Abraham Lincoln by Sarah Fisher Ames, 1868

Although I liked Greta Pratt’s Lincolns at MASS MoCA–like Elvis impersonators at an Elvis convention–I was happy to see Sarah Fisher Ames’s bust of Lincoln from 1868. Ames’s Lincoln, while idealized, is familiar, human, and there seems something wry and knowing about his expression. The artist clearly views Lincoln with a sympathetic eye and portrays Lincoln as a great man–but approachable, accessible. Although I appreciate the mutable cartoonish Lincolns of the impersonators (as seen by Pratt), and I understand the implied suggestion that Lincoln remains open to interpretation and historical revision, I was moved by this earnestly rendered portrait just a few miles down the road, and reminded at the same time of what was at stake in Lincoln’s time. We find ourselves, today, in another moment when fundamental values hang in the balance. And while one looks for men and women of Lincoln’s stature to pull us back from the brink, one also looks for artists to reclaim the moral high ground. Both kinds of leaders seem in short supply.

Urban Landscape by Zhan Whang

I spent a good deal of time looking at the three Jackson Pollock frieze paintings on display, one belonging to the museum, which has been recently restored. In this era of mega exhibitions, it is a pleasure to be asked to contemplate just three paintings. In a nearby gallery were Jacqueline Humphries’ Seven Sisters, a new series of beautifully luminous paintings reminding one that painting is alive and well, though it may be ignored upriver at MASS MoCA. There was, however, installation art at Williams College Museum–Urban Lanscape by Zhan Whang–a depiction of the cityscape of Beijing rendered in pots and pans and other kitchen objects. It was spectacular at Williams, and would have looked even better in the factory galleries of MASS MoCA.

18 Lincolns, MASS MoCA by Greta Pratt
(no photos allowed in galleries)

The museum is an impressive adaptation of a factory complex along the Hoosic River containing large spaces with 19th century wood beams and columns. Large spaces dictate outsized art, or at least that’s the way most curators approach things. Which means, generally, installation art. House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective was the main show, a gigantic assemblage of assemblages touching on history, politics, and the aesthetics of art exhibitions. A mock dinosaur fossil bigger than any in the Museum of Natural History hovers over one gallery its tail poking through a door into another. The museum website points to an essay by Phillipe Vergne who writes that Huang’s work has: ” brought to my understanding of art as an aesthetic storm, a storm that is the image of the important shifts in aesthetic and theory that have fed the field of art history, its narratives and discourses, over the last twenty years, leaving it baffled.” Putting aside the fact that a field of study does not have consciousness and therefore cannot be baffled, I saw lots of baffled elderly people shuffling through the exhibit.

I was also not terribly amused by Carsten Hoeller’s Amusement Park, which I assume is intended to slow down and decontextualize experience. The museum website states: “Originally trained and employed as a scientist, Hoeller now uses his audience as “subjects”, positioning his work as giant experiments. But, with no data recorded, measurements taken, or objective results achieved, he allows visitors to experiment with themselves.” The result of the experiment I ran on myself was boredom with the art in MASS MoCA and a yearning for the cool stuff outside like in this picture:

Sunshine Pool and Fence Company

We left New York for a week in the Berkshires, the mountains in western Massachusetts. Drove up, via the Taconic Parkway, we are staying at The Porches, a hotel in North Adams across the street from MassMoca, the factory turned modern museum. The Porches is comprised of a row of former workers housing.

The Porches in North Adams, Mass.

North Adams remains largely blue collar despite the decline of its industrial base. But clearly, cultural tourism, not to mention the proximity of natural beauty, has changed the focus of this small city of 14,000. Yesterday, we rented bikes and peddled the Ashuwillticook Trail, formerly a rail line linking the towns along the Hoosic River. It’s about 11 miles–double that if you go both ways as we did. Today, we plan to visit MassMoca.

MassMoca and car wash across from The Porches

Brendan finds Osama

We were in Central Park on Tuesday, and my 7 year old son Brendan scampered up on one of the many rocky outcroppings in the park. As he reached the top a man seated cross-legged below spoke in a loud voice: “I am in New York to…” Then someone yelled “Cut!” I saw that the seated man was–uhh–Osama bin Laden. He was speaking to some cameras and microphones. I called for my son to get down from the rock, and a man came forward wearing a t-shirt with “The Onion” printed on it. Seeing the onion logo I figured it must be some Islamic media outlet.

