Helen Gee's Limelight : Book Highly Recommended

For seven short years, a coffeehouse in Greenwich Village called Limelight was at the center of the art-photography world. There, owner Helen Gee exhibited the works of such luminaries as Harry Callahan, Bill Brandt, Imogen Cunningham, and Lisette Model at a time when photography was not yet considered an art, and the sticker prices on the prints were a mere fraction of what they'd be today. Limelight is Gee's memoir, a story about the coffeehouse she started, the people she knew, and the times in which she lived.

Even without the coffeehouse, Gee's life is like something out of a novel: at age 16 she left home to live in Greenwich Village with a Chinese painter named Yun Gee. The late '30s and early '40s were hardly a time of racial tolerance in the United States, and so their romance was disliked as much for its interracial nature as for the age difference between the two lovers. After the birth of their daughter, Yun Gee developed schizophrenia, leaving Helen to fend for herself and her child. She did this in a variety of ways before finally hitting on the idea of opening a coffeehouse. In Limelight Gee describes the obstacles she faced in starting the place, the people she met while running it, and the eventual problems--both political and personal--that brought Limelight down. This memoir is both Gee's story and the story of the art community in 1950s, both of which are worth telling.
-The New Yorker

The Private Collection of Fern M. Schad

RWFA / Rick Wester Fine Arts

511 West 25th Street

Suite 205

New York, NY 10001

917.348.8485

This is an exhibition of photographs from the Private Collection of Fern M. Schad. Mrs. Schad and her late husband Tennyson co-founded LIGHT in 1971 in New York, the first art gallery devoted exclusively to exhibition, promotion and sale of contemporary photography, where Rick Wester formerly worked. With LIGHT Mrs. Schad developed some long standing relationships with the artists she worked with including: Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, Harry Callahan, André Kertész, Emmet Gowin. LIGHT was the reason these photographers are what they are today - modern masters. This exhibition is the first time this group of pictures has been brought together in a public venue. The exhibition runs from September 24th to October 29th. I highly recommend going to see the show

Note for Taylor: This image is by Emmet Gowin called Edith with berry Necklace, 1971. It made me think of your project through its style and tribal feel.

The Hijinks of the YES MEN

The Yes Men

"SPECIAL EDITION" NEW YORK POST from The Yes Men

More Info about the 9.21.09 NY Post Heist
(you can download a copy here)

Yes Men blog includes interviews
READ the FAQs section before their Oct. 5 visit

The Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum Arrested at ‘SurvivaBall’ Demo



and here is a preview of their new movie The Yes Men Fix the World

Alfred Gescheidt at Higher Pictures

Upon walking into Higher Pictures, the only thing I knew about Alfred Gescheidt was that I had never heard of him. Walking into a gallery with little to no knowledge of an artist is not a unique experience for me, but what is rare is how much I enjoyed the work. Often it seems to me that if a gallery shows work by a little known artist, it is often because the artist is newly “discovered” and the work itself often seems too thought out, too serious, and difficult to enjoy if you experience it without knowledge of the artist and his/her intention behind the work. In Gescheidt’s work, on the other hand, each picture is a sly and subtle wink at the viewer, urging them to be entertained by his visualizations of “walking on pins and needles” in the image of a woman teetering on the head of a pin, the reinterpretation of what are bodies are made up of, in a silhouette of a man and a woman collaged with images of salt and water and muscle builders, a baby in wedding clothes in “Young Bride”. Come on, Gescheidt’s images say, have as much fun with these as I did. While his work can be light and entertaining on an individual scale, many of his images also have a distinct tone regarding either politics or culture. A political example is “Politics Make Strange Bedfellows” and the untitled image in which a clenched fist, resembling the “fight the power” gesture, is overlay with an American 10 dollar bill. His graphic style and image combination allows the audience to interpret each image differently, but the possible interpretations are not infinite. It is perhaps the definitiveness of these images which appeals to me as opposed to the art of newer, younger artists, who often are so afraid of their message that they overload their art with vagaries, allowing the audience to speculate the meaning of the piece indefinitely. Or perhaps I simply felt liberated by the surprise of walking into a gallery to see the untitled image of a snake emerging from the fly of someone’s pants. It is rare that an artist allows you to look at their work, get it, enjoy it, and move on, but perhaps that is the key, as that which is rare is also memorable. All I know is what I thought; trouser snake. Hahaha.

