Films with cross-dressed protagonists and advertisements featuring androgynous adolescents are just some of the evidence of the contemporary fascination with gender and sexuality. This book provides an art-historical perspective on photography that explores and plays with this controversial, sexy subject. 144 color photos.

Rrose Is a Rrose Is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography

WILSON, SARAH

SPECTOR, Nancy

Blessing, Jennifer

Tyler, Carole-Anne

Halberstam, Judith

Harris, Lyle Ashton

Reference

Guggenheim Museum Pubns

Revised, expanded and completely redesigned, this latest edition of the Guggenheim Museum's popular guide to its New York collection is a beautifully produced volume, not only a handy overview of the museum's holdings but a concise, engaging primer on twentieth-century art. Organized alphabetically, the book consists of entries on more than 250 of the most important paintings, sculptures and other artworks in the collection by artists from Marina Abramovic to Gilberto Zorio. Also included are definitions of key terms and concepts of modern art, from "Action" to "Non-Objective" and beyond. The Guggenheim Museum Collection is beloved for this wealth of masterpieces by leading modern artists, such as Marc Chagall, Vasily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso. Reflecting the recent growth in the collection, this 2001 edition includes new entries on such artists as Matthew Barney, Robert Gober, Ann Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman, among others. The text is by the museum's curators as well as prominent authors and scholars, including Dore Ashton, Gary Garrels and Rosalind Krauss.

Guggenheim Museum Collection: A to Z

Arts & Photography

Alsdorf, Bridget

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Guggenheim Museum

Speaking With Hands

In October 1993, Henry M. Buhl purchased Alfred Stieglitz's photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe's hands. This photograph became the cornerstone of his private collection that now includes over 1,000 images by the medium's foremost practioners, as well as little-known and emerging artists. From a photogenic drawing negative made in 1840 by William Henry Fox Talbot to serial Polaroids made in 2002 by Cornelia Parker, the collection encompasses a wide range of photographic practices--scientific, journalistic, and fine art photography--with a strong component of contemporary art. Published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, these beautiful and poetic reproductions demonstrate the prevalence of the hand as a photographic theme; a result of photography's easy ability to capture fragments, details, and ephemeral movement. The images are discussed through topical texts: why hands are a unique theme (Jennifer Blessing), the prevalence of hands in Surrealist photogrpahs and prose (Kirsten A. Hoving), and the uncanny aspects of hands in contemporary art that uses photography (Ralph Rugoff). Containing work from 150 artists, this catalogue is both a visually stunning and haunting object, and a handy resource for the study of photography.

Hoving, Kirsten

Photography & Video

Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition

Robert Mapplethorpe never concealed his interest in and passion for the human figure in all its sensuous manifestations. His celebrated black-and-white photographs from the later part of the 20th century reveled in the athletic body, the nude body, the exquisite body. This groundbreaking exhibition and its accompanying catalogue explore the relationship between the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe and Classical art, in particular through Mannerist engravings and sculpture. The pairing of works is among the first collaborations between the Guggenheim Museum and the State Hermitage Museum. Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition exemplifies the artist's rapport with the elongated and elaborate forms of Mannerist art, namely the study of the human body, highlighting the underlying classicism evident in the clarity and potency of all Mapplethorpe's subjects as well as their explosive energy. The classical ideal was not only a poetic inspiration but also an ethical model and, in his creative quest, Mapplethorpe described photography as "the perfect way to make a sculpture." The potency of love and Eros, which electrifies many of the Mannerist works shown here, is articulated again in the work of Mapplethorpe. The vital anatomical forms of his portraits of models such as bodybuilder Lisa Lyons and the statuesque Derrick Cross find their roots in Antiquity, and here they find their mirror in the likes of Jan Harmensz Muller's Sabine woman and Jacob Matham's Apollo. The Hermitage's superb collection of Italian painting and sculpture amply illustrates the course of Italian art from the Middle Ages to the 18th century and includes an impressive collection of Mannerist works. Approximately 50 Mannerist works from the Hermitage collection are paired with the same number of works by Mapplethorpe from the Guggenheim's collection, are several Italian, French and Flemish bronze sculptures from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Essays by the curators are included: Addressing the return to Classicism at the end of the 16th, 19th, and 20th centuries, Arkady Ippolitov discusses the obsession that defines both the work of Mapplethorpe and the Mannerists. Germano Celant's text further explores the influence this 16th-century style had on Mapplethorpe's artistic practice and sensibility, illuminating the artist's interest in the study of pure form as well as allegorical imagery. Articulated in both word and image, the catalogue also traces Mapplethorpe's complex relationship to the history of art more broadly, ranging from Neoclassicism to Surrealism, with comparisons to the work of Jacques-Louis David, Antonio Canova, Auguste Rodin, Man Ray, and more. A third essay by Guggenheim Curator Jennifer Blessing traces allegorical representations in 19th- and 20th-century photography, with references to Mapplethorpe's oeuvre.

