history is being pulled out from under.

Jeanne Dunning, Untitled Hole, 1990 Cibachrome mounted to plexiglass frame, 42½x34½" (Courtesy Feature,NYC)

Jeanne Dunning, Sample 3, 1990 Cibachrome mounted to plexiglass, I 8 x IS" (CourtesyFeature,NYC)

Lorna Simpson, Nervous Condition, l 992 Color Polaroid and engraved plexiglass, 49½x 20½" (CourtesyJosh Baer Gallery, NYC)

The contextual situation of this exhibition is titillating: first at the Center for Photography, ·- a clean, well-lighted renovated artists' space, and then at the Neuberger Museum of Art, an austere, modernist, early seventies classic by Philip Johnson. The alternative and the institutional. The domestic and the anonymous. The subjective and its remove. It is interesting to wonder, for example, if Elaine Tin Nyo's vegetables can b~ read as informal inanimate portraits in one location, and as Edward Weston descendants in another.

NOTES

l. Brian Wallis, "What Is Not Seen: Subjective Photography and the Political," Camera Lucida, exhibition catalogue, the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Alberta, 1989, p. 9.

2. Dave Hickey, "Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty," The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, (Los Angeles: Art Issues. Press 1993) p. 11.

3. I am grateful to a recent conversation with Deborah Garwood and a reading of her unpublished paper on the historiography of twentieth-century photography, "Feminist Approaches to the History of Photography," Spring, 1993.

4. Wallis, "Questioning Documentary," Aperture, no. 172, Fall 1988.

5. Douglas Crimp, "Pictures," October 8, p. 88, Spring, 1979.

6. See "Choosing the Margin," Yearning: race, gender and cultural politics, (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 145-153.

7. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham, Duke University Press, 1993, p. l.

8. See Deborah Bright, "Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry into the Cultural Meaning of Landscape Photography," The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton, Cambridge, M.l.T. Press, 1989.

9. Gregory Crewdson, gallery handout from Daydream Nation exhibition organized by the artist at Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York, Summer 1993.

10. "Questioning Documentary," Aperture, no. 112, Fall, 1988, p. 60.

11. See Douglas Crimp on the shift in photographic strategies in the eighties as seen in the work of Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and others in the Pictures exhibition at Artists Space, 1977, October 8, p. 87.

12. Beryl Wright, "Back Talk: Recoding the Body," For the Sake of the Viewer, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, New York: Universe Publishing, 1992, p. 12.

13. See my catalogue and exhibition, Warp and Woof: Comfort and Dissent, Artists Space, New York, 1991.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This exhibition allowed me to locate an innovative and quietly radical group of artists about whose work I had only the most intuitive sense over a year ago. The shape and thesis of the exhibition were clarified through conversations with Gregory Crewdson. I am grateful to Kathleen and Colleen Kenyon for their enthusiasm about a rather abstract hunch and for providing a forum for its articulation. Derek Johnston and the entire CPW staff has been patient and supportive throughout. Lauren Wittels of Luhring Augustine Gallery, Feature, and Josh Baer Gallery were always helpful. I thank Micki McGee for providing rigorous moral and critical support and for creating an intelligent video component to the exhibition. Katherine Ware's insights ground this work historically, and I appreciated her shared excitment and critical distance. Finally, my thanks go to the artists, whose work I find beautiful and disturbing.

CORN EL I A H. BUTLER studied art history at Scripps College, Claremont, and the University of California at Berkeley. She is currently curator of contemporary art at the Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York at Purchase. Formerly a curator at Artists' Space in New York, Butler has created interdisciplinary exhibitions and written about contemporary art in its cultural context. She is currently working on an exhibition and book about architecture and the social inscription of space in installation and sculptural work.

Carolien Stikker, Untitled, 1990 Cibachrome print, 20x 24" (Counesy of ,he ar1iS1)

Elaine Tin Nyo, Untitled from Gorsynski Portfolio, (Carrot), 1992 Gelatin stlver print, 20 x 16"

(Counesy of ,he artiSI)

Elaine Tin yo, Untitled from Gorsynski Portfolio, (Oaikon radish), 1992, Gelatin silver print, 20x 16" (Counesy of ihe aniSI)

Gregory Crewdson

Untilted(Butterflies& Jars),1993 Ektacolorprint,30x40"

Untitled(DeadBird BurialGround),1993 Ektaolorprint,30x40"

Untitled(Dirt Mound),1993 Ektacolorprint,30x40" (PrintscourtesyLuhringAugustineGallery,NewYork)

Jeanne Dunning

Detail16,1992

Cibachromemountedto plexiglass,25Y,x32Y," (CourtesyFeature,NewYork)

Head6, 1990

LaminatedCibachromemountedto plexiglass,28Y,x19" (TheArthurandCarolGoldbergCollection,NewYork)

Head9, 1990

LaminatedCibachromemountedto plexiglass,281/ 4 x19" (TheNeubergerandBermanCollection)

Sample3, 1990

Cibachromemountedto plexiglass,18x15" (CourtesyFeature,NewYork)

UntitledHole, Cibachromemountedto plexiglass,42Y,x34Y," (CourtesyFeature,NewYork)

Doug lscha Stay,1993(dedicated toClaytonHartwig,USNavy,deceased,and KendallPruitt,USNavy-suspectedloversaboardtheUSSIowa) Threelightboxes,each1Ox12" (Courtesyoftheartist)

Jack Pe son

Dan'sbed,ruedeSeine,1993

Ektacolorprint,30x40"

(CourtesyLuhringAugustineGallery,NewYork)

Heplayedrealgoodforfree,1993 Ektacolorprint,30x 40"

(CourtesyHeithofffamily,NewYork)

JellyfishII, 1993

Ektacolorprint,30x40"

(CourtesyLuhringAugustineGallery,NewYork)

BreakfastinParis,1993 Ektacolorprint,30x 40" (CourtesyKathleenandRolandAugustine)

Jerryinthedressingroom, 1993 Ektacolorprint,30x 40"

(CourtesyLuhringAugustineGallery,NewYork)

Lorna Simpson

Untitled,1992 ColorPolaroids,plasticplaques,98x162" (CourtesyCollectionPaineWebberGroup,Inc.,NewYork)

