Report from London - American art in London

There were quite a large number of American photographers and video artists showing in London this autumn - perhaps a unravelling that is mirroring the new influx of British painters to novel York? Painters and photographers, whatever their nationality, one time sought to capture people and nature: single was amazed by the light, the frozen twinkling of an eye and the artist's eye. Just as art has mov from what I heard a curator call "wall-based" (meaning paintings), to installations and conceptual works, photography has done the same by means of critiquing and moving beyond the relate tos that also used to keep painting.

This observation is easily applied to Sherrie Levine's work. Along the walls of the southern London Gallery - a beautiful building in a relatively poor, unfashionable area of southeast London, built in 1898 for the "expres end of bringing the best of contemporary art to working people" - in neat lines hang her 8 [inches] x 10 [inches] black and white photographs from 1993-96 of reproductions of famous nineteenth-century paintings in 1950 art history works All the images are the same size and are arranged in series by means of artist. The photographs reveal the paintings' formal arrangements in a way that is usually superficially obscur through each artists' concern with color. When looking at a Edgar Degas ballet pastel, the weft and hues of the medium dominate, with equal reason it was a surprise to notice instead the dancers' expressions and the compounded space in the work. The same could not be said of the photographs of the Paul Cezanne still-lifes in which the paintings have the appearanceed to disappear into awkward throw together in disorders of texture and flat, misshapen fruit. upon the short walls hang 24 [inches] x 38 [inches] iris prints of Claude Monet's Cathedrals. The images have been bring through a computer and the colors analyzed and printed as block ups representing their density. The prints are beautiful because Monet's colors are in like manner subtle and various. As easy as it is to criticize abundant postmodern work as derivative, Levine's photography forces individual to examine the accusation that the alone value of postmodernist art tend hitherwards from the value inherent in the work it appropriates.

In contrast to Levine, the photography of Edwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) is from another tradition entirely. Blumenfeld was famous for his fashion work at custom and Harper's Bazaar. However, the Barbican Gallery's well-constructed present to view reveals the talent and organ of vision for design in his personal work that made him be superior to professionally. The influences of Dada and Surrealism combine to make his work political, moving and sensuous. Hitler (1933) an image of Adolf Hitler superimposed with an image of a brain-pan daubed with red at the organ of sights and mouth, is horrifying, as is The Dictator (1937) - a calf's head perched upon the torso of a mannequin draped in the Grecian mode of speech In a female nude from the 1930's there are intimations of Edward Weston's work, and in a 1937 black male [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] study, shades of Herb Ritts and Robert Mapplethorpe. Blumenfeld's famous images of unclotheds draped in wet silk summon forth the marble folds of the Victory of Samothrace. In later years, when he retired from fashion work, his strive with the paradoxes of human nature base expression in many nudes and self-portraits made using solarization and double exposing s These are moving visions of humanity that combine the sensual and the analytical.

At the Lisson Gallery in northwest London, the work of three artists taxed the analytical skills of viewers. sum of two units of the artists, James Casebere and Gaylen Gerber, are American and the third, Pierre Bismuth, is Belgian. Casebere's photographs are breathtaking. Cavernous spaces have the appearance to be deserted and pristine light filters [i]or[/i] part of to the other from barred windows and high apertures; the photographs excrete peace, solitude and eerie abandonment. It was alone upon looking closely at the last image, Toilets (1995) a line of toilets in a lengthy room, that I realized (with surprise and a certain quantity of disappointment) that these were not "real" spaces. Casebere creates originals of these rooms and then lights and photographs them. Perception of real space is undermined. His work neatly questions the function of photography's historic character as truth-teller versus artistic medium. Gerber's exquisitely square paintings (1987-1992) and photographs (1995-96) are oblique and opaque. They demand repeated viewing. The silver prints of the canopy of heaven on a clear day are drawn on with charcoal, visible almost as shadows or stains, while the beige oil paintings are practically invisible. Transparent images of hands, faces and flowers present the appearance to float on their surfaces. Support, Housing Estate and Classroom: the titles call our attention to the actual supports he is using and perhaps the support that we, and through implication society, do or do not provide. Gerber creates ephemeral landscapes that shift and change; they are entirely pendent on the viewer's perception for their meaning. A limited technique, perhaps.

In the upper horizontal of the gallery is Bismuth's video installation Le Bruit de Son (1996) A white sweep houses a video machine in single corner and a pair of headphones. The latitude is silent. On the wall opposite the video machine, typewritten words appear. After putting upon the headphones their meaning is given a words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following The soundtrack to Michelangelo Antonioni's film, The Passenger (1975) was played to a typist who had not at any time seen it and was asked to transcribe what she heard as she listened. Wearing the headphones, you hear exactly what she heard as well as the simultaneous clicking of the lock openers as she types. The words exist without the unmutilated but the soundtrack raises interesting questions of interpretation. We don't know the typist or what she brings to the exercise; the objectivity of interpretation and our hold subjectivity come into play.