In Its New Bowery Home, the International Center of Photography Strives to Stay Relevant in the Digital Age, With Mixed Results
ICP’s new home, at 250 Bowery in Manhattan.
©SAUL METNICK“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/ARTNEWSSet 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/ARTNEWSIn 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/ARTNEWSAnd 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/ARTNEWSHow 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.
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