Friday, June 24, 2016

British Lose Right to Claim That Americans Are Dumber

British Lose Right to Claim That Americans Are Dumber

LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—Across the United Kingdom on Friday, Britons mourned their long-cherished right to claim that Americans were significantly dumber than they are.
Luxuriating in the superiority of their intellect over Americans’ has long been a favorite pastime in Britain, surpassing in popularity such games as cricket, darts, and snooker.
But, according to Alistair Dorrinson, a pub owner in North London, British voters have done irreparable damage to the “most enjoyable sport this nation has ever known: namely, treating Americans like idiots.”
“When our countrymen cast their votes yesterday, they didn’t realize they were destroying the most precious leisure activity this nation has ever known,” he said. “Wankers.”
In the face of this startling display of national idiocy, Dorrinson still mustered some of the resilience for which the British people are known. “This is a dark day,” he said. “But I hold out hope that, come November, Americans could become dumber than us once more.”
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Borowitz Report || British Lose Right to Claim That Americans Are Dumber

Borowitz Repo

British Lose Right to Claim That Americans Are Dumber

LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—Across the United Kingdom on Friday, Britons mourned their long-cherished right to claim that Americans were significantly dumber than they are.
Luxuriating in the superiority of their intellect over Americans’ has long been a favorite pastime in Britain, surpassing in popularity such games as cricket, darts, and snooker.
But, according to Alistair Dorrinson, a pub owner in North London, British voters have done irreparable damage to the “most enjoyable sport this nation has ever known: namely, treating Americans like idiots.”
“When our countrymen cast their votes yesterday, they didn’t realize they were destroying the most precious leisure activity this nation has ever known,” he said. “Wankers.”
In the face of this startling display of national idiocy, Dorrinson still mustered some of the resilience for which the British people are known. “This is a dark day,” he said. “But I hold out hope that, come November, Americans could become dumber than us once more.”

In Its New Bowery Home, the International Center of Photography Strives to Stay Relevant



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In Its New Bowery Home, the International Center of Photography Strives to Stay Relevant in the Digital Age, With Mixed Results

