LUNCH
April 12 – May 19, 2018
Judy Linn
1
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
STAFF
ADVISORY COUNCIL
Vernon Church
Executive Director
Katie Cercone
Theodore S. Berger Thomas G. Devine Thomas K.Y. Hsu John S. Kiely Vivian Kuan
Rachel Maniatis
Corina Larkin
Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director
Shona Masarin-Hurst Programs Director
Christen Martosella
Chase Martin
Kyle Sheahen
Eva Elmore
Aliza Nisenbaum Brian D. Starer Lilly Wei
Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus
Development Associate Programs Assistant
Polly Apfelbaum Lynn Crawford Ian Cooper
Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney
Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass
Sharon Lockhart Juan Sรกnchez
Irving Sandler Lilly Wei
Andrea Zittel
2
CUE Art Foundation is a visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for artists of all ages. Through exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists, writers, and audiences with sustaining, meaningful experiences and resources. CUE’s exhibition program aims to present new and exceptionally strong work by under-recognized and emerging artists based in the United States, and is committed to exhibiting work of all disciplines from living artists. Exhibiting artists are selected via a hybrid process, featuring solo exhibitions curated by established artists, alongside a series of solo and group exhibitions selected by an annual Open Call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, curators and Open Call panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing their exhibition. We are honored to work with artist Arlene Shechet as the curator of this exhibition.
3
LUNCH
Judy Linn
I don’t remember when but a few years ago at the Morgan Library, there was a drawing show with an Ingres drawing and a Cezanne drawing hung face to face. Standing half way between them, I felt I was suspended in a force field of opposing poles of representation. One drawing talked about the object and the other talked about the light around the object, and the more I looked, the more I did not know which drawing did what. As a child brought up on television, I believed the incongruous sequential image before I found words. What I think I do is not what you see. What you see is more important than what I write. The only thing that is true about a photograph is what it lets you think about when you see it. I am not going to tell you what my work is about. That is up to you. Taking a photograph, I don’t want to know what I am looking for. I do know I want to be clear and accurate to what is in front of me and to be hungry for the next one. There are a few moments of grace in editing photographs but the ones I don’t understand, where there is something in them
4
that doesn’t sit right, are the photographs that keep turning up. I am trying to shed the words in my head and openly respond to a visual world. In 1994, I saw a show of de Kooning paintings at the Metropolitan. His paintings from the 70s were ripping themselves apart and coming together all at once. They seemed to create and hold back their own apocalyptic disaster. It made me think about all the art in the entire museum. It made me wonder if all art was made to ward off the inevitable finality of time, the certainty of death, the ever-present misery and loss of everyday life. A few years later, 2009 I think, at the Louvre I saw a beautiful stone Egyptian stele. On it was a perfect rendering of a bunch of scallions carved in low relief. Lying on their side, bound with what looked like a rubber band, they were ancient and timeless and exactly like the ones in my refrigerator. It made me think about the artist who carved them and who must have stood there looking at them just like me, wondering what's for lunch.
Judy Linn was born in Detroit, Michigan and received a BFA from Pratt Institute in 1969. She has had portfolios published in Artforum and BOMB magazine, and a book of her portraits of Patti Smith, Patti Smith 1969 – 1976: Photographs by Judy Linn, was published by Abram Image in 2011. Linn’s photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Art Institute, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Getty Collection, among others. She has received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and grants from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Anonymous Was A Woman, and the Peter S. Reed Foundation. Linn currently lives in New York and teaches at Vassar College.
5
Arlene Shechet Curator-Mentor
There’s never a dull moment when you’re in Judy Linn’s world. Her universe is alive with outstanding things; ordinary stuff and the light and space and color in, around and between the everyday. I love being inside of Judy’s vision because she sees and understands and communicates so broadly, incisively but with a light touch.
are a lot of frames within the photos but Judy insists on exhibiting her finished photos in their unframed state…as paper, simply pinned to the wall. Their availability and the modesty of this presentation gives them unexpected weight as objects. It is also a signal to us that these gently humorous pictures are slyly packed with confidence.