Carolien Stikker

Six, Untitled,1990 Cibachromeprints,19Y,x23Y," (Allprintscourtesyoftheartist)

Elaine T n Nyo

Untitledfrom GorsynskiPortfolio(Carrot),1992-93 Gelatinsilverprint,20x16"

Untitledfrom GorsynskiPortfolio(RoundDaikon),1992-93 Gelatinsilverprint,20x16"

Untitledfrom GorsynskiPortfolio(Daikon),1992-93 Gelatinsilverprint,20x16"

Untitledfrom GorsynskiPortfolio(Parsnip),1992-93

Gelatinsilverprint,20x16"

Untitled(Flowers),1992-93

Gelatinsilverprint,20x16"

Untitled(Flowers),1992-93

Gelatinsilverprint,20x16"

Untitled(Flowers),1992-93

Gelatinsilverprint,20x16"

Untitled(CompostingProject#19), 1993

Gelatinsilverprint, 15Y,x12"

Untitled(CompostingProject#21), 1993

Gelatinsilverprint, 15Y,x12"

(Allprintscourtesyoftheartist) 12

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. (-Charles Darwin) Within the American imaginationthe suburban yard is a place of comfort and stability,an oasisof sorts, a plot of land that holdsthe family and home apart from the chaoticmovements of the outside world. It isalsoa placewherethefamily can organizeand make sense of the wildnessof thenaturallandscape.In my photographs,I search under the calm surface of the suburbanlandscapein an effort tofind the darker tensions that liejust beneathdomestic trappings.In the constructedtableauxof scenesin backyardsand gardens,disruptive forcesform the natural world move against the orderedfacades of domesticlife. It is my hopethat thesepictures,taken in and about the house, unearthan air of quiet mystery and dramafrom thisfamiliar setting.

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Dead Bird Burial Ground), 1993 Ektacolor print, 30 x 40" (Courtesy LuhringAttgttsrmeGallery, New York)

DUNNING

C h i c a g o, I 11 i n o i s

Those little black spots inside bananas are cockroach eggs. Bubble gum stays in your stomach for seven years after you swallow it. Yous houldn 'teat watermelon seeds because they will sprout and grown into vines inside your intestines. The imagesthat I use in my photographicwork areof commonplace things-fruits and vegetables,and/or parts of people's bodies. These objectsarerepresentedin such a way thatat first glancethey look like somethingthey're not. They engenderassociationsthat arepotentiallyfar more threateningthan what is literallydepicted. These associationsrelate to aspectsof the physicalreality of our bodiesthat we often deny, suchas imperfections,bodilyfunctions, eroticism,and connectionsbetweendeath,food,and sex. My work makes the everyday seem simultaneously seductive and uncomfortablein order to question the arbitrarybarrierswe erect between what is male and what is female, what is "natural" and what is not, what is sexualizedand what is not, what can and can't be acknowledged,and what is and isn't permitted.

r.hou9

IS

Every openingin thedeadbodywe pluggedwith cotton wadding, and thisthe orderlydid with the aidof a forceps, whileI stoodby and handedhim the materials . ... He put cotton in the earsand nose and mouth, then shovedgreatwads of cotton up the rectum. He tied the penis tightlywith a string.When it was thus made impossiblefor any fluid to leak from the corpsein the courseof its decomposition,we closedthe eyes, coveredthe body with a sheet, and carriedit on a stretcherto the morgue. As we trudgedalong with our load, our boots crunchingon the pebbledwalkway, the dawn was comingup around the majesticcliffs, and therewas a lovelypink glow in sky, as if someonehad made a mountain of strawberryice creamduring the hot tropicalnight.

-(Excerpted from Orderly!, M.R. Werner, 1930.)

Jeanne Dunning, Head 6, I 990

Laminated Cibachrome mounted to plexiglass, 28½ x 19"

(CollectionArthur and CarolGoldberg,New York)

Surrender in Uniform, 1991 Detail from mixed media installation (Courtesyof the artist)

:J. ac k PIERSON

N e w Y o r k, N e w Y o r k

I'll alwayswonderwhatyouwould've saidhadI just asked. Had I .ilill-Asked. What broughtyou to Miami? It was the ultimate opportunity wherein the confrontationcould've been somewhat organic.Your answer might've been uttered spontaneously-the answeryou'd give in a noisy crowd. And now I'd have some slight understandingof what it all meant to you. What broughtyou to Miami?I wish I didn't know. What broughtyou to Miami?I wish I knew how you'd have responded.What broughtyou to Miami? Was it businessor pleasure?Or both. What broughtyou to Miami? If you'd only asked I'd have told you. If you'd only asked I'd have toldyou: Everythingcomesto dust in Miami. Epilogue:Did I ever tell you: I used to call the pay phone in the courtyard of 56 Washington Ave. You were longgone and there was no one left there to talk to. But I'd call knowing someonewould pick up and say "_". And late at nightI'd be connectedto at least the sound of the air in that quarter.

TIN NYO

My work grows out of a need to addressthe devastatingloss of topsoildue to present standardagriculturalpracticeand a concern about solid waste disposalmanagement. I am compostingin my Lower East Side apartment. I am makingsoilin the city. It is a small positiveact in theface of the dauntingecologicalcompromisesI make everyday. Looking into a worm bin is a humbling experience.My plastictub is a microcosmof the cycleof creation:out of decaycomes nourishment. Warms and countlessinvertebrateslive out their life cycles.The hatch, they eat, theydefecate, theygrow, they procreate, theydie, and decay, leavingtheirenvironmenta littlericher.It has the beauty of "a thing in itself."

-( From a flyer circulatedby the artist.)

Jack Pierson, The roses we brought Dan that day in Paris, 1993

Ektacolor print, 30 x 40"

(Courtesy LuhringAugustine Gallery, New York)

Elaine Tin yo, Untitled (Mums), I 992

Gelatin silver print, 16x20" (Courtesy of ,he artist)

STIKKER

B rook I y n, N e w Y o r k

I am interested in using the photographicprocess to create anotherentity througha trans[ormationof what is therealready. To accomplishthis, I extractdetailsor photographthe objectout of focus, therebychangingtheoriginalimageinto somethingelse. The imageson these Cibachromephotographsare detailsof negatives that werephotographedin thedarkroomthroughagrainfocuser( an instrument similarto a microscope).This processrecordsa superenlargedparticle.The imageon thenegativeis of a closefriend who died. This work was made soon after his death in an attempt to understandhis absence. I also tried to extract somethingfrom the image that we do not see or perceivenormally. The fact that I interceptedthe photographiccourse by taking a photographof a negative before it was printed adds an intellectualforce to the process.