The ICP's new home, at 250 Bowery. ©SAUL METNICK
ICP’s new home, at 250 Bowery in Manhattan.
©SAUL METNICK
As it opens its doors again, after moving from Midtown Manhattan to the Bowery, the International Center of Photography should consider changing its name. Its first show is “Private, Public, Secret,” a frenetic exhibition that opens with videos by Doug Rickard, Martine Syms, Jon Rafman, and Natalie Bookchin. Yes, that’s right—four videos, all playing simultaneously, like ads in Times Square. Here is a photography show where still images are equated with moving ones, where Weegee gets literally sidelined in favor of a Zach Blas video and sculpture, and where Kim Kardashian’s selfie book is juxtaposed with a Cindy Sherman photograph. Just what, exactly, is going on here? “Far too much” would be my answer.
“Public, Private, Secret” signals an ICP running on new software—a museum that’s hit hard reset, and decided to reevaluate what the word photo means in the digital age. Its opening show looks at how photographic images, technology, and identity mingle today, and that sounds like it should be great. But it isn’t. It’s a tangle of barely related ideas that never gel—a show that feels, for better and for worse, like my clogged Twitter feed.
You can’t criticize the ICP for playing it safe. Here is a museum that has so dramatically changed its own formula that it feels like an entirely different institution. It’s been over a year since the ICP closed its Midtown location with a massive show of Sebastiao Salgado’s lush nature photography. Although Salgado is a contemporary photographer, his work is done in the spirit of the modernist pioneers the ICP has honored over since it opened in 1974, like Elliott Erwitt, Richard Avedon, and Gordon Parks. (The museum was founded by Robert Capa’s brother.) Many of these artists take a photojournalistic approach to daily life, asking how a camera might be able to capture the beauty and politics hidden away in cities, fashion, wars, celebrity, and art itself.
Installation view of "Public, Private, Secret," 2016, at ICP, New York. MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN/ARTNEWS
Installation view of “Public, Private, Secret,” 2016, at ICP, New York.
MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN/ARTNEWS
Based on its first show, the new ICP wants to be a cutting-edge contemporary art institution rather than a single-medium one. Gone are the soft lighting and spacious hangs of its former space. In its place are white-cube galleries, reminiscent of the interiors of its Bowery neighbor, the New Museum. (A welcome bonus of the new building: all-gender bathrooms, placing the ICP on the right side of history.) Although the new ICP is smaller than its previous space (11,000 square feet, compared to 17,000), it’s now hipper, tighter, and vaguely European, both in overall tone and artist selection.
Set across two floors and organized by ICP’s curator-in-residence, Charlotte Cotton, the inaugural show is colder and more intellectually rigorous than anything I recall seeing at the past ICP, but it’s also more intriguing. It includes some works that are so kooky and difficult that they are unlikely to appear at most New York museums. I’m thinking, in particular, of Rafman’s little masterpiece Mainsqueeze (2014), a video that appropriates various nasty clips from the Internet, among them footage of a fetishist squashing a crayfish. And this, just as a reminder, is one of the first things viewers see at the new ICP. Game on.
Head down a steep flight of stairs, and the offbeat selection of works continues. Postmodern giants like Sherman and Nan Goldin hang alongside up-and-comers like Amalia Ulman and Ann Hirsch (a sound work, among other pieces). Andy Warhol Polaroids appear alongside a Patrick McMullan face book. A 19th-century stereograph card is near Sophie Calle’s photographs. While this is all very strange and absorbing, it’s also extremely difficult to follow. With its images hung on top of images, and its reflective surfaces, and its hours and hours of video, and its paragraphs and paragraphs of wall text, the new ICP isn’t going for clarity on its first go-around.
Kim Kardashian, Selfish, 2015, slideshow, installation view. MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN/ARTNEWS
Kim Kardashian, Selfish, 2015, slideshow, installation view.
MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN/ARTNEWS
To some extent, this all-over quality is intentional—the exhibition is meant to mirror the feeling of surfing YouTube or infinitely scrolling through Pinterest, where it isn’t humanly possible to see everything. At the same time, moving through “Public, Private, Secret” is an anxiety-inducing experience, filled to the brim with pictures, both moving and still, that ought to be presented in a more digestible way.