I told the guy if he was going to have Osama bin Laden sitting here in Central Park he better let the cops know about it. He pointed over my shoulder to a genuine NYPD officer casually leaning against a nearby fence watching over things. Situation obviously under control, I apologized to the man for interrupting their interview–probably another of Osama’s public service announcements–and we headed uptown to the Museum of Natural History.

Blue condominium on the Lower East Side

Back in New York I’ve done a lot of walking around. My friend Anamarie from Berlin was in town, and we strolled the Lower East Side where both of us lived when we were in school at Cooper Union. I wanted to check out the progress of Blue, the condominium designed by architect Bernard Tschumi. 2/3rds of its glass is now in, and it is unquestionably one of the most striking new buildings in New York. I have no doubt that many will hate the insistent blue of Blue, but I think it looks great, especially blue glass against the blue sky on a beautiful summer day.

Irish Hunger Memorial, Battery Park City

We walked downtown past Ground Zero and entered the Irish Hunger Memorial, a facsimile of the landscape of the western coast of Ireland complete with a ruined stone cottage brought over from County Mayo. To the north are the towers of the newest part of Battery Park City. Nearby, vacant lots are under construction, most notably, the site of the future Goldman Sachs headquarters.

Time Warner Center

Today, I walked by the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. Coming out of the subway, I pointed the camera up to the towers with the stainless steel globe mounted in front of the Trump International Hotel. Not an original view, I’m sure, but hard to resist. On the other side of the park I photographed the new Apple Store designed by Bohlin, Cywinski, Jackson architects set in the plaza of the GM building. Fifth Avenue was jammed with tourists, the plaza crowded, and the glass cube with glass spiral staircase magnetically draws people into the Apple (theme park) store.

Apple Store

Sidewalk shed, the New Museum, under construction on the Bowery

Flew to New York on the weekend with my family. Plan to do more Lower East Side photos as well as begin printing the Amsterdam, Berlin, New York portfolio series that I’ve been working on. The Berlin images will include one or two of the new pictures that I posted earlier. Scroll down to see those images. Next week we’ll be in the Berkshires for some outdoor and cultural recreation.

River Spree, Dutch Embassy on right (4×5 film)

A couple of final pictures of Berlin before I turn my attention back to New York. I was looking for the Dutch embassy, designed by Rem Koolhaas, which was completed in the last year. I came across this scene across the Spree from the building. The Fernsehturm (TV tower) was decorated as a soccer ball in the unmistakable magenta of Deutsche Telecom. Although I was focused, during my trip to Berlin, on certain key sites and areas–the Holocaust Memorial and Jewish Museum–I was also looking for more textural views through the seams of the landscape. The embassy is not prominent in the picture, but unlike most of the published architectural views, here one can see how it sits in the cityscape.

I began my Berlin photographic odyssey in 1985 when the city was divided in two–the western part was surrounded by the Wall–and I’ve returned numerous times over the years. Like most visitors to Berlin I still look for remnants of the Wall and the DDR (East German) past. At Potsdamer Platz there is an exhibition comprised of grafittied slabs of the Wall with photos and text information on panels in between. The slabs follows the line of the border, which is marked by bricks set in the pavement. Behind is the Sony Center designed by architect Helmut Jahn.

Wall exhibition at Potsdamer Platz (4×5 film)

Everything in Berlin, it seems, is a potential memorial. Overlooked by most tourists is a nondescript building adjacent to the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof called the Traenenpalast (Palace of Tears). This was the border crossing for train passengers and subway riders. Western day visitors passed through here routinely after undergoing an extremely officious passport control. In my case, on at least a couple of occasions, it meant being ushered with my camera gear into a tiny room to be interrogated about my plans for the day. For East Germans it was the hall where friends and family from the West said their good byes before crossing back to the other side of the world. Hence the “palace of tears.” Today, it is a scruffy-looking performance venue and cultural center.

Traenenpalast (4×5 film)

Scroll down for more Berlin photos and observations.

Back to the Berlin scans. One of my goals while in Berlin was to get a good photograph of the Holocaust Memorial designed by Peter Eisenman. I spent several hours there–a somewhat blustery day with more cloud than sun. The obvious “photographer’s” view of the monument is to emphasize the abstraction of the black slabs. Telephoto lenses nicely compress the space and flatten it out, if you like that kind of thing. The picture I am most satisfied with is almost identical to the digital camera image I posted earlier.

