Arlene Shechet, Overflow, 2012. © Arlene Shechet. Courtesy of the artist.

In Arlene Shechet’s Meissen Recast at the RISD Museum, strips of clay lie in slag heaps atop intricately painted ceramic vessels. A delicate foot protrudes from the frilly underside of a petticoat. A figure lies trapped beneath a white kiln brick, splatters of pale blue and brown glaze leaking out like blood. There are endless strange protrusions and spillage, small feet and heads half-emerging from shapeless masses.

These works are the products of the artist’s residency at the Meissen factory in Germany, a palace of production whose 18th-century origins can be traced to the king of Poland’s insatiable desire for exotic porcelain. Created with the factory’s original molds, Shechet’s amorphous pieces are not quite vegetable, animal, or mineral, but something in between. The creations are exhibited alongside the museum’s collection of Meissen tableware and figurines, in both the contemporary gallery and in the period rooms of the museum’s Pendleton House.

Shechet’s work explores the dialectic exchange between the raw and the refined. Industrial excess is fused with the delicate and decorative; the result is a postmodern visual scramble of the original 18th-century Meissen pieces. Shechet uses glazes instead of acrylic paint to “fuse the skin with the body” in the process of firing. In her pieces, clay retains the memory of itself, preserving a sense of soft malleability. Her wild splotches of color, in the traditional Meissen palette, are punctuated with gold touches that recall Lynda Benglis as much as the gilded Baroque.

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Andy Warhol. Pia Zadora, 1983; Polaroid photograph. © Andy Warhol. Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.

A 2008 gift from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the exhibition’s 105 color and 52 black-and-white photographs hint at what the curators describe as Warhol’s “compulsive use of the medium,” both as prefatory sketch and documentary vehicle. Warhol embraced photography as early as the 1950s, when appropriated photos often served as the basis for his advertising and portrait work. The show’s images, however, date from 1970 onward, when Warhol discovered and became enamored of Polaroid’s SX-70 Big Shot camera. The resulting flood of color snapshots, a mere sampling of which are on view here, were integral to Warhol’s larger creative process. Yet seen today, and installed as they are at RISD in thought-provoking clusters, they acquire a fascination all their own as surreptitious character studies—absorbing, elusive, yet resolutely open-ended.

Wearing the guise of offhand snapshots, Warhol’s color images enact a cat-and-mouse game of obfuscation and revelation. Particularly telling is the obvious use of heavy makeup, whose implications of performance, masking, and premeditation challenge the snapshot’s connotations of candor. Thus in Maria Shriver (1978), Dorothy Blau (1982), and Pia Zadora (1983), chalky faces and red lips defy the viewer’s searching gaze. In fact the direct, unblinking stare of Warhol’s subjects, who are framed head-on in direct confrontation with the camera, is initially more withholding than revealing. “Make no mistake,” these portraits seem to say, “this is a controlled, stage-managed encounter.”

Indeed, but who is the stage manager? To a significant extent, each sitter’s presence becomes less an assertion of individual identity than an inscrutable amalgam of performance and manipulation—by the photographer as well as by the subject. The images conflate illusion and authenticity, self-possession and exploitation; wearing the depersonalizing mask of artifice, they enlist the simplest and most informal of photographic mechanisms—the instant camera—to surprisingly complex and provocative effect.

Andy Warhol. Maria Shriver, 1978; Polaroid photograph. © Andy Warhol. Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.

Commenting on his subjects’ feelings about the Polaroid film shoots—and they were, in fact, formal shoots—Warhol remarked, “They like it, even though it’s painful—bright lights, the flashcubes. I try to make everybody look great.” This quote, featured prominently alongside the show’s images, acquires a pointed if ambiguous significance. In one respect, Warhol’s statement underlines the staged nature of the images; in another, it proclaims the artist’s supposedly straightforward intention in creating them. Yet, like so much else in Warhol’s life and work, the apparent invariably gives way to something deeper and darker—a sense of meaning and intent that is disconcertingly opaque.