In fairness to Cotton, her selection of work is strong. Kate Cooper’s video RIGGED (2014), in which a computer-generated jogger runs in place and curls into fetal position, is among the best works on view here. With its plotless logic and eerie female voiceover (“Invisibility is survival,” she says, without any elaboration), it accurately evokes the feeling of being trapped online, a place where pictures of anybody can be seen by everybody, and where things stop making sense.
Nearby is Jill Magid’s Trust (2004), a video from her larger “Evidence Locker” project, for which the artist put herself in public places with the intention of being caught on video by surveillance technology. This also accurately evokes the feeling that cameras are everywhere, as does Yuri Pattison’s 1014 (2015), in which a mysterious camera glides through an apartment via some digital effect. Ultimately, Pattison’s camera lingers on a window—and a computer algorithm then analyzes what it sees.
Installation view of "Public, Private, Secret," 2016, at ICP, New York, showing works, from left by Rashid Johnson and Vik Muniz. MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN/ARTNEWS
Installation view of “Public, Private, Secret,” 2016, at ICP, New York, showing works, from left by Rashid Johnson and Vik Muniz.
MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN/ARTNEWS
The majority of the “Public, Private, Secret” makes an argument that the digital has changed photography. With Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr having become places where thousands and thousands of pictures are exchanged every day, this is a logical idea. The problem: Cotton latches onto it in a way that’s too literal. Included in her show are several feeds curated by Mark Ghuneim and various collaborators. They filter social media for concepts like “The ‘Other’ ” and “Hotness,” for which images are cribbed from Rihanna’s Twitter, among other places. In this context, the message of the feeds lack nuance: people share pictures on the Internet. That’s about as predictable as Donald Trump tweeting something insensitive tomorrow. (Awkwardly, museum visitors can’t access their own social media in the ICP’s basement, which has no cell service.)
And yet, there are parts of “Public, Private, Secret” which are more concise, more thoughtful. When it comes to surveying how photographs can construct identity, this exhibition takes a compelling approach. Nineteenth-century portraits of abolitionist and women’s-rights activist Sojourner Truth hang feet from Rashid Johnson and Vik Muniz portraits, both appropriating Frederick Douglass’s image. Opposite them is Lyle Ashton Harris’s photomontage Appunti per l’Afro-Barocco (2015), a mess of photocopied headlines, Basquiat, African masks, Malcolm X, Baroque paintings, and porn.
Lyle Ashton Harris, Appunti per l'Afro-Barocco, 2015, mixed media collage, installation view.MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN/ARTNEWS
Lyle Ashton Harris, Appunti per l’Afro-Barocco, 2015, mixed media collage, installation view.
MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN/ARTNEWS
In all of these works, photography and blackness have an interesting push-pull effect—which constructs which? But, unfortunately, this mini-essay on blackness in digital photography comes out of an idea so big, it should be a show unto itself. As a result, it feels less like a statement than a detour—a wavelet in a disorganized sea of art.
How can we navigate this world filled with photographic images? What if we’ve lost our way? These, it seems to me, are the questions accidentally proposed by the ICP’s first show, and I wonder if they’re really entirely new ones. It’s been almost 40 years since Douglas Crimp came out with his essay “Pictures,” in which he asked similar questions to those hinted at in “Public, Private, Secret.” But the ICP show does have one major difference, and that is its interest in identity—the most clear, sophisticated theme in the crowded affair.
Identity is a very of-the-moment concern, and it’s one the ICP should consider examining in greater depth. If the ICP decides to shift its focus to the digital, this is welcome—some of the most interesting art being made right now is about technology. In a time when Twitter has been essential to the upcoming election, when all Americans, but especially those of color, live under the threat of constant surveillance, when ISIS uses social media to lure young recruits, and when selfie feminism is debated as a valid form of discourse, the digital has become politicized, and pictures have been essential to how each of these issues gets seen online. With all of these issues tied up in issues of photography, the ICP may have some rich material to explore in the future.
Copyright 2016, Art Media ARTNEWS, llc. 110 Greene Street, 2nd Fl., New York, N.Y. 10012. All rights reserved.