SIMPSON

B r o o k I y n, N e w Y o r k

The powerof LornaSimpson'sphotoand text worksderivesfrom a taut balanceof assertionand ambiguity. In these colorPolaroids that are framed in plexiglassengravedwith brief narrative texts or labels, Simpson's exposureof sexual or racialdiscriminationis at once more pointed and more enigmaticthan in her earlierwork. Simpson is most direct and caustic when addressinghow female sexuality is defined, controlled,or negotiated. The struggleof the individualto articulatehis or her own fate .... By being suggestive rather than specific, Simpson effectivelyengagesthe viewer in her quest to give a voice to those who live with the inequalitiesshe confronts in her art.

(-Alice R. Gray, reprintedfrom Art News with permissionfrom Josh Baer Gallery, New York)

H.S. (High School), 1992 Color Polaroid and engraved plexiglass, 491/,"x 20½" (CourresyJosh Baer Gallery, New York)

Carolien Stikker, Untitled, I 990

Cibachrome print, 24x20" (Courtesy of rheartisr)

DirgeWithoutMusic

I am not resignedto the shuttingaway of lovingheartsin the hardground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darknessthey go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned with liliesand with laurelthey go; but I am not resigned. Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminatedust. A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, A formula, a phraseremains,-but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter,the love,-They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegantand curled ls the blossom. Fragrantis the blossom. I know But I do not approve. More preciouswas the lightin your eyes than all the rosesof the world. Down, down, down into the darknessof the grave. Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent,the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Buck in the Snow & Other Poems(New York: Harper and Row, 1928, p. 43)

Jeffrey Silverthorne, Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, 1972, Gelatinsilverprint, 181/,x 153/,,' (Courtesyof the artist)

Photographer unknown maker, American, postmortem portrait of a baby, ca. 1860, Daguerreotype (CourtesyThe]. PaulGetty Museum, Malibu, CA)

IDARK ROOM

The problem of driving in Los Angeles is not the traffic but that there are so many fascinating things to see, making it difficult to concentrate on mundane functions such as staying in one lane. Surging cars will engulf me if my attention lingers too long. I am always mesmerized by the two huge digital signs anchored to the facade of the Hard Rock Cafe in Beverly Hills, that still-thriving relic of 1980s excess. One sign provides. a continual update on world population; the other announces how many acres of rainforest have been destroyed. In the span of one traffic light, many babies are born and many trees are felled. Does the act of creating human life balance the destruction of ancient flora? Does one compel the other? What meaning do we ascribe to them? Not long ago, the creation of life was considered unequivocally good, but in this precarious world it has become an act of ambivalence. Where is the signboard counting deaths, to remind each person of his own limited natural resources? Where is the signboard that clicks off each human being lost to the AIDS epidemic, the signboard for lost souls, the signboard for children who die of malnutrition or are shot to death? Not even the Hard Rock Cafe will let us forget.

"The specter of death-or more precisely its image, its portrait, its many guises-turns up often these days where photography makes its bid for an art audience," 1 Vicki Goldberg writes in her spring 1993 gallery review in The New York Times. Goldberg goes on to enumerate photography exhibitions touching on this theme during a six-month period in the New York area, including Weegee's gruesome dead gangsters; Andres Serrano's sleek Cibachrome prints of bodies in a morgue; still lifes of human body parts by Joel-Peter Witkin; and recent pictures by Diana Michener of preserved fetuses-all work that is appearing in galleries across the country. Museums on both coasts have also sanctioned these images: Harvard University recently published and exhibited post-mortem photographs from their archives under the title Lookingat Death; the exhibition The InterruptedLife was presented in late 1991 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in So Ho, accompanied by a catalogue; in 1990 the California Museum of Photography in Riverside presented the well-attended exhibition Memento Mori: Death in Nineteenth Century Photography,also with a catalogue.

Photographs of the dead are nothing new, but clearly a barrier has been breached in terms of the public display and commodification of these images. Even if these challenging pictures are purchased by museums and serious collectors, rather than destined for hallways and family rooms across the country, the concurrent marketing of picture books on the subject of death remains to be explained. In addition to the above-mentioned catalogs, Michael Lesy's bizarre 1973 book, Wisconsin Death Trip-an inventory of the insane, the dead, the disasters, and the epidemics of small-town Wisconsin at the tum of the century-was issued in softcover by Doubleday in 1991. And in 1990 T welvetrees Press published the lavish coffee-table book Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photographyin America, with rich reproductions of nineteenth-century post-mortem images from New Yorkopthamologist Stanley Bums's extensive collection of early medical photographs.

Post-mortem photography in the United States dates to the 1840s, when enterprising daguerreians advertised their willingness to make house calls to photograph the dead (often for about twice the price of a live portrait). Not coincidentally, in the nineteenth century about forty percent of American children died before the age of ten, and adults were regularly claimed by disease, accidents, and childbirth. With the advent of photography, ordinary people had a means of preserving their likenesses for posterity. Far more than the painted portrait, the daguerreotype was a true relic-a last impression of the loved one created by light on silver. The polished daguerreotype surface gives the portrait a shimmering, ethereal quality, and the practice of displaying these delicate objects in cases enhances their reliquary status. These very personal images assert the incontrovertible existence of an irreplaceable individual. Pressed between sheets of glass as a flower is preserved in the pages of a book, lifeless but beloved. The shadow has outlasted the subject.