Here, that “something” seems bound to the underlying nature of the imaged identity and, more specifically, to a sense—subtly yet cogently expressed in these portraits—that this identity is inherently fragile, premised on a needy vulnerability. In submitting to the “painful” demands of the photo shoot, Warhol’s subjects trust that the artist will “make them look great”; the artist essentially becomes the “maker” of his subjects’ visual selves, which are conjured and validated through the artist’s camera. Given this context, the portrait series Mrs. Carlo Bilotti and Daughter (1980) becomes especially interesting. Mrs. Bilotti and her adolescent daughter are framed side by side, the former wearing the ever-present heavy makeup. While the mother stares directly into the camera, the daughter, in each of the four shots, directs her gaze to some point outside the frame. Despite—or perhaps because of—her  youth, the daughter maintains a powerful integrity of self. By refusing to acknowledge the camera, the girl declares, however unconsciously, an essential personal autonomy; her presence conveys an innocent inscrutability that deflects any attempt to read her internal life.

Warhol’s Polaroid snapshots reveal a formality and degree of deliberation that are, considering the medium, subversive—the tossed-off snapshot becomes the ambiguously layered portrait; the instantaneous Polaroid records the strategically prepared sitting. Meanwhile, black-and-white images such as People on the Street (ca. 1980), captured using a 35mm camera and printed using the traditional gelatin silver process, convey both an of-the-moment immediacy and a subtle aesthetic awareness.

Andy Warhol. People on the Street, ca. 1980; gelatin silver print. © Andy Warhol. Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.

Significantly, the exhibition notes that “while the Polaroids tended to turn everyone into a glamorous Warhol icon, the black-and-white images…tended to make everyone ordinary.” It is this very ordinariness that yields a striking poignancy, and the apparent absence of the artist’s hand foregrounds the sheer dynamism of his subjects. Thus in Keith Haring, Juan Dubose, and Joe Deitrich (ca. 1980), a series of three shots, the camera becomes an unobtrusive observer of life being lived, and the photograph becomes a testament to the careless youth and fleeting beauty of its subjects.

Gazing at this image, the viewer registers a sense of time collapsing, as the young men’s offhand vitality coincides with the viewer’s retrospective awareness of imminent tragedy—AIDS would claim first Dubose, then Haring, by decade’s end. This casual image thus becomes a kind of paradoxical memento mori—it recalls an irretrievable past yet exists in a pure present, one that defies both past and future. Such ambiguity is the unassuming, utterly compelling through-line of Warhol’s photographs. It is also, perhaps, the most compelling proof of the artist behind the myth.

Andy Warhol’s Photographs is on view at the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence through June 29.

Joe Deal, Kite, Chino Hills, California, 1984, from the portfolio Subdividing the Inland Basin. Gift of the artist. © The Estate of Joe Deal, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

Upon entering the first gallery, the viewer is immediately enmeshed in a web of contemporary imagery whose formal and conceptual diversity offers a heady, concentrated sense of the exhibit’s open and adventurous ethos.  Just inside the entryway hang Millee Tibbs’ Self-Portrait in the Fog (2009) and Henry Wessel’s Night Walk #28 (1995).  The moody austerity of Tibbs’ image, a serene yet unsettling evocation of air and atmosphere, suggests a kind of minimalist, abstract refraction of Wessel’s image.  The latter, meanwhile, calls to mind the detached, de-peopled style of the New Topographics photographers in its stark image of a suburban house.  Yet this darkened house and its eerily illuminated, square-frame doorway yield a haunting sense of loneliness, even alienation. While the geometric precision and angular composition of Wessel’s photograph contrasts the intangible haze of Tibbs’ Self-Portrait, together, the two images exude a shared existential intensity.

Millee Tibbs, Self-Portrait in the Fog, 2009. Gift of the artist in honor of Joe Deal. © Millee Tibbs. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

Moving deeper into the first gallery, one encounters Catherine Opie’s chromogenic print Football Landscape #12 (2008), a vivid, wide-angle view of a Texas high school game in progress and a telling glimpse of regional American culture. Further on, Gregory Crewdson’s alluring, large-scale ink jet Untitled (Cement Canal) (2007) conjures a mysterious world of post-industrial decay and moral isolation, while across the gallery, Doug Rickard’s #82.948842, Detroit, MI, 2009 (2010) appropriates a Google Street View image in an implicit exposé of urban poverty that serves, equally, as an indictment of societal indifference.

