I have been blessed to have spent a fair portion of my formative life in the presence of Erik Griswold – pianist, omni-instrumentalist, composer of New Music, occasional somnambulist, and true Friend. Oh, and he’s a tall drink of water. He is both brilliant and genuine and the source of some of my fondest, funniest memories as well as many of the more profound concepts of art that I hold dear. But Erik moved to Australia some 10 years ago chasing a skirt (whom he later married – the percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson – nice one, E!) and a dream. It’s been far too long since I have seen him. Our touring schedules coincided this past week, so we made arrangements for the four of us to spend the afternoon in San Diego’s Balboa Park, choosing to meet at the Museum of Photographic Arts. A perfect day, in my estimation.

First, the company. Together, Eric and Vanessa are the Clocked Out Duo. I’m not going to try to describe what they do, particularly in light of the fact that what they do lies so far outside the common experience of what music is and can be that it really can’t be described in terms of genre or style or mode. That’s not to say that their music is unapproachable – far from it – but its genuinely strange and familiar and warm and frustrating and meaningful and nonsensical and earnest and silly and its always delivered with a virtuosity that is as alarming as it is mesmerizing. Its art, I guess is what I’m trying to say. Erik and Vanessa are amongst the purest artists I know. Or frankly ever hope to. Let’s just say they rock and leave it at that.

Portrait of the Artists as a coupla hams.

The lovely and talented Vanessa.

The lovely and talented Erik.

The lovely and talented Pepper.

The lovely and talented Fishboy. Pepper inexplicably pushed him in the pond a few seconds later, taunting him with cries of “Aw, c’mon – don’t be so koi!” and laughing maniacally.
We all shook our heads in shame. But secretly, we were pleased.

Mitch entertains the crowd with a traditional dance of his people. Neither lovely nor talented.

After MOPA, it was just a 100 yard hop over to the San Diego Museum of Art to catch the Annie Leibovitz show. It was interesting in that this is a selection of more personal works that are realy quite removed from the celebrity portraits for which she is known. It covers a period that includes the loss of both her father and of her partner, Susan Sontag, and it is appropriately introspective as a result. A different side of Annie, to be sure.

V, enjoying a hotdog more than anyone really should.

The Hands of the Musician

Thank you, E & V, for a perfect day. Next time, we’ll see you in Oz.

MOPA – A Review
First, I just want to go on record as saying that Pepper and I LOVE San Diego’s Musum of Photographic Arts (MOPA, to its friends). It’s a bit of a strange bird, however. On the one hand, it has an extraordinary collection of some of the most important publicly viewable photographs in the world – some 7000 pieces in its permanent collection and several lending agreements with other prominent museums. On the other hand, it has often seemed to falter in finding a unifying theme or context in which to present these amazing pieces in a cohesive and meaningful fashion. Its single artist retrospectives are always very strong (I ‘discovered’ Irving Penn there), but its thematic shows can often seem incredibly contrived or invented – as though the unifying thread were drawn from a hat. On any given visit, you are bound to see some of the finest works ever produced as well as be confused as to what connection they have with their exhibition mates. The current set of 3 exhibits was a case in point.

The lovely and talented MOPA.

Woman: A Celebration
This show of approximately 30-40 pieces features works by Henri-Cartier Bresson,László Moholy-Nagy, August Sander and Ruth Orkin, amongst others. Its a pretty impressive roster, to be sure, and in adition to its perfectly produced silver gelatin prints it includes a handful of albumen prints and tin-types, both in extraordinary condition – a real tribute to MOPA’s archivist and conservator. But something is queer if not outright unsettling: the works are strangely clustered from about 1880 to 1945, with a few outliers. Not a bad period, but an odd truncation of the history of photography. Additionally, while each piece seems to include a female as a principle subject, the majority of them don’t really speak to the ‘feminine’. Neither sexuality nor motherhood nor feminism is explored as a subject in its own right and it makes for a very strange sort of experience. I’m not contending that the extent of the female experience can be summed up neatly in that triumvarate, but I do think that a celebration of womanhood that doesn’t invite that trio to the party is a pretty lame event. Vanessa commented that she had actually forgotten what the theme of the exhibit was until she happened to glance at the sign some 2/3rds of the way through! Anyway, to recap – some really exquisite and classic work; women in all of them; very few of the ABOUT women.

Rebels & Revelers: Experimental Decades 1970s – 1980s
I am ALL ABOUT art that breaks out. I’m a big fan. And there were some interesting works here, to be sure. But again, the problem was in the conception of the theme, as stated here from the program:

The images encompass a wide range of photographic forms, including assemblage, sun prints, alternative surfaces, and mixed media, highlighting photography’s move beyond the traditional black and white documentary school of artists like Ansel Adams to more expressive, personalized imagery.

That sounds like a great idea for a show. The problem is that what they are describing is actually more of a Modernist concern and something that took place in much earlier decades – the 20’s and 30’s for Europe, the 40’s-60’s for the U.S., and those artists aren’t represented here! The 70s and 80s are actually decades of Postmodernism, and while you can clearly see the appropriation and revisitiation of earlier styles that characterizes that period in some of these pieces, you’d be hard pressed to call any of them ‘rebelious’. This stuff was groundbreaking when Man Ray did it – the most that it can hope to achieve thereafter is irony or referential depth. At worst its simply derivative. Pepper remarked that she felt like she was stuck in a 2nd year art-school show. Is it brilliant irony or simply a lack of information on the part of the curator that the oddball photograph of the exhibit is both its most bald-faced commercial effort and its most successful Postmodern gesture – William Wegman’s 20×24 Polaroid Stag’s Head Chair? Anyway – some interesting works, but mostly revisitations of earlier ideas. Oh, and a portrait of Minor White that is really nice…and really out of place.

Tell Me A Story: Narrative Photography Now
The most successful exhibit, in my opinion, and the only one with a named curator. And I think that may be the difference. Merry Foresta is the Director of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, so she’s done this kind of thing once or twice before. This is the only collection currently exhibiting at MOPA where you get the sense that the concept was selected and defined BEFORE the images were chosen, rather than the other way around. The photographs presented are all engaged in the process of narrating a story. The pieces are well thought out and represent dramatically different approaches to similar problems, including works by Tracey Moffat, Gavin Hipkins, Melanie Pullen, Pipo Nguyen-Duy, Anna Gaskell, Polixeni Papapetrou, Nikki S. Lee, Muriel Hasbun, Barbara Probst, and Jem Southam.

These three exhibits demonstrate that there really is an art to curating a thematic exhibit that exists beyond the composition of the included works themselves.

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