copyright Ryan McGinley
Went to the Ryan McGinley opening at Team Gallery last night along with 350,000 or so other lookie-lou’s to see or be seen. These are my impressions.
Straight off, some of the pictures are very beautiful. My favourites tended to be those involving the dunes and the human form, a large 8′x10′ print of two people tumbling naked down the side of dune is tremendous, another 11″x14″ of a far away person lit by a spotlight taking a dive off the top off a dune like a falling angel is wonderful. I can’t find it even on the artists site.
copyright Ryan McGinley
I looked on the Team Gallery website for these images and it seems they favoured more the portrait work and the more “lifesytle” esq imagery. To me this was not what I felt was strong. I probably am in the minority. But overall you could say the focus was beauty, and beauty in the moment. It is not much more complicated than that.
So then there is the other part, the whole production aspect of the work, the models, the assistants, the budget, the 4000 rolls of film, etc, etc. The re-imagining of 70′s style nudist magazines for a contemporary audience. This is a vision of something that didn’t exist at the time, and does not exist now. It is a complete fiction.
I think we all like to imagine our youth was spent or misspent in some sort of free innocence, we all have our own gardens-of-eden that we look back on. In this way I see “I know where the summer goes” as aspirational. It is very close to if not advertising in its effect. No one had what these kids had, well, perhaps a few. But you want it, at least judging by the throngs that showed up to the opening. You want to be close to this kind of life. McGinley is giving us access to something seemingly lost, prohibited, or out of reach. He is giving a shape to a current culture’s dreams.
It makes me think of On the Road.
On the Road is a fiction also, created out of the raw materials of the life of Jack Kerouac which were undoubtedly real, but the story is pure fiction. It went on to become rightly or wrongly the voice of a generation of Beats, and evolved later into a vision of freedom as it might be experienced in life and in art. Sal Paradise is a beautiful loser, a searcher, a Tom Sawyer lighting out for the territories, well, at least Denver.
For me it is interesting to compare the dreams of different generations. For the generations that followed the Beats here is this jazz-inspired solitary poet figure, a little in awe of a greater man (Dean Moriarty). It is the vision of one poet, enough money for gas to get to the next town maybe and a cup of coffee left over.
“I know where the summer goes” is the vision of another poet, albeit one with tens of thousands of dollars, a production van, and cast of hired models. Tell me which one is more innocent? Or true? Maybe it doesn’t matter, but a culture expresses itself through it’s aspirations, and this is a very commercial kind of expression. It leaves me feeling a little poorer.
Yet I like the pictures. Which fiction is truer?
Actually, there are a lot of 20ish year old artists who for the past few years have been producing snapshots of their lives that DO remind me a lot of these images… and one of them, Coley, actually assisted for and modeled in these images.
I remember crashing at coley winston and andrew’s place in brooklyn for a couple weeks. I saw a lot of polaroids and a lot of film (they’re all artists) and I saw a lot of people actually enjoying life as well. It’s not all a dream.
It’s actually weird to me that he required such production to create those images… I’ve seen work that is similar that seems to spring up naturally. Of course, that’s not a negative statement, he’s probably enjoying what he is doing and I’m not sure how I’d use the budget if I had it.
Ryan McGiinley’s dream is the dream of reality tv; I wouldn’t call him a poet.
although I enjoyed reading about all the “I burned 4 million filmsand 100000 Dollars on this” —I think that it is used as a promotional and hype device is taking away from the work.
But maybe not: if you hold that the artist statement must be:
innocent is just a construction
Love like art CAN be bought.
THEN it makes sense actually.
Apart from that: There’s quite a bunch of photographers who shot a lot. I’ve seen a lot of heavily destilled work and with this amount of shot frames I’m somewhat dissapointed with the final outcome of Ryans work. I see that they didnt select “perfect” images or moments and where more going for the in-between stuff. But i think its still somewhat of a dissapointment.
I personnaly thought that his actors portraits for NYTImes Magazine where stronger
@g: the artist statement is perfect.
I also liked the Times video more than the portraits but the portraits were good I agree.
Robert, do you have a link to the Times video? Thanks.
http://nytimesshorts.feedroom.com/?fr_story=09a962282e3874a0e73993fd1d91d5235a524d04&rf=bm