While in Amsterdam this past March, I had the opportunity to visit the Richard Avedon exhibit at the Foam gallery. It was an exciting experience to see prints of some of my favorite photographs. I was ecstatic to see the amount of work exhibited, some of which I had never seen before. Revisiting his work at The International Center of Photography (ICP) added to my excitement; it surpassed my expectations as I witnessed his most comprehensive body of work.

As a photographer, Richard Avedon challenged the world of photography by adding life and dynamics to photography after World War II . As I enter the ICP galleries, I was able to observe the evolution of an artist from the interior of a studio to the streets of Paris. "The New Look of Dior" resembles the elegance and the importance of the female model as well as the dress she wears. Both subjects flow together as men are mesmerized by the beauty of what they observe. Moving on from the romantic look of Dior, Avedon captures symbolic moments of the time period. His image of Suzy Parker with Robin Tattersall and Gardner Mckay at the Cafe des Beaux-Arts in Paris, highlights moments in the 1950s when American lifestyle elements (such as the pinball machine) were introduced to European culture. Later on in his life Avedon introduces color to his photographs in his portfolio titled, "In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort" (1995). This body of work serves as a fable to expose the contemporary ideas of money, death, chaos, ambition and vanity.

I admire the way Avedon embraces a cinematic approach to his images, raising the stakes of what fashion photography was. The lighting and choreographed look gave the images elegance, beauty, and energy. The cinema look enhanced the icons in the image, as well as brought life of the moving image to the static life of print media.

Robert Frank

Looking in Robert Frank's The Americans
Interesting interactive online resource developed by the National Gallery in DC
MET exhibition dates: September 22, 2009–January 3, 2010 

READ: Road Show
The journey of Robert Frank’s “The Americans." 
by Anthony Lane, New Yorker, September 14, 2009

Robert Frank's Elevator Girl Sees Herself Years Later

Another NPR story where Robert Frank speaks

Robert Frank's America by Philip Gefter
in The Daily Beast, September 17, 2009

Juergen Teller at Maupin Gallery

Paradis by Juergen Teller

Maupin Gallery

540 W. 26th Street

I've never really been a fan of Juergen Teller's work. Not unlike how I feel about Jill Greenberg's work, I find that the photographer's style--that amateur flash wash-out--has become too much of a gimmick that I can't see past and that I have trouble connecting/relating to the subject. After a while I've started to feel that I've seen them all after having seen one. (Though at least Jill Greenberg's work can be humorous.) That said, I'm always up for checking out the cross-section between the commercial art world--especially fashion photography--and the fine art world, so when I heard Teller was having a show in Chelsea, I had to check it out. And, well, the photographs were probably the most interesting that I've seen from him in a while (how much my low expectations contributed to that, I can't say).

Most interesting to me, after reading Groys's 'On the New,' was how the museum space, under Teller's flash and with his figure composition (nudes casually lounging around artworks), ceases to become that vacuum partitioned from the "real world" (to preserve unique works, to re-present the profane and mundane as unique works, blah blah, etc.). The museum presentation lighting is washed out. The models stand within the guard rails (naked, no less) intended to protect the works. The space becomes just another personal, intimate place where we go about our business--and in this case, be naked.

And then there's the juxtaposition of nude, recognizable subjects with old masterpieces of art (particularly nude sculptures and the Mona Lisa). Pretty cool, I guess.

Then there was also the occasional shot of a painting or sculpture, subjected to Teller's flash, without the model and framed closely in on just the exhibited work. These seems to further show the effect of his "amateur style" on the clean, formal and public space that is a museum, but as individual images, I don't think they'd be so interesting if Teller's visual style--that flattening orb of light--hadn't become something of an icon of its own. Though I guess there's something to be said about that.