- - -
Notable Shows :
Cheim & Read :
David McDermott and Peter McGough, "Of Beauty and Being"
547 West 25th St New York, NY 10001
(Nearest subway: 23rd St Station via A, C, or E trains.)
Jan 7 - Feb 12, 2011
http://www.CheimRead.com
http://www.McDermottAndMcGough.com
55 years after Richard Hamilton's seminal Pop Art collage Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, Pop Art is reborn at Cheim & Read gallery ---with authority. It is no lame rehash of Pop Art, but instead a retro-yet-new vision (since apparently the period Pop artists didn't really do photography). The show is titled "Of Beauty and Being."
55 is a recurring theme in the exhibit. Around 20 photos by artist duo McDermott & McGough, all with 1955 in their titles (at Cheim & Read through February 12, 2011), ache with nostalgia for the visual style of 1955 while of course also smiling mockingly at its pretense.
A purposefully retro-styled McDermott & McGough 2010 photo Dreaming Without A Dream To Dream Of, 1955 is identified as a "tricolor carbon print," which (to translate for those who don't speak Photo-tech) is a long-forgotten early color photography process. Oh the color! So lush! And it isn't Photoshop, but instead the present-day reuse of the vintage technology that makes the gaze from the model memorable ---that and her eyes which out-blue the paintjob of a two-tone '55 Chevy 210 Powerglide sedan (make it baby blue and turquoise with whitewalls).
Such Technicolor-Baroque coloration recalls Marilyn in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" ---as she snuggles alluringly into the ranks of those singing white-tie chorus-hunks before a backdrop almost as red as this model's lips. The Dream model's hair says "Better Living Through Chemistry" while the verdant tricolor-process tropical leaves shielding her bosom evoke Bali Ha'i.
The modesty-leaves drop in other photos like Haunts My Reverie, 1955 in which a smooth nude model strikes a Three Graces pose (before metallic-sunburst wallpaper that Don Draper would fantasize about) ---or My Song Of Love, 1955 where a half-length nude model poses in a 50's harlequin mask in front of two-toned drapes. In My Solitude, You Haunt Me, 1955 shows a spread of girlie playing cards picturing buxom glamazons.
Anyone whose first sexual "experience" (so to speak) was with the mute countenance of "old school" porn pages could be embarrassingly reminded of such youthful sights by the McDermott & McGough photos ---so authentic is the old-tech style and coloration.
And here, the gallery has done the viewer a favor.
It has become trendy in some circles to complain about "sacred white box" gallery spaces as somehow sterile, but really, the white box has its virtues. Cheim & Read's presentation of the photos is spot-on: around a yard of clear "white" space between each artwork ---for which the viewer is grateful, the better to give each remarkable photo due scrutiny without feeling overly exposed to the view of others.
The better ---say--- to take a good long stare at A Woman Alone, 1955 and to absorb the skintones rendered perfect and opalescent by the tricolor carbon print process. While looking at a model's rump-curves, one is seeing a pearl. It might be the decade's most beautiful depiction in film of someone's butt.
Thank goodness (and gallerists) for the white space again when looking at My Flame In Your Heart, 1955, in which our Reverie model has now reclined on a pricey bed. One really might want to look closely at the burlwood veneer headboard, the geometric blanket, or the bedside Westclox alarm clock ---never mind the model who is (ah well, oh) "So Different, So Appealing."
On the gallery wall hanging next to the above alluring model is a still life composition, Those Moments, 1955. The photo's tiki-bar bamboo vase holds a lush Hawaiian-style flower arrangement. Against the photo's richly glossy black tabletop and tea-green wall, the whites of a ceramic Modern cat sculpture are sensuously creamy ---thank you again, tricolor carbon process. The cat faces a delicate glass orb which resembles a large soap bubble.