Reinventing the International Center of Photography for the Selfie Age

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Mark Lubell, executive director of the International Center of Photography, outside the center’s new building at 250 Bowery. Credit Brian Harkin for The New York Times
Two years ago, the International Center of Photography bowed to the realities of Manhattan real estate, giving up its Midtown home on Avenue of the Americas and going dark. Now it is set to reopen on June 23 in a new incarnation downtown, after institutional introspection compelled not only by the move but also by the presiding quandary about what, exactly, defines photography today as the medium keeps morphing and mutating within a vast, evolving technological landscape. The smartphone has turned us all into photographers; social media floods us with an endless array of images; omnipresent video threatens the relevance of the still photograph; and the hovering eye of drone surveillance chronicles our every move. The center had to recalibrate.
Its curatorial staff has been investigating the meaning and relevance of photography for years with shows that, at times, either challenged the medium, confirmed the stature of individual photographers or identified significant new work. In 2014, the center’s controversial exhibition “What Is a Photograph?” didn’t try to answer the question, said Carol Squiers, the show’s curator, but simply posed it. It was the right question at the right time, underscoring the challenge ahead for the institution as it searched for a new home.
The center paid $23.5 million for 11,000 square feet of exhibition space at 250 Bowery, across from the New Museum on the Lower East Side and only blocks from the cluster of anti-Chelsea galleries and restaurants that cater to a millennial crowd. An all-glass, street-level facade is intended to draw foot traffic into a visible public space where talks and events are planned.
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Cornell Capa, who founded the institution, outside the original center at 94th Street and Fifth Avenue. Credit Orin Langelle
With its new neighborhood comes an expanded identity. Mark Lubell, the executive director, now refers to the center as an institution dedicated to “photography and visual culture,” a term meant to incorporate the breadth of the technological change in which photography is a malleable part. Mr. Lubell insists that we are no longer even photographers, per se, but, rather, “image makers.”
In the context of such multitentacled image-making — 350 million pictures are uploaded daily on Facebook alone — the center’s curators must make sense of the vast array of imagery presented on myriad platforms and to identify work that most poignantly reflects contemporary experience and warrants historical preservation.
“I look at I.C.P. as an arbiter in this wild, wild west world that we’re living in right now,” Mr. Lubell said in an interview earlier this spring, gesturing to an illustration of the center’s new facade on display in his office, which is still in Midtown. In a world where everyone is taking pictures of everything, he said, “there should be a place with a deep history of the understanding of photography and the power of the image in order to put some of what’s happening today in context.”
The issue was simpler for Cornell Capa, the Magnum photographer who founded the center in 1974 in an elegant neo-Georgian mansion on Fifth Avenue at 94th Street, with galleries in intimate parlors. The impetus to open it derived from Mr. Capa’s growing anxiety in the late 1960s about the diminishing relevance of photojournalism because of the increasing use of film footage on television news. It would be a center for “concerned photography” — the term he coined for social-documentary photography in which, he specified, “genuine human feeling predominates over commercial cynicism or disinterested formalism.”
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“My Meds,” from Natalie Bookchin’s “Testament” series, will be part of the International Center of Photography’s “Public, Private, Secret” show. Credit Natalie Bookchin
The center opened just as photography was gaining stature in the art world, yet it proceeded on a course parallel to the museum world — one in which subject matter took precedence over artistic intent. Its first show was the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, an appropriate choice given Mr. Capa’s relationship to Magnum — his brother, Robert, was a co-founder, along with Cartier-Bresson. All three were exemplars of bedrock photojournalism.
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Willis E. Hartshorn, Mr. Lubell’s predecessor, was executive director from 1994 to 2012, and sharpened the center’s goals. Upon his retirement, Mr. Hartshorn said he had aimed for “greater awareness about how pictures create meaning and an understanding of the impact that they have on us. You know, visual literacy.” To that end, in the last decade the center’s curatorial program stood at the front of the art world’s dialogue about photography. “A Different Kind of Order,” its fourth Triennial, in 2013, featured a roster of contemporary artists, including Mishka Henner, Trevor Paglen and Walid Raad, who have a substantial influence on the making of photographic art today.