My first take on Judy’s work was that she is a sculptor disguised as a photographer. The green grass shadow blob made from light and a rooster, the big blocks of building that dissolve into a single plane, the yellow bucket holding down the floor with the Egyptian treasure, and the dangling light fixture spilling its guts are all revealing their material state while poking us to see beyond their thingness. I cannot help myself from seeing sculptural potential but I’ve come to see their rightness as pigments settled into paper. There
I know almost nothing about the academic discourse in photography but I know these pictures are deep things, not aloof but empathetic and piercing investigations of what is often ignored. And what’s more, Judy’s luminescent Walmart photo does the same thing for me as a majestic Ellsworth Kelly painting.
6
I’m so pleased to be a part of sharing this work.
Arlene Shechet is a multi-disciplinary sculptor living and working in New York City and the Hudson Valley. In 2015, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston exhibited, All At Once, a twenty-year survey of the artist's work. Historical museum installations include Porcelain, No Simple Matter: Arlene Shechet and the Arnhold Collection at The Frick Collection, NYC, May 2016 – April 2017; and From Here On Now at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Oct 2016 – May 2017. An ambitious public sculpture project will open at Madison Square Park, NYC, September 2018.
CAA Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work, a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship Award, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Walker Art Center; The National Gallery of Art; the Jewish Museum; and the Brooklyn Museum.
Shechet was featured in Art21’s “Art in the Twenty-First Century,” and The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “The Artist Project.” Her numerous awards include the 2016
7
venus, 01.14.2015 wednesday 11:36AM 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 15 x 22 inches Edition 1/3
8
cock, 2008 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 11 x 8.5 inches Edition 1/3
9
10
rocks, 06.29.2016 Wednesday 4:43 PM 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 20.75 x 14 inches Edition 1/3
11
12
LEFT 54th st, 03.08.2005 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 29 x 22.5 inches Edition 1/3 RIGHT pinhole, spring 2008 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 20.25 x 15 inches Edition 1/3
13
shingles,1998 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 28.5 x 21.75 inches Edition 1/3
14
kiss, 2000 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 20.5 x 28 inches Edition 1/3
15
16
walmart, 02.13.2017 3:02PM 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 19 x 28.75 inches Edition 1/3
17
hair, 1999 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 28 x 20 inches Edition 1/3
18
elizabeth st, 70ies 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 15 x 21.75 inches Edition 1/3
19
truck, 2017 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 20.5 x 29 inches Edition 1/3
20
21
lamp shade, 12.06.1972 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 27.75 x 19 inches Edition 1/3
22
swamp, 2001 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 20 x 29 inches Edition 1/3
23
24
dendur, 2001 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 21 x 16 inches Edition 1/3
25
yoga, 1997 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 21.5 x 14.75 inches Edition 3/4
26
The World in a Photograph Alexandra Nicolaides
Sand drifts over the photograph, dusting it lightly in grey. The grey particles float, so softly, to become the hazy sky. Two women face the ocean. A heave and a hold, their hands are raised to the near-imperceptible line of the horizon, while each woman balances on one leg in the soft, wet sand. The women exist within the vast indeterminacies of sea and sky, earth and light. Their look towards the horizon can be seen to stand-in for that of the photographer, Judy Linn. And, as a projection of Linn, the scrutiny of the unknown is innate to the act of creation. Linn’s photograph echoes the early seascapes of Gustave Le Gray. Le Gray combined the sea and sky in his seascapes from separate exposures, with earth, sea, sky, and light bound to the human body through photography. Then, photography could not yet capture the sky
and the sea together – the light that was needed to see the earth obliterated details of the sky. Similarly, Linn as a photographer positions herself as a locus—a fixed position from which to create photographs from the indeterminate. This act of exploration is the pulse of the photographs represented in this exhibition. It calls to the viewer to accept uncertainty and to experience the possibility there. The capturing or framing of the indefinite reveals the inherent contradictions within such seeming infinites as sea or sky, earth or light. Judy Linn’s photographs play with the paradoxes of light. Light is the material funneled through the camera’s aperture to make images. Light illuminates hard to see details, the hidden and latent. Like the car lights shining through
27
