“Photobook” is a relatively new critical term in Western photography. If the 1999 exhibition “Fotografia Publica/Photography in Print, 1919-1939” in Madrid denoted a new museological attention to the form, The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, edited by Andrew Roth (2001), signaled a broader interest. Three years later, The Photobook: A History, coauthored by Margin Parr and Gerry Badger (2004-06), gave the term wider acceptance.

Unlike Parr and Badger, who published what arguably amounts to the greatest post–World War II photobook, addresses Japan’s contributions in a chapter, Kaneko and Vartanian set out in a more nuanced direction. Japanese Photobooks offers a selection of forty odd examples, with detailed annotative text that represents a broad spectrum from the veritable ‘land of photobooks’ that is Japan, a place where the term for the medium, shashinshū, has existed since 1900.

During the period this book covers (1954-1986), print journalism was the main site of presentation for photographers, but the photobook was another important vehicle—more suited for experimentation and individual expression because it creates an intimate and self-contained realm, as opposed to the public space orchestrated by magazines and newspapers. Exhibition opportunities for photography were limited during this period; a handful of galleries sponsored by camera manufacturers exhibited work but “photo galleries” as we know today were virtually non-existent. In fact, the concept of “original prints” did not catch on in Japan until well into the 1980s.

Kaneko and Vartanian narrate this trajectory of postwar Japanese photography from its place in print journalism to the rise of exhibition display. Notably, this shift unfolded in tandem with a conceptual shift from the prints as shashin genkō—meaning “photographic prints prepared as ‘production art’ for publication”—to the original prints as display objects and marketable commodity. Case in point is the revered Kimura Ihei, a hardcore practitioner of prints as shashin genkō, Kimura believed that the true form of photography should be realized only when reproduced in a book or a magazine. However, this attitude makes it “difficult to establish a standard set of terms for printing style or tones” because there are no “master” prints, only reproductions of reproductions. To convey this, Kaneko and Vartanian included his black-and-white book The Eye of Kimura Ihei (1970), which they consider, thanks to superlative printing technology at the time, to be tantamount to his “original prints,” against which subsequent publications may be compared.

Japanese Photobooks includes must-haves such as Kawada Kikuji’s Map (1965), a landmark publication characterized by his challenging images and an elaborate design, and Araki Nobuyoshi’s Sentimental Journey (1971), a controversial volume in which Araki made his private life public. Still, what makes the compendium special is Kaneko’s discerning eye and his intriguing selection of books by lesser known amateurs, including Impressive Landscape (1970) self-published by Sugino Yasushi, a member of Osaka Bijutsu Club, and What Is 10/21? (1969), which documented a violent antiwar demonstration and was published anonymously to conceal the photographers’ identities for fear of political persecution. Books by famous amateurs, such as poet Tanigawa Shuntarō, who inventively combined his poetry and photography, and the artist Yoshioka Yasuhiro, known for his scandalously extreme enlargements of female genitalia, were also represented. If Kaneko’s choice of Underground Generation edited by Kanesaka Kenji (1968) further reveals the significance of photobooks in the antiestablishment movement, that of Shinjuku Thievery Story, ’66-’73 (1973) by Watanabe Katsumi points to the hidden realm of urban underworld.

The tradition of shashinshū is still evident in Japan today, as younger photographers frequently debut by publishing photobooks rather than having exhibitions. The medium’s portability makes it an even more powerful asset in today’s highly fluid world than was ever imaginable during the 1960s and 70s. However, it is integral to remember where it all started.

In a similar vein though larger in scale, Nick Cave (Jack Shainman Gallery) builds figurative sculptures that act more like costumes from twigs and socks. Cave’s sculptures are creatures that in your memory move and dance together in a world their own. They are simple in their structure and playful in their position. These universal bodies are not clear of race or culture, but feel modern in their need to recycle and build off of the common small object made unit for the whole.

Upstairs in Pier 92 the work of yesterday shows off its drawing and painting skills whether established artists like Gorgio Morandi, or the estates of lesser known ‘ab-ex’ painters whose work grows in value despite its lesser magnitude among its contemporaries. The work of the mid-twentieth century feels fresher in its frames than the current work displayed downstairs in Pier 94.

