Learning, like looking, takes time. It took until well into the 20th century for photography to be fully accepted as art, longer for color work to make the cut. (People thought color belonged in advertising.) And it’s only fairly recently, in the digital present, that hard lines separating photography from painting, sculpture and performance have evaporated.
The Museum of Modern Art has done a lot to clear the path to acceptance and popularity. One way was through a series of yearly “New Photography” exhibitions, which, beginning in 1985, gave everyone, curators included, a chance to see what was hopping in the field. To observe the 30th anniversary of the series — and perhaps to soften the news of a change in frequency to every other year — its current edition, “Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015,” is the largest and most cosmopolitan yet, with 19 artists and artist collectives from 14 countries.
As it happens, the Guggenheim Museum also has a photography survey, and it says something about the present breadth of the discipline that there are no overlaps among the participants. Titled “Photo-Poetics: An Anthology,” the Guggenheim show is smaller, with 10 artists, all but one of them women. It’s also tighter and tougher, which makes it less entertaining than its MoMA counterpart, but, with slowed-down looking, a more satisfying one.
What the shows share are historical roots in Conceptual Art. Narrative, portraiture and documentary, all staples of traditional photography, play relatively small and indirect roles here. Language, speculative thinking and borrowed imagery are common. So are delays in accessibility. Almost wherever you look, you need to look twice, and consult a label, to understand fully what you’re seeing, and the extra effort feels more fruitful in some cases than in others.
An exception is the music video that opens the MoMA show: It grabs you, whether you get its message or not. Commissioned by the museum from the New York-based design collective called DIS (Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro), the video has several of its most conspicuous features listed in its title: “Positive Ambiguity (beard, lectern, teleprompter, wind machine, confidence).” The video stars the European pop singer and drag performer Conchita Wurst. A slender, sloe-eyed, bearded man in a Beyoncé wig and a breezy white gown, he faces a microphone as if to sing or speak.
He’s simply, by his presence, DIS’s imagined rebranding of the museum’s public image. Floating in the middle of the video screen, too faint to be seen right away, is a watermark of the familiar MoMA logo. So the exhibition begins with art as institutional self-advertisement. Shameless commercialism? Totally. But with a saleswoman as ambiguously alluring as Ms. Wurst (né Thomas Neuwirth), who cares? Plus, the strategy works. When I walked through the collection galleries later, I envisioned “MoMA” imprinted on every Picasso and Pollock.
DIS also appeared in the New Museum’s 2015 Triennial, “Surround Audience,” which was very much about the impact of digital technology on new art and culture. “Ocean of Images” — the “ocean” here is the Internet — adds little to ideas broached in that show, being content mostly to view technology in terms of formal tools. Lucas Blalock composes abstract photographs using graphic elements from Photoshop; Natalie Czechdigitally grafts poetry (Allen Ginsberg, Gertrude Stein) onto book and album covers. John Houck, whose work is influenced by his experience as a former computer programmer and by psychoanalysis, photographs and rephotographs objects remembered from childhood, then layers the images into decorative still lifes.
His pictures are more interesting to think about than to look at — an old complaint about Conceptualism — but other concept-driven work delivers real visual traction. Lieko Shiga photographed neighbors in a Japanese coastal village before, during and after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, then later manipulated the negatives of what were essentially snapshots to create lurid, epical nightmare scenes: A man is impaled by a tree; bodies hang in midair; everything could be happening underwater.
The 2011 catastrophe had tremendous and continuing political repercussions worldwide, though only a few artists deal directly with politics, as David Hartt does in an overly obvious way with shots of propaganda materials found in the offices of a free-market think tank. More effective is work in which evil is present but invisible. Over several years, in Lithuania, Indre Serpytyte researched and photographed buildings that had been used as interrogation centers by the Soviet military police. As if to get a full grip on the history of brutalization they represented, she paid local woodcarvers to make miniature versions of the buildings, which she also photographed.
A few of these models are in the show, which has been organized by Quentin Bajac and Roxana Marcoci with Lucy Gallun and Kristen Gaylord. But, in general, art that departs from standard photographic formats, as in the case of some large sculptures, falls flat. An exception is Edson Chagas’sinstallation of poster-like prints of photographs taken in the streets of his home city, Luanda, Angola. Stacked on pallets in the gallery, the prints are free for the taking, and they go fast. Mr. Chagas won a prize for the piece at the 2013 Venice Biennale, and its generous spirit still comes through.
“Photo-Poetics,” at the Guggenheim, is a very different show from MoMA’s. The product of what feels like a unified sensibility, it’s formally reserved, even hermetic. The curators, Jennifer Blessing and Susan Thompson, approach photographs less as generators of translatable ideas than of suggestive metaphors. Digital isn’t ignored — it can’t be; it’s in the atmosphere now — but it’s de-emphasized, passed over, when analog will do. Over all, photography is treated as a kind of flotation device: It’s on the Internet ocean, but not immersed in it.
Claudia Angelmaier places museum postcards of well-known paintings, mostly of women, facedown on light boxes and photographs the backs of the cards, where faint traces of the paintings shine through. Erica Baumtakes close-up pictures of the page edges of slightly open paperbacks, catching glimpses of word fragments and half-seen illustrations. Kathrin Sonntag photographs auction catalogs around which she builds, in a life-echoes-art way, tabletop still lifes.
All of this, and almost everything in the show, could be created in a small studio. Where work at MoMA spreads, in serial arrays, out across walls and floors, the photography at the Guggenheim is compact and self-contained, done one picture at a time, with each looking constructed and handmade, the way sculpture can.
And some of these photographs are of sculptures. Leslie Hewitt arranges layered assemblages of books, magazines, historical prints and family snapshots, composite views of African-American life, past and present, then shoots them from above. In the past, Sara VanDerBeek made rangy, mobile-like sculptures of art historical and personal images expressly for the camera. More recently, she’s been using abstract plaster shapes, simple, solid and white, like a kind of dream-Minimalism. Elad Lassry puts together studio set-ups, of eggs, fruit and existing photographs, and completes his Pop version of Joseph Cornellian neatness by encasing the final picture in a shadow-box frame.
Anne Collier’s rephotographing of magazine portraits of female photographers has a clear feminist edge: She’s staking her claims to photo shoots for which men probably got the assignments. A video by Moyra Davey, filmed in her Manhattan apartment, states similar loyalties in its title: “Les Goddesses.” Erin Shirreff takes politics out to the city itself in a ghostly video of the United Nations Secretariat Building looking as blank as a tomb.
And in 2006, Lisa Oppenheim gave an antiwar statement an oblique, global spin in a slide installation called “The Sun Is Always Setting Somewhere Else.” In a series of pictures, she holds up Internet-harvested photographs of sunsets taken by American soldiers in the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq and aligns those images with a glorious sunset over the sea on Long Island.
All of this art, even Ms. Davey’s, with its spoken soundtrack, is quiet, meditative and subtly structured, rich with the equivalent of poetry’s metrical cadences and internal rhymes. We’re not in a subtlety-loving period in art. Thanks in part to art-fair culture, our viewing metabolism is set in shopping mode. Big, shiny and loud is what turns us on. Stupefaction is what we demand. Little wonder Conceptualism is out of fashion, and anti-intellectualism, ingrained in parts of the New York art world, is to the fore.
Forget all that. The photography at the Guggenheim is telling us very interesting things about how art can stay afloat in a digital age. We just need to take the time to listen, which is to say, to look.
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