It’s a simple view from the southwest corner of the site. At first it seems to contain a ramdom sprinkling of objects and colors. But after looking at the image awhile I noticed a centrally located diamond shape formed by the lines of the pavement and the tree branches. Just off center a couple holds hands and directly in the middle a group of people behind some trees poses for a camera. The walls of buildings in the rear reinforce the spatial geometry of the picture. The sky vaguely mirrors the slabs of the memorial.

Holocaust Memorial (4×5 film)

The memorial is clearly popular, situated conveniently between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz. It is also located at the heart of what was once the Nazi government quarter, and in the cleared swath of the death strip of the Berlin Wall. The somberness of the dark slabs is lost on the children who run pell mell through the gridded maze. Tourists stand or sit on the slabs posing for snapshots, digital cameras held high at arms length.

Along the east side of the memorial a row of souvenir shops and fast food restaurants has recently been built. The stores sit on a raised wooden veranda with postcard racks and tables and chairs in front. Dunkin’ Donuts and the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Holocaust Memorial and postcard racks (4×5 film)

Pulling down statue of King George III, New York City, July 9, 1776

The following song is loosely based on the Declaration of Indpendence. Lines taken or adapted from the original text are highlighted. The recording was done straight to computer without any benefits of a recording studio. But the quality should be listenable to most ears. Please feel free to share the lyrics and sound file.

declaration.mp3

***

declaration

in the course of human events
these truths betray a liar
red rockets glare our flag still there
over baghdad nights afire

the tyrant king usurps the throne
lets slip the dogs of war
terror thrown a useless bone
to settle obsolete scores

pull the statue down
watch it tip fall and shatter
break his phony crown
and his cronies tumble after

let facts be submitted to a candid world
the chaos of shock and awe
a long train of abuses
he refuses his assent to laws

a shadow state perpetual war
mercenary corporations
complete the works of death
tyranny and desolation

pull the statue down
watch it tip fall and shatter
break his phony crown
and his cronies tumble after

tramped on dragged through
a prison of earthly delights
strip searched and naked
certain unalienable rights

morning light frozen height
the blinding gates of hell
declare the causes which impel
the day the towers fell

pull the statue down
watch it tip fall and shatter
break his phony crown
and his cronies tumble after

throw the gauntlet down
our lives our sacred honor

© Brian Rose

Dutch Indian on the road to the beach at Ijmuiden

Since I’ve begun photographing the city in 1985, much of Berlin continues to lie exposed, whether ruined and abandoned, or under construction and in transition. I stepped into a hinterhof (rear courtyard) of a building between Mauerstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse in the heart of the old government quarter. A number of art galleries had taken over spaces hidden from view from the street, and a hodge podge of different structures, some old, some new, were revealed. I found it a particularly vivid example of the layering of the city.

Courtyard between Mauerstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse (4×5 film)

When I first visited what was East Berlin in ’85 I was shocked by the condition of the buildings, most still showing the scars of World War II, and even the new ones already beginning to look shabby. There were a number of showcases, however, that had received some attention like the Pergamon Museum and Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus, the concert hall. The Neues Museum on the Museum Island, on the other hand, was a ruin. It is finally being renovated based on plans by David Chipperfield.

From the architects’ website: The power of the ruin not least stems from this exposed brickwork shell, investing the building 150 years after it was first imagined, with the indelible presence of a picturesque classical ruin.

Today the building is under construction, covered with scaffolding and towered over by cranes, that ubiquitous element of the Berlin skyline. A shrapnel pocked building was on the right, a piece of a classical collonade stood beyond wire fencing, and a tourist couple stopped to gaze.


Neues Museum under reconstruction (4×5 film)

I have finally gotten my recent Berlin film developed and scanned. The pictures came out well, and there’s a lot to work with. Primarily, I am interested in two or three images to round out the portfolio I am working on: New York, Amsterdam, Berlin.

The Jewish Museum, Berlin (4×5 film)

One of the images has to be this one of the Jewish Museum. Having visited the museum before I had a sense of what I wanted to do, which was to show the relationship between the museum building and the adjacent low income housing projects. The area was virtually obliterated during World War II, and has been rebuilt in a hodge podge manner without any sense of coherence. Libeskind’s museum building, an abstracted Star of David, appears as a jagged thunderbolt in the midst of this landscape.

From the ground it is difficult to visually connect the museum structure to the housing projects, but it’s possible to do so tangentially, showing a piece of the building or a recognizable element of the museum garden. As I wrote before, it is supremely ironic that the residents surrounding the Jewish Museum are largely Muslim immigrants, and evidence of that can be seen in the numerous satellite dishes afixed to the residential buildings.