As attitudes toward death changed around the tum of the century making pictures of the dead became less acceptable in this country except under the guise of reportage. 2 Photographs began to be printed on paper, making these images easy to distribute to the public: as cartesde-visiteto be collected in albums of curiosities, as stereographs to be viewed in 3-D in the parlor, or in the form of reproductions in newspapers and magazines. Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession was photographed extensively, but images of the dead president were not

Katherine Ware

-To Jo Tartt and the other pioneers

David Wojnarowicz, Sex Series, 1988-89 Gelatin silver print, 31 x 34½" (Courtesy P.P.O. W., New York)

David Wojnarowicz, Bad Moon Rising, 1989 Acrylic, photography, and collage on wood (CourtesyP.P.O. W., New York)

Carolien Stikker, Untitled, 1993 Cibachrome print, 20 x 24" (Courtesyof the artist)

circulated. Timothy O'Sullivan's still-life compositions of the Civil War dead reached a wide audience via stereographs, as did the work of Alexander Gardner, and George Barnard. Still other photographers vividly recorded the details of unearthed mummies, contorted bodies discovered at Pompeii, catacombs lined with bones, burial customs of other cultures, and grisly hangings and executions. Being mortal, how can we not look?

Photographers began addressing the taboo subject of death in a fine-art context toward the end of this century. Jeffrey Silverthorne's 1972 images taken in the Boston morgue are 90th stylized and brutal, a crucial tension missing from the recent morgue series by Andres Serrano. Joel-Peter Witkin's newly controversial work is also powerful because it so precariously walks the line, finding beauty in death without making death beautiful. By lavishing attention on pierced skin and hollowed cadavers, by revealing the pain and vulnerability of the human body, Witkin forces us to contemplate the mortality we share.

"The slow deterioration of unquestioned religious faith, the rise of a new form of intense individualism, and the disintegration of idealized communal values-some of the same phenomena, albeit in quite different form, that had served as the threshold for the revolution in the Middle Ages' representations of the dead-were at the heart of America's new Victorian vision of mortality," David Stannard writes. "But so too were other concerns that had troubled medieval minds: the frailty of human life, brought powerfully to consciousness by the sudden eruption of epidemic disease, and the place of sensuality-the proper uses and meanings of intimacy and the body." 3 It sounds familiar. The subject of death is no longer academic. Contemporary artists are now grappling with how to portray not merely the dead, but the process of death of friends, family, of self; no hint of a hereafter, just a search for comprehension in the here and now. Larry Sultan gives us a diary of his parents' lives after his father's heart attack; Nan Goldin and Nicholas Nixon have each created extensive series of images documenting the effect of AIDS on individual lives. However personal and confrontational these images are intended to be, the style in which they are presented allows a certain amount of distance on the part of the viewer.

Nicholas and Bebe Nixon's 1991 book People with AIDS movingly gives a name, a story, and a face to fifteen victims of the HIV virus. The subjects were all photographed and interviewed after they became sick, and the book follows their decline. In one photograph, the grieving family is posed together with their young son, a person with a disease. "What we were trying to do was impossible," the Nixons write in the foreword to the book, "to record the illness and the dying of ordinary people with so much candor and so little cant that even total strangers might be moved". 4 We are left with the record of their physical and mental decay, not just their last moment of life. The challenge now is not just to maintain the presence of the deceased but to testify to his struggle as a filmic memento mori.

The failure of the health care system in the United States demonstrates a pervasive lack of respect for the human body and thus for human life. People are angry. People are sick in body and soul. "A sociopolitical power struggle has ignited between a death-denying cultural establishment and the dying themselves, who have been relegated to the economic, ethnic, and sexual margins. On all fronts, death and the dying are emerging from the ghetto of the unseen, battling for acknowledgment by the collective eye," Kristen Brooke Schleifer writes in a review of The Interrupted Life. 5

Running out of time, David Wojnarowicz focused his rage in words, paintings, and photographs about his own death from AIDS. It's confrontational work about the decay of his body and the decay of our society. What has happened to us?" A camera in hand can keep our bodies and our psychic and physical needs visible in a country where those needs are being legislated into invisibility more and more," Wojnarowicz writes. "A camera in hand can create a socially divine moment in late twentieth-century style and methods of telecommunications. A camera in hand can produce images of authenticity that break down the walls of statesanctioned ignorance in the forms of mass media/mass hypnosis and stir people to do what is considered taboo and that is to speak." 6

Photography is a useful tool in this enterprise because of its reputation for recording fact and its equally strong nostalgic resonance. The camera's special ability to capture detail allows us to examine a subject with scientific intensity, but because the moment captured is necessarily in the past, we are also susceptible to the play of memory, to feelings of loss. As Roland Barthes notes, "the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been 18

Nan Goldin, Cookie in her Casket, NYC, 1989 Cibachrome print, 20x 24"

Nan Goldin, Cookie at Vittorio's Wake, NYC, 1989 Cibachrome print, 20 x 24"

Nan Goldin, Alf at my Bon Voyage Party, NYC, 1991 Cibachrome print, 20x24" (All Goldin imagescounesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York)

real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive ... but by shifting this reality to the past ("this has been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead." 7

How do we come to terms with disappearances? The visceral, sexual, transitory nature of much of contemporary art seeks to express the physicality and the ephemerality of human life. If mourning rituals in the nineteenth-century centered on the intolerable death of another, the loss of a loved one, (hence the need to retain his presence photographically), in the late twentieth century our attention appears to be focused on the death of another as a symbolic death, death with a capital "D", foreshadowing our own decline. Representations of the human form seem too literal for addressing these issues, yet in evoking the mystery and horror of the human body, we can rivet the viewer on a gut level. Like when you watch someone dancing on stage, and your legs begin to twitch involuntarily. Like whe·n you hear a dentist's drill and wince.

The Los Angeles Times recently ran a feature about a man who brought a human brain to an elementary school science class. In the picture that accompanied the article, some kids touched it and some children covered their eyes. To hold someone's brain in your hands, makes us vulnerable-this organ that generates our most profound thoughts and reminds us where we left the car keys, that is responsible for our laughter and our tears. As John Coplans's graphic self-portraits of his aging, hairy body require each of us to consider the perishability of our own flesh, Jeanne Dunning's glistening Cibachromes of stewed tomatoes, show us what our insides look like. It's central to who we are, all of us, without exception. By drawing on this sensation, artists are able not only to get our full attention but to tap into deeper associations. The artists in Picturing Ritual walk a tightrope, between visceral and clinical. On some level we must identify with the picture while also maintaining cool scrutiny.

