Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Lee Friedlander: Off the Road and Out of the Car

(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.

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.

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...

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.


Richard Serra & the Plane of Painting

Henri Matisse, The Open Window, 1905





"First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to he painted is seen." 
- from Alberti's On Painting










"Aware that whenever I state this I incur a heavy silence, I point out once more that what De Pictura 1.19 maintains is that ifyou draw a rectangle then you may treat it-the drawn rectangle that is, not the entire hypothetical surface-as an open window. Of itself, the given conventionally flat format of painting, whether panel in the fifteenth century or stretched canvas now, neither entails nor implies Alberti's "window." The flat surface with edges precedes what Alberti calls a window, which is a construct, willfully imposed. 'The "window" idea, then, is a trope,:3 and a signal of the essentally fictive poetics of painting."
Untitled, 1972 (charcoal on paper)


"There was no way to make a tree. And there wasn't any Idea of "tree," not in your imagination, not in your fictive imagination, not it the reality of mark making. Because everyone seems to make up their own tool, and everyone has their own procedure.And it was totally revealing because basically, what Schuler was telling these people who were trying to get the elbow attached to the finger correctly was that there is no [one] way to draw an arm, there's no [one] way to draw a hand, there's only drawing (gerand, process) and there is only the invention of drawing."

"There is no [right] way to make a drawing, there is only drawing."
"There is only drawing and there is only the invention of drawing."

"Its up to you to make your own drawing."

Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51 (7' 11 3/8" x 17' 9 1/4")


The external appearance of nature as perceived by the eye does not and should not limit the parameters and possiblities of drawing. Drawing as an inventions limited only to the imagination and technical faculties of the artist.


Untitled, 1973 Paintstick and charcoal on paper; 50 x 38 in.
Vir Heroicus Sublimis in situ















Serra's reinvention of the pictorial plane surface of painting and drawing into a bodily and phenomenological space bounded on by the sensation of light on the retina but extended into the three-dimensional realm of the body and all its sensativity responsiveness to the physical space it occupies.
Drawing into architecture
Blank, 1978
(Paintstick on Belgian linen; 2 parts, each 10 ft. 1/4 in. x 10 ft. 1/4 in.)