The late Benny Andrews (Michael Rosenfeld Gallery) gets an exhibit almost to himself. Andrews specialized in a figurative work style that held to WPA roots but gained a small following in the 1960’s, together with painters Alice Neel, Rapheal Soyer, and Red Grooms. Like Red Grooms, Andrews adds three-dimensional relief to emphasis different aspects of his paintings: the breasts of a woman, the hat of a Sunday stroller, or the hair of a man lifting a bolder. These additions whether collage or structured behind the paint surface, make the experience of seeing them complete, and their reproduction missing the magic created.

Unbeknownst to many viewers, the Armory Show wasn’t always a vehicle for consumption. Named after the 1913 show that brought cubism to America it has since evolved into the cultural convention it is today. Although it lacks the intensity of it’s namesake, it proves its purpose the same; American collectors will pay for art.

Each piece is ingenious and original. Every component is precisely arranged to express the artist’s meticulous yet playful futuristic vision. When a work is opaque, a peephole, equipped with a thick glass lens, is available for visual access to its interior. Lines, particles, and globes found in medical or gardening materials, such as funnels or synthetic orbs, beads, and nylon string comprise the most characteristic forms in Zezmer’s visual vocabulary. She makes subtle use of color, adhering to neutral tones, with touches of red, blue and orange that lend sophistication and simplicity to the look of the installation. The staggering diversity of small parts woven within and around larger parts creates visual narratives with complex crescendos that evoke musical compositions.

Zezmer’s art brings danger to the fore. The cold seductiveness of plastic orbs and menacing tubes highlights a sense of menace that hints of medical clinics, especially in the pieces “Hints and Allegation,” and “Fiction Factory LS1.” “Community Report LS1,” elicits listening devices; one can almost hear the jumbled wires crackling with overheard tidbits culled from the surveillance of private conversations. The circular slide tray in the piece entitled “Revolver LS1” recalls the obsolescence of the slide projector, since slides have long since been replaced by digital images. To quote the Wordsworth poem “The World Is Too Much With Us,” in our plastic world, clearly, “little we see in nature that is ours.”

In today’s high tech global culture, technologies are obsolete before they hit the streets; we are left to recreate our world with the very non-biodegradable plastics that threaten the balance of the nature that is left to us. In the film, “Kill Bill II,” the mother’s efforts to protect her child from violence are ironic, given the violence transmitted directly into the home by TV. Zezmer’s artistic vision brings us a sculptural equivalent of this contradictory view of human nature. Her elegant sculptures subtly mirror life’s violent side that has managed to run amok, with the help of increasingly pervasive technology.

Photography by misaki matsui.

Since his entrance onto the contemporary art scene in 2008 with his Los Angles show “Life is Beautiful”, Guetta, better known as Mr. Brainwash, has raised a lot of questions, namely ‘is he for real?’ Guetta began to follow the exploits street artists’ Shepard Fairey and Banksy with a digital video camera, but soon Banksy turned the camera on Guetta, encouraging him to create his own persona, which is the end product of Exit Through the Gift Shop, the documentary being billed as ‘the world’s first street art disaster movie’. Critics and gallerists alike have written him off as a hack, or simply a regurgitation of Banksy and Shepard Fairey’s existing work.

Regardless of sentiment, Guetta’s work draws a crowd. During Thursday’s preview (a nod to the beginning of Fashion Week, perhaps) countless people streamed into the exhibit which was covered in sheer square footage of prints. Turning one corner was a wall of Madonna, Yves Saint Laurents, and Tom Fords; turn another and there are contemporary artists mounted six wide and three tall, including Hirst, Warhol, and Haring. Prints of a Banksy caricature are snuck in the grids of both celebrities and artists alike; hooded and bug-eyed, while the proprietors of technological celebrity, including Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg share a less crowded space. The aforementioned tire horse presides over the front of the exhibit, the jumbo-sized cans of paint and Pepto-Bismol scattered throughout the floor dwarf in comparison.

In the lower level, amongst prop-like over sized drums of Behr and seemingly discarded spray paint cans lean some of Brainwash’s more detailed work; using shards of broken CDs and vinyl, Brainwash composed images of celebrated musicians. Notorious B.I.G. leans against Frank Sinatra, sharing company with familiar snapshots of U2, Madonna, David Bowie, and several from the Beatles. Using location to his advantage, Brainwash adds touches and turns this into a nod of the swingin’ Seventies basement, replete with egg swivel chairs, softer lighting, and an over sized boom box that occupies the height of an entire wall.

Without endorsing or refuting his credibility as an artist, Brainwash certainly fulfilled the exhibitions’ namesake. Under his nom de guerre, Guetta created or reproduced images that are easily identifiable; the subjects are no longer individuals, but rather logos in our collective cultural memory.

