Artist of the day

Thursday, December 5, 2019

Artist of the day, December 5: Jessica Lange, an American actress, photographer (#856)

In Bob Dylan’s song, “Highway 61 Revisited,” from his epochal album of the same name, the famous stretch of road that connects the Canadian border to Louisiana is imagined as a surreal site of escape, murder, and war-mongering.

This was the first album that Jessica Lange, the two-time Academy Award-winning actress, and photographer, bought when she was 16 years old. Living in Minnesota at the time—Dylan’s home state, too—she knew the highway well, having traveled it countless times throughout her childhood to visit family who lived throughout the eight states bisected by the throughway.

Now, more than five decades later, the actress is revisiting the stretch of road through a new book, Highway 61.

The publication, out now through the publisher powerHouse, includes 84 grainy black-and-white photographs that Lange shot while driving the stretch of road in recent years.
US actress Jessica Lange poses on July 9, 2010, in front of her black and white work, at the Ateliers de l'Image, in Saint-Remy de Provence, southern France. Photo: Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty Images.

Lange’s vision of the highway, which connects her home in New Orleans to her summer cabin in northern Minnesota, is quite different from Dylan’s.

Instead of a hallucinatory yarn filled with gun-toting, god-fearing characters like Mack the Finger and Louie the King, Lange’s vision is populated with working-class dishwashers and diner patrons, transients and ranch hands, and loitering smokers silhouetted in the streetlight.

Without the book’s afterword, which alludes to the fact that these photos were taken recently, you’d think they depict the middle America of decades ago, like long-lost Robert Frank outtakes.

This is Lange’s third photo book, following a monograph of personal pictures titled 50 Photographs (published in 2008 by powerHouse) and In Mexico (RM, 2010), which included candid photos taken south of the Rio Grande.

The actress studied art and photography at the University of Minnesota on scholarship before dropping out, moving to Europe, and beginning her acting career in Paris. She began taking pictures in earnest again in the mid-‘90s when her partner at the time, actor and playwright Sam Shepard, brought her a Leica camera from Germany.

© 2019. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Jessica Lange. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

Ms. Jessica Lange

From Highway 61: Blues bar, Greenville, Mississippi

From Highway 61

From Highway 61: a young girl, California

From Highway 61: Clown, Alabama

From Highway 61: Girl, Minnesota

From Highway 61: Iowa

From Highway 61: Minnesota

From Highway 61: Missouri

From Highway 61: Minnesota

From Highway 61: Mississippi

From Highway 61: Baptist Church, Estill, Mississippi

From Highway 61: Cottonfield, Scott, Mississippi

From Highway 61: Cypress trees, Moon Lake, Mississippi

From Highway 61: New Orleans


*From Highway 61: New Orleans*

From Highway 61: New Orleans

From the Unseen series

Sicily

Mexico

Día de Muertos en Oaxaca

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Artist of the day, December 4: Goshka Macuga, a Polish artist (#855)

Goshka Macuga (1967) is a Polish artist based in London. She was one of the four nominees for the 2008 Turner Prize.

Goshka Macuga was born in Poland. A graduate of Central St. Martins College of Art and Design and Goldsmiths, University of London, she works across mediums from Jacquard woven tapestries to sculptures and robotics. Macuga is known for taking on the role of a curator and archivist within her practice, as her installations often incorporate other artists’ work alongside a variety of disparate objects. Macuga's work is commonly made for the specific institution in which it will be shown, her place-based installations involve many months worth of historical research and have been considered rich storytelling devices.

In 2009 Macuga had an exhibition at the newly re-opened Whitechapel Gallery in London wherein she incorporated a 1955 tapestry version of Picasso’s 1937 antiwar painting Guernica into a year-long installation about the 1930s-era controversy generated by the original painting. After 24 years on display just outside the Security Council at the Headquarters of the United Nations, the tapestry commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller was removed and loaned to Whitechapel for Macuga's installation. Along with the borrowed tapestry, Macuga made a bronze cubist sculpture of Colin Powell, a documentary film, sourced a handwoven Middle Eastern rug, and installed a conference table. As part of the installation, Macuga invited groups to hold meetings in the space free of charge.

While in residence at the Walker Art Center in 2010-11, Macuga produced work for her first solo show in the United States that would investigate the cultural and political context of the Walker Art Center itself. Culminating in the exhibition, It Broke From Within, Macuga investigated the history of the shaping of the Walker Art Center as an institution through its archives. The exhibition explored the political orientation, community theory, lumber, financial history, and serendipity of clerical errors concerning the Walker. Macuga designed enormous woven tapestries of photographs taken in Minnesota's oldest pine forests and used the textile as a backdrop for select pieces from Walker's permanent collection, including works from Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys.

In 2012 Macuga created two large photorealistic tapestries for dOCUMENTA, one was displayed in Kassel, Germany and its counterpart in Kabul, Afghanistan. The two-part work called Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not is to be exhibited simultaneously but never together in the same place. Part 1 depicts a diverse crowd of Afghans and Westerners in front of Darul Aman Palace outside of Kabul, Afghanistan. Part 2, originally exhibited in Kabul, shows a photoshopped collage of an art-world crowd and protesters gathering outside of the Orangerie in Kassel. Macuga's composition technique of collaging together historical photographs and subsequently having the image woven into a unified textile allows her to 'illuminate the elusive relationship between historic documentation and truth

© 2019. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Goshka Macuga. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only