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
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
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
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
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.
