Still Searching…

<div>There are utopian spaces knitted into the fabric of the seemingly pessimistic film <em>La Haine.</em> One famous scene in La Haine condenses this “fleeting utopia” more then any other moment in the film: Hubert packages and smokes weed in his bedroom, listening to “That Loving Feeling,” sung by Isaac Hayes, and looks outside the window of his “rabbit hutch” (cage à lapins – as the identical flats of the cité are called). <br><br></div>

<p>In my last post, I suggested that we should rethink how we might read “politics” into the works of Paul Strand.  I put “politics” advisedly into quotes, because few photographs can translate specific political tenets or party lines into form. Apart from a unique photograph called <a href="http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/310991.html?mulR=21244|1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“Skeleton and Swastika, Connecticut”</a> contrived in 1938-39, Strand was no John Heartfield and never directly attacked scowling financiers or aggrandized noble workers in the fields in his still photographs. He remained above all an artist with a distinct social point of view, who recognized that the power to shift the public’s attention by forcing it to visually engage with the overlooked was his greatest gift.</p>

<p>The same year that Strand shot <a href="http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/27002_reading_strands_new_york_photographs_city_hall_park" target="_blank" rel="noopener">City Hall Park </a>he took another, somewhat similar picture in a second prominent location, <a href="http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/74108.html?mulR=1483769599|11" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York</a>. Still perched above his subject but physically closer than he was in the courthouse north of City Hall Park, Strand was shooting from the second-floor window of Marius de Zayas’s Modern Gallery at 500 Fifth Avenue. The building is now gone, but from photographs it seems that he had to be behind a window (was it opened?) using a lens that radically compressed the width of Fifth Avenue and brought him nearer street traffic while catching a bit of a unfocused cornice in the lower left.</p>

<p>In 1916, the same year that Paul Strand made his remarkable studies of lower-class types caught unawares by a disguised camera lens, he moved away from New York’s crowded streets to capture backyards visible from a bird’s-eye perspective.</p> <p></p> <p></p>

<div>I’m going to use this blog as a way to test out some ideas relating to a series of essays I’m putting together on the retrospectivity of contemporary art. What do I mean by retrospectivity? The tendency, found almost globally, for art to quote and repurpose pre-existing cultural artefacts. Pre-eminent among this tendency is the trend for repurposing Modernist art, architecture and design. </div>

<p>It feels like a million new shows have just opened in Chelsea for the new season, and several of them chime perfectly with my theme for this blog: the retrospectivity of contemporary art, particularly the current fascination/obsession with Modernist art, architecture and design. In this post I’m going to focus on David Maljkovic at Metro Pictures, but also The Propeller Group at Lombard Fried; there are other shows too, but I’m going to save them for next week’s blog.</p>

<div>At the end of last summer, during one of my trips from Los Angeles to New York, I was lucky enough to be able to visit the artist Zoe Leonard’s first exhibition at the gallery Murray Guy.<br><br><br></div>