Not to enshrine or resurrect the dead of the 1990s, but to try to remember, to understand, and to bring the private losses into the public sphere: Carolien Stikker's photographs balance these motives successfully. Using a grainfocuser (similar to a microscope), she rephotographs details of her own out-of-focus negatives-images of someone she cared about who died and also of his possessions. From this level of remove, Stikker conducts her autopsy, laying bare the organic world we share with her subject. We are not offered his name or history. These large Cibachrome prints are varnished for extra glossiness and displayed together without glazing to encourage our scrutiny and analysis of death, unlike the daguerreotype, whose subject is separated from us by a glass barrier, through which we m ay not pass but can only gaze curiously.

At the same time, Stikker's inquiry is also a personal one, because she is examining the death of a friend. These extreme close-ups, abstracted from representation, are an attempt to comprehend her loss. She shows us the biological fingerprint of a man, a subjective view of the cells and atoms that made up his world. In the process, she transforms the loved one into a new creation. If we study the pictures long enough, will we find a map for this mystical journey to we know not where? -© Katherine C. Ware, 1993

NOTES

1. "Is Death Resurrected as an Art Form" (May 2, 1993), p. 35-36.

2. James Van Der Zee'scelestial funeral montages of the 1930s are a notable exception. In his photographs the dead are usually shown in coffins, surrounded by floral tributes and often in the presence heavenly visitors. These works continue the tradition of artistic post-mortem portraits for personal use.

3. "Sex, Death, and Daguerreotypes: Toward an Understanding of Image as Elegy," in John Wood, ed., America and the Daguerreotype{Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991 ), pp. 86-87.

4. Boston: David R. Godine, 1991, p. vii. Many members of the book project donated their services or worked at cost, and the proceeds from the book were donated to the Hospice at Mission Hill in Boston.

5. "Physical Evidence: Imaging Death," in The Prim Collector'sNewsletter (vol. XXII, no. 6, JanuaryFebruary, 1992), pp. 1, 194-195.

6. Reprinted in Aperture ("The Body in Question," no. 121, Fall, 1990), pp. 26-29.

7. Camera Lucinda, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 78.

KATHE R IN E WARE is a curatorial assistant in the department of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California. She was co-curator for the recent Getty exhibition Women on the Edge: Twenty Photographers in Europe, 1919-1939. Previous career development includes curatorial work at the San Francisco Museum of Modem Art and the Oakland Museum. From 1982 to 1985 Ware served as the catalogue editor for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. In addition to post-mortem photographs, her research interests are German and American photographs of the l 920s-1940s.

John Coplans, Self Portrait, I984 Gelatin silver print, 24 x 20" (CourtesyAndrea RosenGallery, New York)

Jeanne Dunning, Detail 16, 1992 Cibachrome mounted to plexiglas frame, 251/zx32 ½" (Courtesy Feature,New York)

John Coplans, Self Portrait, I984 Gelatin silver print, I 4x 11" (CourtesyAndrea RosenGallery, New York)

A VIDEO EXHIBITIO r

Curatedby M i ck i M c G e e

<.P1091amc;lf

Excerptfromavideotapedinterviewwith RichardSchechner producedby the VideoDataBank(1 minute);GlassJawby Michael O'Reilly (b&w videotape, 17 minutes, 1991); Mitchell'sDeathby Linda Montano(b&w videotape,22 minutes,1978); Cyclesby ZeinabuireneDavis(b&w film transferredto video,18 minutes,1988)

<.P1091am:J3

ExcerptfromavideotapedinterviewwithKarenFinleyproduced by the VideoDataBank(1 minute);VoicesoftheMorningby MeenaNanji(b&w videotape,14 minutes,1992); Listento YourHeartbyBarryEllsworth(color16mmfilm transferredto video,30 seconds,1992);FromRomancetoRitualby Peggy Ahwesh(colorfilm transferredto video,21 minutes,1985)

Michael O'Reilly, video still from Gln.ss Jaw

Uncertainty-it's one of the few things we can be sure of. This truism-reminiscent of the classic paradox of the honesty of the man who utters the statement "I am lying"-marks a moment when systems of signification, with their binary basis, fail us. It is against this backdrop of the ever-present possibility of the unpredictable and the binary shortcomings of language that humankind has fashioned rituals.

•

While there is perhaps somewhat less uncertainty for contemporary man than for our Paleolithic ancestors, untimely deaths, inexplicable illnesses, and unforeseeable accidents continue to challenge our capacity for understanding. In our secular society, where rational thought is privileged, rituals, with their egalitarian and potentially disruptive effects, have fallen into disuse and obscurity, while their hierarchical and stabilizing, counterpartsceremonies and spectacles-have flourished (Grimes, 173; Driver, 159). What remains of rituals are attenuated gestures: candles blown out on a birthday cake, rice showered on newlyweds, gifts stacked under an electrically lit, chemically flocked tree. In response to this poverty of ritual, performance artists have represented themselves as new shamans or magicians, providing transformative experiences for themselves and their audiences (Schechner, xv-xvi). In the words of performance artist Karen Finley, "We felt it was our responsibility to deal with transformation-that we were the priests and priestesses of culture" (Jaremba, 1990).

Film and video artists have also taken up the task of presenting and representing ritual. Often, as is the case in Michael O'Reilly's GlassJaw, Linda Montano's Mitchell's Death, and Zeinabu irene Davis's Cycles, the artists respond to uncertainties and surprises posed by life's passages-an unexpected injury, an untimely death, or the unpredictable arrival of one's period. In the work of Meena Nanji Voices of Morning, Barry Ellsworth Listen to Your Heart, and Peggy Ahwesh From Romance to Ritual, rituals become the subject of their tape or film investigations: Nanj i explores the impact of Islamic fundamentalist proscriptions; Ellsworth questions the advisability of routine circumcision; and Ahwesh suggests that a pre-patriarchal ritualized sexuality may be buried under romantic fantasy. While by no means comprehensive, the experimental film and videotapes featured in RitualResponses& RitualSubversions,suggest the vital importance of revisiting and reinventing ritual.