Robert Mapplethorpe And The Classical Tradition

Ippolitov, Arkady

Individual Artists

Jeff Wall: Exposure introduces four new large-scale black-and-white photographs by the Canadian artist Jeff Wall. Presented publicly for the first time in an accompanying special exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, this new work is shown alongside earlier pieces--both black-and-white photographs as well as transparencies mounted in light boxes--to create an ensemble that resonates formally and thematically. Wall has long been interested in the language of Realism, in the values and aesthetics of representing daily life. All of the pictures realistically portray desolate places and people in straitened circumstances typical of contemporary society. This focused catalogue, with essays by Guggenheim Museum Curator of Photography Jennifer Blessing and Katrin Blum, aptly demonstrates Wall's continuing interrogation of the history of photographic representation--here specifically the legacies of documentary photography and Neorealist film.

Jeff Wall: Exposure

Blum, Katrin

True North features the work of contemporary artists whose photographic or video-based work evokes the formal conventions of Northern Romantic landscape painting as well as its legacy in later nineteenth-century photography. Yet unlike their Romantic antecedents, the works in this exhibition are historically and politically self-reflexive and problematize the notion of a pure, unchangeable North. Rather than report a uniquely Northern essence or truth, this presentation is premised on the idea that our visions of the North are structured through our own varying positions. A fantastical place of fear, desire, refuge, conquest and decay, the North has played an increasingly important role in the work of contemporary artists interested in the socio-political issues of colonization and pollution, as well as aesthetic notions of the sublime. Accompanying a spring 2008 exhibition at Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, this catalogue includes entries on the featured artists: Stan Douglas, Olafur Eliasson, Elger Esser, Thomas Flechtner, Roni Horn, Armin Linke and Orit Raff. In the introduction, Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography at the Guggenheim Museum, sketches a theoretical framework for the exhibition, linking the recent focus on Northern locales to the qualities of the photographic medium itself. Rebecca Solnit's poetic essay gathers together personal recollections, reflections on literature and environmental and political concerns to explore various cultural fantasies and symbols associated with the North.

True North

Solnit, Rebecca

Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by ghostly apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive media, as well as in live performance and the virtual world. By using dated, passé or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter and technologies, these arts can embody a melancholic longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past. Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance examines the myriad ways by which photographic imagery is incorporated into recent art practices, and in the process underscores the unique power of reproductive media―while documenting a widespread contemporary obsession with accessing and retrieving the past. The works included in Haunted range from individual photographs and photographic series, to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements, to videos, film, performance and site-specific installations. Drawn primarily from the Guggenheim collection and its recent acquisitions, Haunted features major artists such as Marina Abramovi?, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Gregory Crewdson, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Anthony Hernandez, Roni Horn, Pierre Huyghe, Joan Jonas, Zoe Leonard, Sally Mann, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sara VanDerBeek, Jeff Wall and Andy Warhol. A significant part of the survey is dedicated to work created since 2001 by younger artists such as Walead Beshty, Spencer Finch, Ori Gersht and Idris Khan.

Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, Performance

Phelan, Peggy

Saltzman, Lisa

Trotman, Nat

History & Criticism

Guggenheim Museum Publications

This volume is the first comprehensive monograph on Rineke Dijkstra to be published in the United States. The catalogue accompanies the first U.S. mid-career survey of this important Dutch artist’s work in photography and video; it features the Beach Portraits and other early works such as the photographs of new mothers and bullfighters, together with selections from Dijkstra’s later work including her most recent video installations. Also included are series that she has been working on continuously for years, such as Almerisa (1994–present), which documents a young immigrant girl as she grows up and adapts to her new environment. The catalogue features essays by exhibition curators Jennifer Blessing (Senior Curator of Photography at the Guggenheim) and Sandra S. Phillips (Senior Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); an interview with the artist by Jan van Adrichem; interviews with the artist’s subjects by Sophie Derkzer; short texts on the artist’s series by Chelsea Spengemann; and the most comprehensive exhibition history and bibliography to date. Rineke Dijkstra came to prominence in the 1990s with her celebrated Beach Portraits, large-scale color photographs of children on the verge of adolescence posed on beaches around the world, from South Carolina to the Ukraine. From that point on, her sensitive and visually riveting portraits have documented individuals caught in transitional states, sometimes due to physical exertion, for example after giving birth or dancing, or charted over time through series. Along with other Western European photographers such as Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, Dijkstra has been a leading innovator in the production of large-scale color images, which came to define contemporary photography in the 1990s and have transformed it ever since.

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective

Philips, Sandra

THE GUGGENHEIM /ALLEMAND

Hatje Cantz

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