Text: Aneta Glinkowska
Photo: Kosuke Fujitaka

Dominick Lombardi, Tatooed Tokyo #5, oil on canvas, 2008

An outsider in a foreign city is confronted with an overload of unexpected sights and sounds that make the experience hard to integrate in one’s consciousness. Lombardi has painted his way through poetic remembrances that help him to internalize his authentic portrait of the non-tourist Tokyo. He paints glimpses of offbeat imagery that project a kind of back street appeal of which most tourists take no notice. These atmospheric pictures seem to flicker like fading memories, just barely within the mind’s reach. Lombardi’s images of Tokyo street scenes are set back in space by graffoo-tattoo symbols. These forms, painted with thick graphic lines over the scenes, function as marks of the artist’s consciousness as he recalls the experiences from his trip. He employs the graffoo-tattoo as a unique ever-changing emblem that embodies the creative-destructive component of graffiti as a metaphor for life’s incessant changeability.

These graffoo-tattoo symbols provide a narrative thread that runs through the series, creating contrast in the images, and stimulating emotional tension in the viewer. The paintings do not depict the high tech post-modern skyscrapers or up to the minute fashionable youth of Tokyo; instead they capture ordinary somewhat old buildings, everyday views of street traffic, Japanese men in restaurants eating with friends, girls celebrating a birthday, or an older woman just crossing a street, but wearing a facemask. Masks are used as courteous gestures if one is sick, to protect others from illness; they are also used against air pollution. In the U. S. masks are worn only in hospitals. Traditional underpinnings are very much alive in Japan. As seen in the painting of men at dinner enjoying a stag night out, there is extensive bonding of same sex groups; there seems to be an even greater schism between the sexes than exists in the United States. Perhaps this is just part of the traditional Japanese way of life. This is the Tokyo that still lingers behind the high-tech veneer.

It is a personal view that is not often presented in the West.

Dominick Lombardi, Urchin # 4, mixed media, 2008

Lombardi’s new sand-coated sculptures also on view, created with sand and found plastic objects, send a message to a consumer culture defined by wasteful consumption. On the sandy side, the sculptures depict small gnome-like boys with Mayan features and mournful expressions, who testify to the wrong-thinking cultural practices of littering that despoils the beauty of the environment, natural and man-made. The emotional expression of one side of the sand figures contrasts with the compilation of plastic leftovers that comprise the exposed internal content. These compelling sculptures reinforce the possibilities for increased emphasis on recycling, an assertion whose time has come in an era of growing joblessness. It is an alarming truth that when we throw used objects “out,” they are merely dumped into our environment. They do not disintegrate but remain intact for years; they don’t miraculously evaporate. By being placed on low stands, the sculptures literally become more vulnerable to damage by gallery visitors. Their imploring expressions seem to beg for understanding; we are perhaps meant to realize that nothing disappears in nature; it is merely recreated in renewed forms.

The sculptures and paintings, in different ways, both tap the necessity to create our own world. In the paintings, Lombardi reinvents experiences called forth from memory, thereby recycling glimpses of his Tokyo adventures. They present an unexpected, personal remembrance of a Tokyo that is largely ignored by visitors. It is a view of the underpinnings that still remain in a city famous for its vast new ultra modern skyscraper towers. The soft-edged nostalgic works evoke memory and the passage of time. These are images recalled of places seen in the rapid pace that a short stay affords a visitor.

Dominick Lombardi’s work can be seen at the Rockland Center for the Arts in West Nyack, NY, January 17 – March 7, 2010.

FRESH PAINT
Rockland Center for the Arts
27 South Greenbush road
West Nyack, NY 10994
Phone:: 845-358-0877
Website: http://rocklandartcenter.org/exhibits.html
Artists:: Cecile Chong, Susannah Frosch, Jen P. Harris, D. Dominick Lombardi,
Lisa Sanditz, Holly Sears and Michael Zansky.

It was scheduled to start after dinner, at 9pm and prepared by four artists and “leading” NYC pastry chefs cakes were to be served as the performance.
-Marina Abramovic with Executive Chef Dominique Ansel of Restaurant Daniel
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-Mickalene Thomas with Bob Spiegel of Creative Edge Parties
-Rob Wynn with Lidia Bastianich and Pastry Chef Brooks Headley of Del Posto

Don’t miss the video all the way below.