The bubble-orb seems to reappear in A Fool To Fall, 1955. It is held in a woman's hand ---seen only from a bit above the wrist against a Ford blue ground. Gorgeous hues reappear ---not just her cherry fingernails and jasper Bakelite bangles, but also even the flawless fleshtones of her fingers and arm. In what at first seems like clever alignment of reflections, the glass ball contains a man perusing a 50's girlie magazine. A closer work, however, shows no mirror-image text on his copy of “Cover GIRLS Models,” so perhaps reflections aren't involved ---maybe photographic double-exposure work.
I Believe In Dreams, 1955 is a grid-format still-life of nine issues of cheeseball proto-porn mag "People Today," with such amusingly-dated teaser headlines as "Seven Ways To Get A Mink Coat," "Exclusive: SEX --New Communist Weapon," and (gasp!) "They Want To Legalize Homosexuality." A less-racy still-life of vintage magazines is Day Following Day, 1955. Here classic issues of "Life" and "Vogue" compete for attention with "Motor Life" and Charles Atlas-influenced "Vim."
Another still-life, In My Memories, 1955, is an arrangement in white ---white wall, tablecloth, ashtray. The distant pair of whiskey glasses and foreground's pair of doused Luckies (presumably His and --in the lipstick-smudged lizard green cigarette holder-- Hers) imply that, well, someone "got lucky." Maybe out of frame, that burlwood bed is getting a workout.
The David McDermott and Peter McGough approach interestingly combines Pop Art's theme of mocking a decade's pop culture by quoting it ---with Cindy Sherman's way of creating a new tableaux in a period style. There's even a possible whisper of Sally Mann in the new use of long-obsolete processes while re-imaging a past era (Mann's Antietam battlefield images come to mind).
McDermott & McGough's fantasy 1955 re-creates the era that was both so Modern and yet so long ago: while the Brooklyn Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and (finally!) won the World Series, Jackson Pollock thrashed his last two paintings into existence, and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" went from TV pilot to a full-blown series. Trivia: 1955 was also the year Einstein died. To abbreviate the word Exhibit as E and to combine the two artists who start with Mc, one could remember this show as E=MC2 : an exhibit where two artists' forces unleash such energy ---an exhibit where color is brilliant, intense, haunting, and strangely-beautiful as the sky after an above-ground A-bomb test.
---Terry Ward
Ward is an artist and occasional writer for "The New York Art World.”
McDermott & McGough
DAY FOLLOWING DAY, 1955 2010
Tricolor carbon print
30 1/8 x 25 1/8 inches
76.5 x 63.8 centimeters
Edition of 7
Photo: Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
McDermott & McGough
ALWAYS REMINDING ME THAT WE'RE APART, 1955 2010
Tricolor carbon print
30 x 23 1/2 inches
76.2 x 59.7 centimeters
Edition of 7
Photo: Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
McDermott & McGough
IN MY SOLITUDE, YOU HAUNT ME, 1955 2010
Tricolor carbon print
30 x 24 7/8 inches
76.2 x 63.2 centimeters
Edition of 7
Photo: Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
McDermott & McGough
THOSE MOMENTS, 1955 2010
Tricolor carbon print
30 x 23 1/2 inches
76.2 x 59.7 centimeters
Edition of 7
Photo: Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
McDermott & McGough
BEFORE THE FALL, 1955 2010
Tricolor carbon print
30 x 20 1/2 inches
76.2 x 52.1 centimeters
Edition of 7
Photo: Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
McDermott & McGough
A WOMAN ALONE, 1955 2010
Tricolor carbon print
30 x 24 1/2 inches
76.2 x 62.2 centimeters
Edition of 7
Photo: Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
McDermott & McGough
HAUNTS MY REVERIE, 1955 2010
Tricolor carbon print
30 x 18 inches
76.2 x 45.7 centimeters
Edition of 7
Photo: Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
McDermott & McGough
I BELIEVE IN DREAMS, 1955 2010
Tricolor carbon print
30 x 22 7/8 inches
76.2 x 58.1 centimeters
Edition of 7
Photo: Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
- - -
Top.
ARTicles page.
- - -
.