The question now is whether it can keep a clear eye on what the medium is becoming without losing sight of its history. The exhibition inaugurating the new Bowery space, “Public, Private, Secret,” is organized by Charlotte Cotton, the center’s first curator in residence. It explores the ways in which self-identity is intertwined with public visibility. At the same time, technology is yielding new breeds of photography, and artists are exploiting the medium’s surveillance capabilities or identifying visual patterns in social media networks.
Visitors will confront their reflections in mirrored partitions meant to suggest our “selfie culture”; Closed Circuit Television cameras will document museumgoers with live feeds projected as pixelated patterns of color on a wall in the public space. The idea here is to pay attention to the visual language of machines, something we are all being conditioned to read.
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This untitled 1979 work by Cindy Sherman will be part of the new International Center of Photography opening show. Credit Cindy Sherman/Metro Pictures
In the main gallery, there will be video-based wall-size projections of work by Natalie Bookchin, Jon Rafman and Doug Rickard, who “represent a clear turn in artistic practice,” Ms. Cotton said, “choosing to gather and sequence found images and footage from the vast terrain of social media.” She said “authorship and artistry reside in the ways in which they sequence and edit seemingly disparate and unconnected visual material” to tell new kinds of stories about contemporary behavior.
Amid construction debris as the galleries were being completed, Ms. Cotton described the heightened sensory effect she hopes to achieve with the installation. “I create shows for people who like to put things in their mouth to see what they taste like,” she said with a wry smile, describing her goal to create a visceral experience. In a separate gallery, work will be shown by established artists who have long explored issues of identity — Sophie Calle, Lyle Ashton Harris, Nan Goldin, Martha Rosler and Larry Sultan, among others.
Asked if the trustees are on board for this journey, Jeffrey A. Rosen, deputy chairman of Lazard and president of the center’s board, projected confidence. “I’m a strong believer,” he said in a telephone interview, adding that the board does not get involved with programming. “The director runs the institution,” he said.
Stefano Tonchi, editor in chief of W Magazine, joined the board four years ago. He doesn’t think that responding to photography’s digital evolution alters the center’s fundamental purpose. On the contrary, “the art of photography has really changed so much,” he said by phone. “I think I.C.P. would really like to chronicle these changes and be in step with the times.”
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Charlotte Cotton, the center’s first curator in residence. Credit Brian Harkin for The New York Times
The senior curators Christopher Phillips and Ms. Squiers are working on the next show, “Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change,” planned for January. “We’re trying to take apart the online visual world and organize it in some way that is more comprehensible,” Ms. Squiers said.
The show’s themes will include “ISIS and the Imagery of Terror.” Ms. Squiers is looking at the organization’s intensive media campaign of propaganda, designed both to lure recruits and to frighten other people. “The very violent material that we see all the time in the American press is only a small part of the visual material that ISIS puts out,” Ms. Squiers said. “In fact, the greater part of its output is a kind of utopian view of what the caliphate is doing for people now and will do for them in the future.”
Another theme of “Perpetual Revolution” will be the impact digital media have had on extreme winter sports. Technology continues to alter our visual experience and even shape our activities. The speed and agility with which GoPro cameras, for example, document treacherous jumps on 500-pound snowmobiles has only increased the bravado of those athletes, making them try ever more dangerous stunts. Ms. Squiers joked that the images in this part of the show might “draw a new demographic of 14-year-old boys into I.C.P. for my little celebration of these sports.”
The center is emphasizing the need to grasp the contemporary moment, but what about the past as prologue? After all, photography evolved with technological advances that changed the look of the image from one era to another.
Asked about the center’s formidable permanent collection, Mr. Lubell insisted that it had not abandoned the history of photography and the masters of the art. Still, no gallery space has been set aside at 250 Bowery to show work from the collection, which is housed at Mana Contemporary, an arts center in Jersey City. At least 85 percent of the 156,000 images in the collection are scanned, and students, scholars and general visitors are able to access the pictures using onsite computers in Jersey City.
“There’s a millennial generation that doesn’t even know some of this great work,” Mr. Lubell said. But some of those people will have to travel across the river from the new center to see what photography once was.
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Photography’s Shifting Identity in an Insta-World

