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WALKER EVANS
Graveyard Monument, 1973-74
The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr.
Bequest and Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1994
1994.245.1420)
© Walker
Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Courtest
of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
The
Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid
Project)
with
Roni Horn
Curated
by Ydessa Hendeles
December
10, 2011 - January 14, 2012
Prothalamium
The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid
Project) is my response to an invitation from the Andrea
Rosen Gallery to curate my first exhibition in New
York.
The
only stipulation was that I include at least one from the
series of Polaroid images made by Walker Evans during the last
year of his working life. The request to include something by
him resonated with me because I had assembled an extensive
collection of his black-and-white images 20 years ago, which I
showed together with works by contemporary artists in several
exhibitions. Positioning archival photography in a
contemporary-art setting had actually become central to my
practice by 1991.
Otherwise, I was given complete freedom to explore the
architectural and cultural context of the Andrea Rosen
Gallery, just as Chris Dercon and Thomas Weski allowed me to
explore Munich's Haus der Kunst for my 2003 show, Partners. In
my practice, my approach is to develop a site-specific work,
conceiving and executing each show as an artistic embodiment
of the particular exhibition space. I start with the context
and search for ways to develop a relationship with it that is
expressed through layered metaphorical connections. I use an
artistic process to create a site-specific curatorial
composition that interweaves narratives from disparate
discourses using disparate elements. These elements are in no
way aligned art historically, and I regard each as a
fundamental component of the composition that bears no
substitution, not even from the same body of
work.
I
have never come into the Andrea Rosen Gallery without feeling
the majesty of the cathedral-like architecture of its main
gallery. The ceiling, in particular, with its magnificent
skylight and dark brown loft planks sloping down to a strong
supporting steel structure, lifts the eye.
But
how to show Evans's small Polaroids in such a monumental
space? My curatorial challenge was in part to find a means of
negotiating between the physical space and the scale of the
Polaroids, but also to fully respect the content of the humble
but masterful Polaroids.
Ultimately, the problem inspired the solution. I
decided to make a show that focused on Evans's photographs of
architectural structures and details. Each image is one of a
filmic suite of pictures snapped sequentially and precisely
composed. Each records the photographer's engagement as he
circled his subjects, capturing them in a succession of
portraits. He found something curious and engaging from every
angle in the inventory of everyday dwellings. I noticed that
all the Polaroids of architecture showed buildings with their
windows covered by blinds and shutters or, when abandoned,
with no windows at all. Evans shot his vernacular subjects
with his characteristic combination of curiosity, persistence
and detachment.
The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid
Project) ultimately came to include: 83 Walker Evans
Polaroids; elements from Bird, a body of work by Roni
Horn made between 1998 and 2007; a collotype from Eadweard
Muybridge's 1887 Animal Locomotion series; a photograph of
c1900 Paris by Eugène Atget; a 19th-century French model of a
cooper's shop, with tools to scale; a large, 19th-century
English birdhouse; and a selection of early 20th-century
American Arts and Craft Movement furniture, including original
and custom-replications, designed by Gustav
Stickley.
A
list of components, however, like a roster of artists,
indicates little about the content of any of my shows. My
exhibitions are meant to be poetic rather than didactic,
amalgamating diverse individual works and objects into a
coherent whole. A curatorial composition has its own unity and
point of view, like an individual work in any artistic medium.
Individual artworks and objects stand in specific
relationships to each other, both in terms of their physical
placement and their cognitive consonance, dissonance and
resonance. Their form and the medium in which each is made, as
well as the places in which they are set, provide
opportunities for viewers to mine them individually and
together for meaning, knowledge and insight.
The Wedding (The Walker Evans Project) is a
direct function of my own intellectual and experiential
engagement with specific artworks in tandem with the space.
But while my shows always start from something that resonates
in my own experience, they should not be taken as
autobiographical. I am especially allergic to hearing that my
curatorial practice is autobiographical since this mistaken
focus on my back-story—or, indeed, that of the artists
included—short-circuits the experience conveyed by the works
and by the exhibition. An artwork is a manifestation of an
artist's worldview. My role, as I see it, is to grasp
something significant in a work of art and then position it in
a way that brings its insights to the foreground.
I do
not develop a thesis for a show and then find and fit objects
into the space as illustrations. I consider the locale for
each show carefully—physically, geographically and as a
specific cultural place—and look for ways to stage the art as
I perceive it and as I think it might resonate best for
viewers in that particular context. Each object, of course,
has its own history and narrative, but my goal is to reveal
fresh insights into the objects exhibited as individual
entities and as components of the exhibition. My aim is to
mediate between the exhibition space and viewers to reveal
multiple layers of meaning in the works and something
significant about the locale.
Creating an exhibition is a public act that transcends
the interests of the individual curator who created it. I make
exhibitions for other people to see and benefit from by
provoking their own critical-creative engagement. The
autonomous elements on display have dual roles - as fixtures
that pin down the cultural-diagnostic content of the works in
their original historical context, and as paradigms that
function as provocative contemporary-art gestures in a
contemporary-art gallery. My shows are designed and
constructed to offer viewers a challenging and visceral
opportunity, through contemporary art and non-art objects, to
reflect not only on the components of the exhibition, but also
on their own experience of and engagement with the objects
individually and in the way they are assembled. I trust
viewers to be receptive and bring their own perspectives to
bear on what they encounter in my shows. I hope for an
audience that is comfortable with metaphor and willing to look
beyond the obvious thematic links to think about what they
see.
I do
not provide an essay that interprets what I have assembled. I
don't try to interpret the work for viewers. Instead, because
the elements extend outside the arena of contemporary art, I
put together "Notes" that contain all that is required for a
thoughtful viewer to experience the work without having to be
a connoisseur in the various disciplines of the pieces on
display. They can then move to the level of metaphor and
meaning more easily without being told how to
think.
Ydessa
Hendeles
Toronto
November
2011
ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY
525 West
24 Street
New
York, NY 10011
T: 212
627 6000
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