the haze in a smoky photograph, the light draws our eye and sharpens our focus. Light also obfuscates: a bleaching pane of light, originating out of the photograph’s frame, covers the back window of a car. Light washes out the color and texture of the car’s trunk and places another, reflected image of gauzy building tops, over the trunk’s itchy carpet. Blinding light plays over the surface of a red-brick apartment building. Chips of reflected white light repeat on the window sills otherwise ensconced in the shadows. Hit with raking light on one side of the building, the windows (with white shades pulled down to shield the rooms from the sun) become orbs. Linn explores how the light we perceive can exist in a liminal space between discovery and destruction. It is in this space that the texture of light and the texture of time connect. William Henry Fox Talbot writes in the second fascicle in The Pencil of Nature (1844): “The sun is just quitting the range of buildings adorned with columns: its façade is already in the shade, but a single shutter standing open projects far enough forward to catch a gleam of sunshine.” Linn’s window sills and Talbot’s shutter are accidental gnomons casting the shadow of time on the world. Linn began photographing in one of the medium’s most experimental and optimistic eras. Photography blossomed with possibility in New York City during the 1970s. Art was exuberant then, but photography,
28
in particular, seemed unencumbered and widely exhibited for the first time in its rapidly aging life. Unlike previous generations, Linn and her fellow artists of that era consumed a vast, soon-to-be global, glut of images. In America’s post-war period, images became ubiquitous. Linn embeds images—paintings, frescoes, sculptures, brands, television screens, reflections—within her photographs. A painted portrait is decapitated by the wooden canopy of a fireplace, fringed in white cotton. The white cloth, however, overspills its banks into the painting, where it joins another painted white cloth on the figure’s clothes. The compression of the painted cloth and the actual cloth posits a conception of the world where the real is the same as the reproduced. Linn describes the photograph as “flattening time,” when “sometimes things get better and sometimes they get worse.” When flat lining time, the asynchronous becomes fixed, and time is negated as a criterium of value. As a result, within the frame of the photograph things exist equally: the picture of a baby and a real baby are equivalent. Playing on this interchangeability, a wad of tape is carelessly slapped onto the image of a baby’s smiling, picture-cute face. The baby is oblivious. Linn has not disguised that this is a photograph, of an image, of a baby, on a cardboard box. In fact, the box is predominant in the photograph. It awkwardly and seemingly haphazardly sits in the front of the image, with the flaps and
albany 2014 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 18.5 x 27.75 inches Edition 1/3
29
box, 12.04.2017 12:35 PM 2017-2018 Archival pigment print 27 x 20.5 inches Edition 1/3
30
corners jutting open, in, and out of the frame. Still, the defaced baby is viscerally disconcerting. The photograph transmutes the baby’s image. The baby feels real again. A photograph of an Ancient Egyptian statue with a yellow bucket proves this sameness with wonderful humor. The pocked grey stone of the statue, the mottled grey stone of the floor, and the pale grey stone of the wall form a material utopia—the statue’s stone as valuable as the floor and the wall. The yellow plastic bucket, at first, seems to trespass into this space, introducing color and kitsch. Despite the few thousand years between the making of the statue and the bucket, the stability of the bucket’s design and use points to a different type of longevity. The bucket will never turn to dust. Where the statue is relegated to the museum, the bucket still functions. The democratization of these components proposes equality. As Linn says, “A nice make-believe world.” Hers is a flat, edged world—an archaic conception of the universe—where time is stable and unvarying. The discovery that the earth was round brought with it the assumption that all could be known. Linn is more interested in what she “doesn’t know, eternally doesn’t know, really doesn’t know.” The edge of the earth. Creating is a way of “controlling the uncontrollable.” Uncertainty and unknowability are reasons to create. To know there is a purpose, that there is meaning, to put meaning on to something, to predefine meaning, is the antithesis of the creative process for Linn. In the stead of these overthought ambitions are the modest and straightforward aspirations of discovery and imagination: to see what the world looks like in a photograph.
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICAUSA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. Alexandra Nicolaides is based in New York. She received her BA in Art History from Wellesley College, a MA in Art History from University College London, and an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from the School of Visual Arts. For over a decade, she has worked as an art consultant for international clients. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student in the Art History, Criticism, and Theory department at Stony Brook University. Mentor Charles Desmarais is the art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. He received the Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism in 2017, and an Art Critic’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979. He spent the years between as a leader of art institutions, including the San Francisco Art Institute; Brooklyn Museum; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Laguna Art Museum; and California Museum of Photography, UC Riverside.
31
CUE Art Foundation's programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals.
MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Anholt Services (USA) Inc. CAF American Donor Fund Compass Group Management LLC Compass Diversified Holdings Lenore Malen and Mark Nelkin The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation New York State Council on the Arts with the support of
Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts
32
All artwork Š Judy Linn. Catalogue design by Shona Masarin-Hurst.