To consider the films and videotapes featured in Ritual Responses& Ritual Subversions,it is helpful to examine the concept of "liminality," which anthropologist Victor Turner has borrowed from Belgian folklorist Arnold Van Gennep (Turner, 1977, 37). Taken from the Latin word limen, meaning "threshold," the liminal is seen as one of three stages in ritual. For Van Gennep, and for T umer after him, rituals are rites of passage or transition that can be roughly identified in three stages: separation, marginalization (the liminal stage), and reaggregation or reincorporation into the social group. Rites of separation include wasl).ing, cleansing, and purification; liminal, or threshold, rites often include sequestration, nakedness, or ritualized ordeals, such as a subincision; and rites of reincorporation feature the sharing of food or the ritual offering of foodstuffs (Driver, 159; Tum er, 1977, 3 7 ). The liminal stage is characterized by being in between fixed states and is consequently transgressive (or, in Mary Douglas's paradigm, "polluting"), since one defies categorization (Turner, 37). Because of their transgressive, potentially polluting state, the "liminaries" are often secluded, sequestered, or treated as though invisible until they are transformed into their post-liminal state and reincorporated into the social group with a new status. In this sense ritual is simultaneously highly destabilizing-in that the social status of an individual is thrown into question-and also restabilizing, in that the individual is reincorporated into the social group with a new, and at least temporarily, fixed identity.

In Glass Jaw, videomaker MICHAEL O'REILLY recounts the excruciating series of transitions and sequestrations which accompanied his abrupt departure from the world of the able-bodied. In April, 1991, O'Reilly's jaw was broken in a bicycle accident; just three months later he was brutally assaulted and, as a result of the injuries he sustained, required brain surgery. His passage-from health to near death to l.C.U. patient to a convalescing recipient of meager public assistance-is represented in a dizzying series of kaleidoscope images: spinning medical charts and food stamps, a spiral-shaped scar, the swirling vortex ofliquid food in a blender-his primary source of sustenance. Time, which has a linear character in quotidian life, takes on a spiraling quality associated with ritual. He becomes preoccupied with blender drinks, swapping recipes for liquid foods with a hospitalized friend, and on the hospital bills, which keep arriving at his home despite the fact that he has no means of paying them. Throughout GlassJaw, O'Reilly captures the disorientation of his sudden forced residence in the world of the injured.

Mourning, like the period of convalescence that follows an accident, is a period of healing. While mourning the death of her ex-husband, LINDA MONT ANO created several performances, one of which was subsequently transformed into a videotape. Mitchell's Death, originally presented as a performance at the Center for Music Experiments at the University of California at San Diego in 1978, details the story of her ex-husband's suicide and its aftermath. As Montano chants the story of her husband's death, a close-up of her white-

Michael O'Reilly, video still, Glass Jaw Courtesy Video Data Bank

Linda Montano, video still, Mitchell's Death

Zeinabu irene Davis, video still, Cycles

Meena Nanji, video still, Voices of the Morning

painted face comes slowly into focus, revealing that acupuncture needles are inserted into points across her face. Emotional pain is rendered physical in this image of suffering, transformation, and healing.

A major figure in the movement to integrate art into daily life by creating "lifelike art," Montano's performance work often involves rituals of endurance. In 1984 she embarked on a year-long collaboration with performance artist Tehching Hsieh, in which the two artists were tied together at the waist with an eight-foot rope, requiring that the two live, work, and sleep together for the entire year without touching. One Year Performance, as the piece was called, gained international attention when a story about the pair was picked up by the Associated Press wire service. With Mitchell's Death, Montano made the ordeal of mourning into a process to be shared with the community, rather than concealed and sequestered.

The state of transition represented in ZEINABU iRENE DA VIS's Cycles is neither tragic nor unexpected, but commonplace. Most women are familiar with the anticipation that precedes the arrival of their periods, and many find themselves gripped with a desire to clean and reorder their homes. Cycles depicts this anticipation as a joyous time of renewal: Exuberant African and Caribbean music mixed with the ticking of a clock fills the soundtrack as a woman vacuums carpets, scrubs floors, washes toilets, and finally bathes herself before curling up in bed to dream of a series of playful encounters.

O'Reilly, Montano, and Davis each use art-making to mark passages in their lives, whether tragic or joyous. Their work suggests the importance of making meaning in the face of inexplicable events, of organizing and containing experiences that might otherwise be overwhelming. While each of these artists constructed personal, ritualized responses to the events of their lives, rituals are most often a collective experience and are not necessarily emancipatory for the individual participant. For film and videomakers Nanji, Ellsworth, and Ahwesh, collective rituals are to be examined, evaluated, and in the case of Nanji and Ahwesh, reclaimed and remade.

Voices of the Morning, MEENA NANJI's first videotape, describes the psychological effects of women coming of age under orthodox Islamic law. A girl is born under a towering minaret, and the process of being born into culture begins as her first cry melds with the sound of the morning prayers. Masked and unmasked-her face coated in the cleansing clay of a facial or wrapped in the cloth of a chador-the woman describes the customs and rituals by which her self is emptied to make room for the needs of a man. Behind the veil her body is protected as her most prized possession and simultaneously concealed as a source of greatest shame. Her face concealed and her future uncertain, the woman searches the lines of her palm for a sign of her fate which she cannot locate in the fluid script of Arabic, in the stories of her culture. She asks herself if it could be her fate to reinscribe her fate, if it could be that it is her destiny to rewrite her destiny. While Voices of the Morning describes the process by which a woman is socialized to attend to the needs of a man and the children she is intended to bear for him, it offers the emancipatory image of a woman constructing a self of her own making from the fragments of her culture. Without capitulating to Western notions of liberationwithout becoming Westernized-Nanji represents a self of her own making, reclaiming what Westerners might see as sign of her weakness as a symbol of her strength.

For infant boys the entry into culture often comes with the first cut of circumcision. In BARRY ELLSWORTH's Listen to Your Heart, the wisdom of this routine practice is questioned. Produced as part of the C-00 (C-One Hundred) Film Corporation's Direct Effect Series, a series of public service announcements on political and social issues, Listen to Your Heart urges parents to think carefully about the decision to circumcise a newborn, rather than bowing to the standard rationales of hygiene and conformity. While ritual circumcision has become medical routine, this common practice may have profound implications. It has been suggested that castration anxiety, and the misogyny that accompanied this terror, may have its roots not in the discovery of the mother's ostensible "lack," as Freud theorized, but in the painful, never remembered and never quite forgotten, experience of circumcision. If this is the case, then the decision to circumcise an infant is an incomparably political decision, with profound ramifications for gender politics.

