(this review was written contemporaneous with the "Recent Western Landscape" exhibit September 2010)
Lee Friedlander’s current exhibition, entitled Recent Western Landscape, now on view at Mary Boone’s Midtown location supplements the concurrent America By Car show at the Whitney. Both catalogue trips across the American West made in recent years. There, the car looms as the artist’s surrogate, here, the same locations layout unmediated by the vehicle’s bounding frame.
Friedlander bushwhacks, in snow and sun, through thickets of grass, limbs, and tree trunks. Shot in Glen Canyon, Death Valley, and the Mojave Desert these 65 photographs document the terrain “beyond the car,” absent signs of human intervention. Nature seems to appear, a l’etat brut, unadorned by the photographer’s long shadow. Yet, like the drum beat consistency of their uniform square format, Friedlander’s enigmatic authorial presence grows more conspicuous with each work.
These photographs are made in an artisanal tradition of picture making which harkens to a bygone Fifth Avenue. The majestic thoroughfare was once site to Alfred Steiglitz's 291 Gallery. Apt to be mistaken as formalist abstractions these photographs are not mere exercises in compositional rigor, technically facility, or photographic veracity. They illustrate and transcend the sheer force of brute visual fact.
Painters beware, the best images demonstrate an immaculate sensitivity to the picture plane and bounding rectangle comparable to a Manet or Cézanne. In contrast to Friedlander’s montage-like signature, foreground obstructions unify these images. Rococo filigrees of foliage sprout out engulfing their surfaces. Dendrites of brushwood synthesize linear and painterly and their abstract beauty belies any documentary assumption.
A restraining conceit, the nettled skeins of foreground flora establish the spatial order continually recalling our eye from fictive depth to the literal surface of the medium. They insist that we are looking at someone’s picture, not a mirror up to nature.
Amidst the layers of space a tenuous balance between hierarchy and all-overness is struck. A dubious stability invigorates their austere homogenous format as each approaches the precipice of Pollock’s gestural chaos. They are so many explorations, so many rehearsals of form. Like a jazz musician Friedlander pursues similar motifs with improvisational variation, always teetering on the verge...
Lee Friedlander’s current exhibition, entitled Recent Western Landscape, now on view at Mary Boone’s Midtown location supplements the concurrent America By Car show at the Whitney. Both catalogue trips across the American West made in recent years. There, the car looms as the artist’s surrogate, here, the same locations layout unmediated by the vehicle’s bounding frame.
Friedlander bushwhacks, in snow and sun, through thickets of grass, limbs, and tree trunks. Shot in Glen Canyon, Death Valley, and the Mojave Desert these 65 photographs document the terrain “beyond the car,” absent signs of human intervention. Nature seems to appear, a l’etat brut, unadorned by the photographer’s long shadow. Yet, like the drum beat consistency of their uniform square format, Friedlander’s enigmatic authorial presence grows more conspicuous with each work.
These photographs are made in an artisanal tradition of picture making which harkens to a bygone Fifth Avenue. The majestic thoroughfare was once site to Alfred Steiglitz's 291 Gallery. Apt to be mistaken as formalist abstractions these photographs are not mere exercises in compositional rigor, technically facility, or photographic veracity. They illustrate and transcend the sheer force of brute visual fact.
The 2 ¼ inch negative of his Hasselblad camera captures light with all the crystalline clarity of an engraving. It allows for an opulence of delicate tonal contrasts, textures, and patterns all teased from nature, and all subtly stuffed in a 15” x 15” square. Confined to the square, no work lacks a delightful dynamic equilibrium of light and form.
A restraining conceit, the nettled skeins of foreground flora establish the spatial order continually recalling our eye from fictive depth to the literal surface of the medium. They insist that we are looking at someone’s picture, not a mirror up to nature.
Amidst the layers of space a tenuous balance between hierarchy and all-overness is struck. A dubious stability invigorates their austere homogenous format as each approaches the precipice of Pollock’s gestural chaos. They are so many explorations, so many rehearsals of form. Like a jazz musician Friedlander pursues similar motifs with improvisational variation, always teetering on the verge...
Their jewel-like painterliness easily recalls a lyrical Corot or late Titian. Are these the works of a late master inclined to isolation from the “social landscape” he was once so fond?
Never afraid of such realities his perspective on them has always evaded categories so often harped on in recent photography. His elusive interpretation of the landscape makes them all the more challenging to decode on the linguistic level. Alone in nature Friedlander increasingly plays a retiring Jean-Jacques Rousseau studying his plants on the l’îsle de Saint-Pierre.
The tradition of American landscape is their point of departure. This mythic American road trip brings us face to face with a frontier both familiar and foreign. He has long afforded intimate if unsentimental access to our landscape. Rarely traveling to distant lands he makes exotic that which is burdened by our acquaintance. Most captivating is this journey’s elusive end. Absent are the manifest signifiers alluding to the destiny of popular art and culture over the last fifty years.
Like Bierstadt or Adams these images might parade some grand American vista. Yet Friedlander occludes potential icons with a thicket of limbs. Views are repeatedly submerged under brambles, like paintings behind Duchamp’s Sixteen Miles of String. The build up of overlapping spatial planes become successive layers of geological sediment. The deep vistas of these “combines” continually collapse into foregrounds elements, demoting them to latent symbols. By thwarting the view such obstructions become the view.
Foreground layers are as much an esoteric game of form as the taciturn surrogate of the artist’s looming presence. Friedlander, known for surreptitiously exposing himself in shadowy silhouettes and fugitive storefront reflections, seems to have rematerialized in even more elliptical guise. The chaotic web of nature floating on their surface establishes a metaphor for the unique lens of consciousness through which this photographer filters his visual world.
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