ART

Who We Are

How We Are

How We Interpret Our Worlds

Season One

• Play Place
• Play Spirituality
• Play Identity
• Play Consumption

Robert Lehman Foundation

PBS
Agnes Gund
The Broad Art Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation

Laurie Anderson – Music, Story, images – begins with a ‘place’ a jumping off point
for her imagination

Why do we fall in love with a Place?

I think we fall in love with ‘places’ the same reason we fall in love with people. It is
exotic and full of energy. Other times b/c they are empty and full of potential,
passionate and irrational and hard to explain.

Why do we fall in love with a ‘place’. Sometimes it is ‘exotic’ or it is huge and full of
possibilities, a place where just about anything can happen. Other times we find
empty vast places. How we move through space, how we ‘trap’ these places and
make them into ‘works of art’
Richard Serra – ‘sculpture’ on large scales

http://www.spliteye.com/serra/installation.htm

Sally Mann –

http://forum.cad.de/foren/ubb/uploads/D13t3r/Balu_Sally.JPG
Ars longa, vita
brevis
New Work by Sally Mann
What Remains from Photo-
Eye
REVIEWED BY
Wayne Bellamy
Sally Mann's latest book, What Remains (Bullfinch, 2003), contains five suites of
extraordinary photographs, by turns horrific and haunting, all focused on mortality
and its aftermath. Mann is no stranger to controversy and this work will provoke
more, but the consummate artistry of her images -- most of them created with the
difficult wet-plate collodion process from the 19th century -- leaves no doubt that her
intentions transcend the predictable objections. Her commentary and a few well-
chosen verses accompanying the images make it explicitly clear that the work is as
much about regeneration as decay, and more about living (and loving) with a full
awareness of the impermanence of life, than with exploiting our shock at
confronting the physical face of death. Thus, although some of the pieces do have a
stomach-churning impact (be forewarned) the overall effect is more Rilkean than
revolting. The last two sections, in particular, redeem and reward the courage
required to view (much less to have created) the photographs in the earlier
sections.

The work has its genesis in the death of Eva, a much-loved greyhound, on
Valentine's Day in 1999. Mann describes how she could not bear to look at the
dog's body when it died, but a year later -- profoundly curious to see how the earth
was reclaiming the "borrowed matter" that had temporarily housed her dog's life --
she exhumed the corpse and meticulously reconstructed Eva's skeleton. The first
group of photographs are meditative studies of fragmentary remains collected
during this process: the slender bones of a toe with its long curved nail intact; a
sheaf of ribs; a solitary canine tooth. The colodion process yields a randomly
irregular surface, and Mann has added a varnish of her own devising. The resulting
patina distances the viewer from the objects represented; strange shadows,
scratches, rips, bleached areas and the like, add mystery and indecipherable
nuance. The effect is poetic and poignant; it is as if the permeable divide between
the living and the dead were itself captured in the frame, as if the photographer
were reaching through that divide, searching wonderingly through those meager
remains for the vanished essence, yearning for some way to restore a connection.

These are Brueghelian nightmares, genuinely artful but only the

more powerfully disturbing because of that.
One may find more relief than poetry in any chemical stains or ripped emulsions
that obscure the subjects of the second group of images. The gaze averted from
death on Valentine's Day is now replaced by an unflinching direct stare. Here we
are shown the corpses and cadavers of human beings who appear to have died
violently. The decomposing bodies are often naked; they often lie twisted on the
earth in wilderness settings. Mann was able to make the photographs through an
agreement with a forensic school, but the aura of permission this bestows does
nothing to lessen the horrific force radiating from the images. These are
Brueghelian nightmares, genuinely artful but only the more powerfully disturbing
because of that. Still, it is probably the case that only such direct countenance of
death can prepare one to experience the concluding suites fully.
Buddhism brought to ancient Japan a heightened awareness of
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