If Listen to Your Heart harkens back to the buried memories of infancy, From Romance to Ritual recalls a prehistorical and perhaps prepatriarchal time as PEGGY AHWESH makes reference to and inverts the title ofJessie L. Weston's classic study of the Grail legends. While Weston traces the ways in which archaic ritual forms were supplanted with romantic traditions, Ahwesh's film scraps away at the trappings of romance to suggest a primitive sexuality. Ahwesh's footage is diverse: A woman is interviewed about a passionate and abusive affair with an actor and ex-convict; another woman, seen from above playing at anthropology, constructs an earthen model of a Celtic ritual site in Avebury; a group of women play with Barbie dolls, creating a ribald narrative of a triangle between Ken and two Barbies. Play and interplay figures throughout, as Ahwesh's camerawork suggests marginal identities in transition. In the words offilmmaker and critic Keith Sanborn, with whom Ahwesh has occasionally collaborated:

Could it be that it is her destiny

Meena Nanji, video still, Voices of the Morning

Barry Ellsworth, video still, Listen to Your Heart

Barry Ellsworth, video still, Listen to Your Heart

Peggy Ahwesh, video still, From Romance to Ritual

{Ahwesh] makes it possiblefor [her subjects] to engage in the act of their imaginativeselfconstruction,-much of which takes pl.acein the domain of l.anguage.In short, she makes a very particul.arkind of talkie. In herfilms, we move articul.ately,for what may be the first time, through the Lacanian shifting of the pronouns: I/you/he-she-it. And we experience the shift not only linguistically,but spatiallyin the synchronous,differentialmovement of Margaret'.scamerawith and againstthe movementsof thepeoplewho constructthemselveswithin and againsther view [Sanborn, 1987].

This fluid construction of identity-the tran itory nature of identity:-sugge ts that the self, and by extension, the social realm is always under construction. While it is the work of ritual to facilitate the passage from one identity to another, the stereotypes of romantic ideals reify players in roles. Ahwesh's juxtapositions suggest that as ritual was supplanted with romantic ideals, the fluidity of gendered identities was lost.

For Nanji, Ellsworth, and Ahwesh, rituals are to be reconsidered, and rejected or reinvented, to permit the construction of newly formed selves, and, ultimately, newly made communities. In his analysis of ritual, Turner suggests that ritual activities allow the possibility of what he calls communitas. Distinct from community, which refers to an "area of common living,-communitas refers to an "essential and generic human bond, without which there would be no society" (quoted in Driver, 83, emphasis Turner's). Communitas is a "social antistructure" in which unmediated communication and even communion arise spontaneously between persons of disparate identities (Turner, 1997, 46). This sense of connection, devoid or, or even inverting, normalizing social hierarchies, is reminiscent of the Rabelaisian carnival inversions described by Mikhail Bakhtin in the introduction to Rabelaisand His World. Rituals, as they revise and reorder, are, in T umer's words, "not merely reversive, they are often subversive" ( 1977, 45 ). Seen in this light, the work of the artists represented in Ritual Responses& Ritual Subversions,suggests the value of renewing and reinventing our relationships to ritual, not only as a means for coping with life's uncertainties but also as a way of fostering life's possibilities.-© Micki McGee, 1993

NOTES

Bahktin, Mikhail. Rabelaisand His World. Trans. by Helene lswolsky. Boston: MIT Press, 1968. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

•

Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Driver, Tom F. The Magicof Ritual: Our Need for Liberating Rites That Transfonn Our Lives and Our Communities. San Francisco: Harper/SanFrancisco, 199 I.

Grimes, Ronald L. RitualCriticism: Case Studies in Its Practice, Essayson Its Theory. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

Jaremba, Tom. Interview with Karen Finley ( videotape). Chicago: Video Data Bank, 1990.

Moore, Sally Falk, and Barbara Myerhoof, eds. SecularRitual. Amsterdam: Van Gorcurn, 1977. Roch, Moira. "Matters of Life and Death: Linda Montano Interviewed," HighPerfonnance, vol. 1, no. 4, December, 1978.

Sanborn, Keith. "Margaret's Shifting Pronouns," Su/Jer-8 Millimeter: The Last Frontier, catalogue of the exhibition, Manchester, N.H.: Currier Gallery of Art, 1987. Schechner, Richard, and Mady Schuman, eds. Ritual, Play and Performance: Readings in the Social Sciences/Theatre. New York: Seabury Press, 1976. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969, 19746. _. "Variations on a Theme ofLirninality." In ::iecularRitual. Sally Falk Moore and Barbara Myerhoff, eds. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977.

Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage.Trans. by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

Weston, Jessie L. From Ritualto Romance. Oxford: Cambridge University Press, I 920. Garden City: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1957.

M IC KI MCGEE is an independent media curator and cultural critic. From 1989 through 1992she served as the Media Arts curator at New York City's Artists' Space, where she was responsible for such exhibitions as Disarming Genres, an investigation of the politics of television genres; Reframingthe Family, a consideration of the myriad representations of the family; and UnacceptableAppetites, a media program on the topic of eating disorders and body image. McGee's criticism has appeared in publications including Art & Text, Afterimage, Heresies, and Fuse, as well as in the catalogue of the New Museum's DecadeShow. She has taught critical theory and performance and media studies at Rutger University, The Maryland Institute College of Art, the New School for Social Research, and New York University, where she continues to serve as an adjunct faculty member. McGee also serves as the Director of Programs for the National Writer's Voice Project, a nationwide network of community-based literary arts organizations.

HlTUAL ~UbllE.Bion:i. Video & Filmmakers Biographies

PEGGYAHWESHhasbeeninvolvedin experimental film andvideofor overfifteenyearsasa filmmaker, editor,andcamerawoman.Sheis a memberof the publishingcollectiveEdicionesla Calavera,which makesfilm relatedbooks.Her films include The DeadMan (1990,with KeithSanborn),which has screenedattheMuseumof ModernArt;the InternationalFestivalof WorkbyWomenat Creteil,France; andthe 1991WhitneyBiennial;andMartina'sPlayhouse(1989)whichairedon WNET'sIndependent Focus.Ahweshwasbornin Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania,andlivesin NewYorkCity.