These images underscore what is among the show’s prevailing themes; namely, that the American landscape represents a stage for the enactment of all manner of personal and social drama, whether real or imagined. They also point to what co-curator Jan Howard, in the show’s insightful catalogue, identifies as the re-introduction of the human figure into the photographic landscape.[1] Among the exhibition’s accomplishments is its rich and nuanced illumination of the stylistic breadth and conceptual expansiveness of landscape as a genre.  As Douglas Nickel, another curator, writes, “[T]here is nothing natural or inevitable about the photographic landscape, and if we scratch the surface of the history and aesthetics leading up to it, an abundance of complexities emerges.”[2]

Lee Friedlander, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1971. Museum purchase with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

American View effectively delineates these complexities and, in so doing, reveals striking contrasts and surprising affinities between galleries and images.  In a juxtaposition typical of the exhibit’s fresh-eyed, dynamic approach, Opie and Crewdson’s quasi-narrative works are hung adjacent to Uta Barth’s hypnotically blurred abstraction Field #14 (1996).  Similarly provocative is the concept of landscape as stage that links such disparate works as Pictorialist Anne Brigam’s warm-hued self-portrait Soul of the Blasted Pine (1908) and contemporary photographer Laura McPhee’s Judy Tracking Radio-Collared Wolves from Her Yard (2004).  When seen in this formally and conceptually broad context, even the most omnipresent of images by Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, and Lee Friedlander acquire a renewed sense of immediacy and impact.

Laura McPhee, Judy Tracking Radio-Collared Wolves From Her Yard, Summer Range, H-Hook Ranch, Custer County, Idaho, 2004. Purchased with funds donated by Donald Stanon and Helen M. Danforth Acquisition Fund. © Laura McPhee. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

Among the engaging displays on view is a fascinating series of post-Civil War photographs, images that not only contextualize subsequent photographic tendencies but also incarnate the interweaving of personal vision, professional intent, and social impact that recurs in much 20^th century imagery.  Often in the employ of the federal government, early photographers like William Bell and Timothy O’Sullivan set out with the practical mission of producing photographs for mapping and surveying purposes.  However, their richly-toned albumen prints frequently reveal a nuanced attunement to light, line, and form that transcend the images’ functional status.

The show cogently reveals parallels between these early and ostensibly objective images of nature and the 1970s suburban visions produced by Stephen Shore, Frank Gohlke, and other New Topographics photographers.  In the manner of their 19^th century predecessors, the New Topographics worked from a position of purported neutrality, though their photographs also bear the subtle imprint of personal vision and aesthetic intent.  Thus, in depicting not a rugged wilderness but a rapidly suburbanizing Western landscape, photographers like Lewis Baltz in Model Home, Shadow Mountain (1977), and Joe Deal in his conceptual series The Fault Zone (1981), produced images whose formal clarity and deliberate framing hint at pervasive social tensions and ambient cultural shifts.

Lewis Baltz, Model Home, Shadow Mountain, 1977, from the portfolio Nevada. Gift from the Collection of Joe Deal and Betsy Ruppa. © Lewis Baltz. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

In spite—or perhaps because—of the exhibition’s thoughtful juxtapositions and provocative insights, photography’s power as a creative medium retains an indefinable, ineffable mystery.  Interestingly, over three decades ago, Roland Barthes described photography as “an uncertain art.”[3]  As this fascinating show makes clear, Barthes’ characterization was—and remains—a profoundly apt one.

American View:  Landscape Photography 1865 to Now is on view at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design through January 13, 2013.

Elliott Hundley‘s work mashes up the diligence of entomology displays with the audacity of pop-up books. He accumulates bits and pieces of lo-fi media like string, paper, and beading, and collages photographs – glues, pins and inlays for an atomistic, yet overall integrated scene. Color, texture and clipped images are made to beautifully butt heads in numerous intimate, epic conflicts. The effect is discursive, overlooking chronology and didacticism in favor of studying the nature of the conflict between the medias he pits against each other.

Hundley’s work is showing in a group exhibition, The World is Yours, ongoing until January 10 at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, just outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. The exhibition’s title promises the world, but also means to insinuate “the real world”: as diehard, breakneck times; as an empty/broken promise; and as a manque dream – usually could’a, should’a, would’a been, but isn’t.

Elliott Hundley received his BFA in printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design in 1997, and his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2005. His most recent solo show, Hekabe, occured this past spring at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA, and he will be in the forthcoming group exhibition, Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum Rotunda, at the Guggenheim in New York City this February 19 – May 16.

View Elliot Hundley’s previous feature on DailyServing.com