The day was extremely unsettled with squalls sweeping across the sky. When one particularly fierce looking storm moved in I dashed over to a postion I had scoped out earlier and took a series of pictures with the 4×5 camera.

Jewish Museum garden and nearby housing projects (4×5 film)

Later, I made a photograph looking south toward the apartment towers with the the Garden of Exile and Emigration (the concrete pillars with willows emerging from within) seen in the foreground. This, too, is a successful photograph, but has less drama and mystery. I like the relationship between the concrete structures of the garden and the tower blocks behind.

Shop window, Prince Street, New York

Anselm Kiefer: Velimir Chlebnikov, The Aldrich Museum

On Saturday, drove with friends Art and Eve to Ridgefield, Connecticut to see an exhibition by the German painter Anselm Kiefer who has created a huge multi-paneled piece inspired by the Russian poet Velimir Chlebnikov (1885-1922), one the founders of Russian futurism, the modernist art movement. To quote from the exhibit brochure: “He wrote poems and pamphlets that, through complex mathematical formulae, chart the ebb and flow of conflicts East and West, the creation of global communications systems, and the supposed existence of climactic naval battles every 317 years.”

A peek inside — photography not allowed

The thirty canvases have lead boats and submarines wired to their surfaces along with various bits and pieces of cloth tape, straw, and dead sunflowers. Kiefer designed the shed-like building to house the paintings, and the whole thing was transported from Germany to the garden of the Alddrich. The piece is actually on loan from an anonymous owner and will only be viewable until October 1. Why anyone would acquire such a gargantuan–not to mention important–piece for their personal enjoyment is beyond me.

Nuremberg, Anselm Kiefer, 1980

Kiefer’s work has interested me for a long time. Back in the ’80s as I was beginning to photograph the Iron Curtain border, I saw Kiefer’s landscape oriented paintings at his gallery in New York. I then found these same haunted landscapes traveling across central Europe. I even wrote a song (mp3 file) based on the title of a series of Russian futurist drawings by Krutikov called Cities on the Aerial Paths of Communication, which was about the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of utopian idealism. I find myself attracted to the large themes that Kiefer grapples with so obsessively, though I pursue a less mythological approach.

Oebisfelde, Germany — the Iron Curtain, 1987 (4×5 film)

Grace Glueck of the New York Times writes of Kiefer: “he confronts the realization that civilization is still not a comfortable distance from chaos and may never be.”

Since I left Amsterdam I’ve been been dealing with necessary business stuff, and continuing to work on my portfolio. I picked up the film shot in Berlin, and will post some of the images in the coming days.

On Friday I went up to Connecticut to visit friends Art Presson and Eve Kessler. I’ve know them both since the days when I worked at ICP (International Center of Photography) in the early ’80s. They have an outstanding collection of photography that I am pleased to be a part of. The prints hang all over their house in “salon style,” not always well-lit, but interesting for the unexpected juxtapositions of images. Most of the collection is comprised of black and white prints of modest size. Some of the images are well-known classics–like this one.

Kessler/Presson collection with Albino Sword Swallower by Diane Arbus

Brendan, my son, in front of the Silodam, our apartment building in
Amsterdam

Back to New York with my film from Berlin and the scans I’ve been working on for the past several weeks. These I will be printing for my portfolio. Had a brief visit from my sister, Cathy Rose, who was on her way to a two-week literary workshop in St. Petersburg, Russia.

In Amsterdam all eyes are on World Cup soccer–my Berlin pictures will, inescapably, include evidence of Germany’s hosting of the event. But I am happy to be heading back in the States in time to catch most of the NBA finals. I wonder if the Germans will be able to distract themselves from soccer long enough to see their countryman Dirk Nowitski lead the Dallas Mavericks to a possible title.

On a darker note, the Times of London ran a story today about how the site of Hitler’s bunker adjacent to the Holocaust memorial and Potsdamer Platz has been identified for the first time with a sign in German and English. The reason given for its previous anonymity has always been the fear that it might become a right wing pilgrimage place. I have always felt that history must be acknowledged rather than covered up. Visitors to Berlin come looking for the past whether it be traces of the Wall or vestiges of the Nazi era. The city’s willingness to finally acknowledge the bunker’s location is further evidence of Germany’s confidence in itself as it moves into the future.

Amsterdam, cruise ship on the way to the North Sea

Flew back to Amsterdam. My thoughts now turn to the next trip to New York. Develop film from Berlin and scan last batch of Lower East Side pictures. Waiting patiently for architectural photography commissions to come through.