ZEINABUIRENEDAVIShaswritten,produced,and directedfilms includingRecreatingBlackWomen's MediaImage,CrocodileConspiracy,Cycles,andA PowerfulThang.CycleswasincludedintheWhitney Biennialandreceivedseveralawards,amongthem BestDrama,NationalBlackProgrammingConsortium; BestExperimentalFilm,BigMuddyFilmFestival;andBestof Category,BlackFilmmaker'sHallof Fame.In 1991,Daviswasoneof sevenrecipientsof the RockefellerFoundations'Inter-ArtMediaFellowships.Sheis anAssistantProfessorof Filmand Audio Productionat NorthwesternUniversityin Illinois.

BARRYELLSWORTHwasbornandcircumcisedin Boston,Massachusettsandlivesin NewYorkCity. He is a filmmakerwhosecredits include Natural History(1986),Tommy's(1989),andJackandthe NorthwestWind(1992).Heis currentlyworkingon St.Vincent'sNurse:SayingNotoCircumcision.

LINDAMONTANOhas beenexploringthemesof duration,transformation,and alteredconsciousnessin performanceandvideofor the pastfifteen years.Herworkis informedby herinvestigationsof spiritualpractices:shespenttwoyearsin a convent andhasstudiedyogaandZen.Montanoattemptsto obliteratethe distinctionbetweenart and life with theobjectiveof "learninghowto livebetterthrough lifelikeartworks."Sheis an AssistantProfessorof Art at the Universityof Texasat Austin.

MEENANANJI isa videomakerof SouthAsianorigin whowasbornin Kenyaandeducatedin Englandand Los Angeles.Her work dealswith issuesof the globaldiasporaof post-colonialpeoples.Voicesof theMorning,herfirstvideotape,receivedtheJuror's Award of the 1993 Black Maria Film and Video Festival,andthe 1991 LynnBlumenthalMemorial Award.Nanjilivesin LosAngeles,California.

MICHAELO'REILLYwasbornandlivesin Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A film and videomaker,musicianandwriter,hiscreditsincludeGlassJaw(1991) andIOftenDreamofShoes(1992).Heis presently working on a piecethat involvesvideo imagery beamedfrom the space shuttle Discoveryand colorizedpixelvisionfootageto tell thestoryof four grandparentsof four siblings.

A F I L M E X H I B I T I O N

Filmsto be presentedby JohnPruitt, Friday,December3:

The /Jead

Slan Brakhage

All My Life

Bruce Baillie

1lostalgia

llollis Framplon

Untitled

Ernie Gehr

Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons

Hobe1'l Bree,·

11ie Fallen World

Marjo1·ie Keller

A Knowledge 11iey Cannot Lose i\i na Fono1·off

JOHNPRUITThas taught Film History and Aesthetics at Queens College, Princeton University, Cooper Union, and the State University New York at New Paltz; he has been a member of the faculty of Bard College since 1981. Pruitt has published articles in The Center Quarterly (#57), The Downtown Review, Field of Vision, and Motion Picture. His most recent essay is on the film criticism of Jonas Mekas. It appeared in To Free the Cinema, edited by DavidJamesand published by Princeton University Press.

Curatedby PeggyAhwesh,PeterHutton,JohnPruitt

Filmsto be presentedby PeterHutton, Saturday,December4:

The Forest of Bliss

Robert Gardner

Reassemblage

T,·inh T .Vlinh-ha

PETERHUTTON,filmmaker, has produced more than fifteen films, most of which are portraits of cities around the world. His work has been shown in major museums and festivals in America and Europe. He has received: a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; DAAD Berliner Grant; Dutch Film Critics Award; Gugenheim Fellowship; and Rockefeller Foundation Grant. Peter has been an Associate Professor of Film in Bard's undergraduate program and has taught in the Milton A very Graduate Program since 1989. Hutton has been working on a series of landscape portraits in and of the Hudson River Valley. A program of Peter Hutton's most recent films will be presented at the Museum of Modem Art in New York City, April 18, 1994.

Filmsto be presentedby PeggyAhwesh, Sunday,December5:

Romance Sentimental

Sergei Eisenslein

Chant Amore

Jean Genel

looking for Langston

Isaac Julien

PEGGYAHWESHhas shown her work at Cineprobe, the Museum of Modem Art; the 1991 Whitney Biennial, the Berlin International Film Festival; the International Festival of Films by Women in Creteil, France; and "The Other Cinema" in San Francisco. She has received honors from the Jerome Foundation, Art Matters, Inc., NYSCA, WNET/13, the Parabola Arts Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Peggy is a member of Ediciones la Calavera, a small book-publishing collective. She has been a faculty member of the Milton Avery Graduate Program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York since 1990. Ahwesh will be showing her most recent video This Side of Nowhere at the Museum of Modem Art on December 10th, 1993.

FilmscreeningsareheldatthePrestonTheatre,BardCollege,Annandale-on-Hudson,NewYork 8 pm,admission at door:$5,seniors/students/Centermembers$2.50 Filmposterswithcompleteprogramnotesareavailable,free,uponrequest:callorfaxtheCenterfor Photography at Woodstock.

Robert Gardner, on location in Benarcs, India for Forest of Bliss (Coune,y Film Scudy Center, Harvard University)

Hollis Frampton, film still, Nostalgia, 197 I (Courtesy Anthology Film Archive, NYC)

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ITALIAN JOURNEY

Travel workshop with Thomas Carabasi

Two weeks of photographing the Italian countryside including Naples, the Amalfi Coast, Isle of Cappri, Pompey, Tuscany, and Rome.

Reservations due by April 1994.

November13 • December17, 1993

Reception:November13,3-5 pm

PICTURING RITUAL

A visualartexhibitioncuratedby CorneliaH.Butler

RITUALS: SECULAR AND SACRED

A videoexhibitioncuratedby MickiMcGee

December1stAIDS: A DAY WITHOUT ART

GALLERIESCLOSEDFOR JANUARY

February1 • February25, 1994

SELECTIONS FROM THE CENTER'S PERMANENT PRINT COLLECTION CYNDY WARWICK/ SOLO

March5 • April17

Reception:March5, 3 • 5 pm

LANDSCAPE / PORTRAIT / STILL LIFE: THE MODERN WORLDIS IT PHOTOGENIC?

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PAUL YU-YANG/ SOLO:

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April30 • June 12

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