TSIOLKOVSKY
“Three (or so) segments of a work in complex progress …”
“… but the myth of the frontier has consistently engaged the disarmingly irreverent sophistication of the modern multi-lens camera, of course. Earlier works, like the focus of the interplay as seen in the presentation of the scrims usually associated with the pinhole camera, the nonchalant stance, the thematic array, and the variously colored fluorescents, confront the secondary myth of the iconic cross-cultural artist, as prefigured in the many seminal and provocative essays by a group of distinguished contributing editors, published in the Contemporary Camera Obscura. ‘The nearest star,’ to adduce a well-known remark of the anonymous Gnostic followers of Blake, ‘is much too near,’ profoundly encapsulates the varied philosophies of shared visual interests and loosely Hegelian theoretical vistas, many of them here on display as a group for the first time, allowing students and scholars to spend hours, rather than the usual hurried moments, with objects commonly associated with the tenaciously unyielding subjects herein deployed in ‘ur’-constructions that take as their unifying and irreversible (although subject, always, to aporia) theme the images that are, paradoxically, vital yet moribund. Whereas mechanical tools, e.g., the hammer, the adze, the wood plane, the nathan, the ripsaw, and the blotter, project and valorize the images in the early films of Wynton Marsalis, inescapable filtering of new and little-known earlier works by now-lost ‘outsider’ cinematographers, as presented in varied locations within North American public spaces throughout the fifties and sixties, contradict a haze of pioneering techniques which can transform such mundane instruments into dazzling media installations that relentlessly transgress the cherished Germanic motifs which inoculate, or, conversely, are inoculated by, surprising Baudelairean correspondances; for example, via the imagery of Callahan, Atget, and Adams, cultural topoi, so to speak, that have delighted and outraged the ‘mouse in the dynamo,’ as Bartley Scott put it some years ago, as well, too, as influencing those cinéastes and plasticists who pioneered the fevered pyrotechnics and mysterious and ineradicable film captions that have come to be viewed, with much justification, as harbingers of pure process, emblematic clips heavy with metaphor, and short but multi-layered arguments, not to mention a vertiginous, motile linear perspective and the labile interfaces contemporaneously labeled as ‘technovideo interventions,’ despite their static modes within …”
— Kelli Dawn Tsiolkovsky
Kelli Dawn Tsiolkovsky writes the “Arts, Dining, and Cinema” column for the West Village Edge, and is also the author of Brooklyn! Economy for Epicures, and the forthcoming novel, Andy Warhol Was a Virgin (Whitlow / St. Martin’s).
TYCHO
A photograph in the corner of the apartment, cloudy, dark, difficult to make out: In a room filled with haze, a woman in a low chair, her face in her hand in a familiar female posture, weeping — again, familiarly — bitterly. She weeps for Buddy, her dead son, killed at the age of sixteen in a fall from the parallel bars that at one time graced, God knows why (perhaps to kill Buddy) every public high-school gym in New York. “My Buddy,” she whispers, bitterly weeping. Life, despite its vaunted pleasures, can be monstrous and ruthless, utterly without pity or solace, despite sunsets and cool forests. The days are long since he died, long. The room’s haze seems to thin or lighten, but then it is again precisely as it was, so it probably never changed at all. (As if a photograph could show such changes!) She thinks about her son all through the day, the days, every day, her obsession is said to be “unhealthy,” an “unhealthy obsession.” So much for assistance from friends and providers of assistance. The world, and we know exactly what “the world” is, prefers that everybody rid oneself of anything that might even hint at “unhealthy obsession,” no matter the form it may take. It wants everybody to fall in! dress right dress! ready front! cover! You girls gon’ soldier or you’ll be doin’ close-order all night! No room for obsessions here, of any sort, that’s what “the world” wants. But she misses his voice, she misses the touch of his hand. Maybe she’ll come out of this funk, this depression, this despair, and become, once again, a valuable, contributing member of society, with a great deal, oh, a great deal to give to same. In the meantime, while society waits, Buddy, her sweet, handsome, funny Buddy, nobody quite so true, is dead; and, although, as a good Catholic, she knows that he must be in heaven with God and all His angels, he’s not here. He’s not here! She thinks about him all through the day. But now, wait, we discover that this is a photograph of — what? — a man shielding his eyes from the sunlight that enters the small room through a worn, almost transparent, window shade. He is thinking about something, but what? He is thinking about the woman whose photograph he is gazing at, holding it at an angle, away from the glare of the sun. She is in a low chair, bitterly weeping. He has looked at the photograph every day for months, an “unhealthy obsession.”
WALTHER
Touchdown!: Mayhem for a New Millennium
Fifty years of gridiron history, the glamour, anguish, pain, and courage of this “equivalent to war,” as Buster Walter, dean of football writers, put it, the exhibition brought to us with the generous assistance of the Texas Petroleum Products Alliance.
The compelling photographs of the exhibition include classic images, both historical and contemporary, of the adipose guardbacker, blustering backender, cute tackleback, demanding quarterend, egregious endtackle, flouncing puntdrifter, grotesque quarterguard, hallucinatory crawling back, incendiary nosebacker, jejeune endnoser, knuckle-headed walkback, lascivious endpunter, moronic tackleguard, newfangled halfnose, otiose comingback, precious going-back, queenly tackleblitzer, resistant outback, sincere ball-toucher, triumphant pushnoser, underpaid shortflagger, visionary quartercatcher, wonderful widecenter, xenophobic backshover, yawning openguard, and zenlike jingotackle. Sincere thanks for gracious permission to reproduce their likenesses to Jambo Pierce, Biff Caldwell, Z. Z. Steeples, Derkone Motherwell, Carl Bracciole, El-Hashishe Thompson, Merlon Brown, Lucky Reno, El ’Rode Washington, Ziggy Imbriale, and Calderotte Saunders.