Photography’s Shifting Identity in an Insta-World

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Rashid Johnson’s “Self-Portrait With My Hair Parted Like Frederick Douglass” (2003), left, and Vik Muniz’s “Frederick Douglass, From Pictures of Ink” (2000), at the International Center of Photography’s “Public, Private, Secret” exhibition. Credit Philip Greenberg for The New York Times
The International Center of Photography is back, and welcome. Two years after losing its Midtown Manhattan quarters, the center has reopened on the Bowery, across from the New Museum. The duplex galleries, on street and basement levels, are, technically, larger than the old ones, though they feel boxy and closed-in, at least for the opening show, “Public, Private, Secret.” As if to offset this impression, the show gives evidence that the center’s view of photography itself has expanded.
In its 2014 Triennial, the center made a serious move toward embracing digital media, and now it has fully done so. Photography no longer means pictures printed and framed. It also means images, infinite in number, flowing in real-time data streams and captured on webcams, video blogs, Twitter and Instagram. This institutional shift in emphasis from hard objects to the broad field of visual culture will make old-style connoisseurs crazy, but it is in line with the center’s history.
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Kim Kardashian’s “Selfish” (2015). Credit Philip Greenberg for The New York Times
It was founded in 1974 largely as a showcase for street photography, war photography and other socially committed and essentially journalistic genres: Content was as important as form. The inclusion of digital media maintains that interest, with the internet now functioning as both boulevard and battlefield, and — this really is new — where photographers were once a distinctive and specialized crew, now almost everyone is armed, for better and worse, with picture-taking devices and the means to distribute images.
The defining of better and worse forms the basis for a stimulating and unsettling exhibition. Its digital orientation is established right at the start with a projected video based on borrowings from social media. The piece, by Natalie Bookchin, is divided into thematic sections, each a visual patchwork of talking heads, mostly of young, English-speaking men and women gathered from online video diaries. In one sequence, all the heads speak of their experience with psychiatric medications, in another with losing jobs.
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Natalie Bookchin’s “Testament” (2009-16), left, is a visual patchwork of talking heads, from online video diaries. Credit Philip Greenberg for The New York Times
Ms. Bookchin’s editing is inventive and revealing. Every time a word or phrase common to all the diaries occurs, all the heads say it in unison, interrupting film’s otherwise random-seeming this-speaker-then-that-speaker flow. The overall effect is twofold: You get a sense of the existence of a digitally connected community of suffering, one with a shared vocabulary and set of emotions. You also begin to wonder, as you do when you overhear public cellphone conversations: How is it possible that so many people are living such clichéd lives?
The raw material for a 2012 video by Doug Rickard is also digital, but of a different kind: found images of American crime scenes and police actions uploaded from cellphones and posted on YouTube. Mr. Rickard collages excerpts from various postings into fictional narratives, notable less for their plotlines than for the atmosphere of danger they project. That atmosphere is similar to one generated by news media and the film industry, an adrenalin-fueled mood of fear, suspicion and emergency, encouraging violence.
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Marc Garanger’s portraits of Berber or Muslim women hang over old mug shots. Credit Philip Greenberg for The New York Times
In one way or another, much of the show — assembled by Charlotte Cotton, the center’s first curator in residence, working with Pauline Vermare, associate curator, and Marina Chao, assistant curator — is built around the basic elements of Mr. Rickard’s work: surveillance crossing into voyeurism, visual fiction standing in for truth. But then, hasn’t photography always had a predatory streak, an eye for existential dirt, an impulse to lie if that will grab attention? Sure, and there are plenty of predigital demonstrations of that here.
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Among them are old French and Mexican mug shots of criminal suspects, and a 1942 shot by the Bowery habitué Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, of two drunk-and-disorderly swells cowering behind face-hiding hats in a paddy wagon. Far more complicated are four mug-shot-style portraits of Berber or Muslim women taken in 1960 by Marc Garanger in Algeria, when he was working for the French Army. The women, confined to a concentration camp, were forced to unveil for the sittings and stare at the camera with undisguised, level-eyed fury.
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Martine Syms’s video installation “Lessons I-LXVIII.” Credit Philip Greenberg for The New York Times
These are images of violation. There are others, several associated with celebrity culture. In a 1971 photograph we see Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis dashing across a lawn in Central Park, apparently fleeing the photographer, Ron Galella, who had been stalking her for years. Two internet-savvy contemporary artists, Ann Hirsch and Marisa Olson, turn the humiliation of losing highly visible competitions — a reality dating show, an “American Idol” audition — into triumphs of self-engineered failure. And in a flawless win-win power move, the media star Kim Kardashian assumes the role of auto-stalker, publishing a book consisting entirely of her own selfies.
I can’t speak for Ms. Kardashian, but many of the show’s younger participants are clearly well aware that they, and we, are being observed, photographed, biometrically tracked and profiled whether we want to be or not, and that this is a problem. And at least one artist, Zach Blas, is doing something about it. He has designed a blobby pink plastic mask to thwart facial recognition scanning, a technology with the potential, possibly already realized, of using racial and sexual stereotyping to isolate groups of social undesirables.
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The International Center of Photography’s new location on the Bowery. Credit Philip Greenberg for The New York Times
Racial stereotyping has, of course, a long history and artists have tried all kinds of ways to deal with it. A decade or so ago, the intriguing Chicago-based photographer and filmmaker Barbara DeGenevieve (1947-2014) hired five homeless men, all African-American, to pose nude for her in a hotel room. When she exhibited the results as “The Panhandler Project,” she took serious critical heat, with many viewers calling the work exploitive. Some will still find it so, though as the mechanics of American economic privilege grow starker, her attempt to confuse roles usually dictated by ethnicity, class and gender looks more and more useful.
Ms. Cotton includes only a single photograph from Ms. DeGenevieve’s project, and it’s hard to get much from that. But another meditation on race, and specifically on blackness, Martine Syms’s video installation “Lessons I-LXVIII,” is the show’s most substantial piece in terms of length. It’s composed in 10-minute units, each made up of randomly sorted 30-second clips related to African-American life, lifted from online videos and visual blogs, including home movies, video diaries, police webcams and advertisements. Many of the fragments are hard to grasp on their own, but together they turn the black presence, still marginalized in mainstream American art and culture, into something substantial, integral and self-sustaining, a whole and sufficient cloth.
Ms. Syms’s ambitious work, dated 2014-16, brings us again into the digital realm, which can be uneven ground to visit. A set of flat screens streaming real-time data from Twitter and other social media sources keeps the show in the 24/7 now, where it should be. And the information, organized by Mark Ghuneim, an internet entrepreneur, and students from the center’s New Media Narratives program and sometimes presented in the form of online addresses, gives a good sense of the pervasive influence of digital technology on daily life, whether in police surveillance or assignment of pop star status. At the same time, the piece offers few visual rewards, and demands smartphone finger work to access its information.
And if Ms. Bookchin’s conglomerate snapshot of a video diary culture hints at a condition of passive narcissism as the dominant malady of life inside the digital bubble, Jon Rafman’s short, composite 2014 video “Mainsqueeze” is infinitely more damning. Its seven-minute sequence of found Google Street View images drops you into a deep pit of physical and psychological cruelty, and cracks the door on a dark side of the social media age that this exhibition otherwise barely hints at. No wonder 21st-century karma is in such horrendous shape.
The visual content of this piece is a far cry from the museum quality images usually associated with the center as a collecting institution. And the exhibition itself, with its mirrored walls and jumble of unalike works, has a looseness that most museums, intent on writing clear narratives, would clean up. At this point, though, visual culture — digital production, including photography — is so abundant and changing so fast that no clear narrative is possible. Photography fans hoping that the return of the center will mean a return of its vintage collection may have to wait awhile. This institution, so often ahead of the curve, has other, challenging ideas on its mind, and the less it acts like a museum the better.
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Reinventing the International Center of Photography for the Selfie Age