photo la 2020: Programming
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THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2020 Opening Night, 4:00 - 5:00PM (prior to opening night), Opening Night Docent Tour ~ Weston Naef, Curator Emeritus, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum, Weston Naef, Curator Emeritus, Department of Photographs, The J. Paul Getty leads a Docent Tour. In 1984, Naef was named founding curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. His appointment was simultaneous with the acquisition of a group of stellar collections of photographs--among them collections formed by Sam Wagstaff, Arnold Crane, and André Jammes along with a dozen other American and European pioneer collections of photographs. For twenty-five years before his retirement from the Getty in 2009, Weston Naef guided the growth and publication of the Getty Museum photographs collection, supervising more than 100 exhibitions and 50 publications.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 31, 10:00 - 11:00AM (prior to opening of fair this morning), Docent Tour ~ Ryan Linkof, Curator, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Ryan Linkof, Curator at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, leads a Docent Tour. Previously serving as assistant curator in the Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and most recently, as part of the founding curatorial team of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. He has organized numerous exhibition projects, including Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium (LACMA and the Getty Museum), and Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa – Art and Film (LACMA). He is the author of Public Images (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), and his research has appeared in multiple exhibition catalogues, edited volumes, and scholarly journals, including Media History, Photography and Culture, and Études photographiques. His writing has also appeared in a number of online and print journals, including the New York Times, East of Borneo, This Recording, and Document Journal. He holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, where he has also served as a visiting professor.
11:30AM, Out of the Trenches – Skateboarding Photography in Perspective, What comes to mind when one thinks of the image of skateboarding? But what about the grand lineage of capturing choreographed movement in photography? While references like the documentation of Loie Fuller or Babette Mangolte’s cinemagraphic images of Trisha Brown dancing on New York City rooftops are not lost on the astute, why not privilege the incredible feat of human prowess that is skateboarding, and its corresponding images as aphotographic genre worth exploring for more than an adrenaline rush? Moderator William Sharp sits down with photographer Anthony Acosta and author and skate historian Ozzie Ausband to hash out these questions and more.
1:00PM, Anarchival Practices and the Questioning of the Archive as an Authority – moderated by Maite Muñoz Iglesias, Independent Researcher and Curator with Hailey Loman, artist and director of Los Angeles Contemporary Archive; artist Adrià Julia; and Pietro Rigolo, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Collections, Getty Research Institute, The questioning of the notion of institutional archives as an authority and the criticism of the role of archives in colonial processes has conditioned the growing development of archival policies, economies, and technologies in the artistic context. New models that collect and preserve displaced memories are born from this crisis – the so-called dissident archives, community archives or anarchives, which underscore the value of the archive in relation to emancipatory cultural movements. Archival treatment and curatorial and artistic practices around the archive are imbued by the urgency of covering gaps in documentation resulting from a lack of inclusion by official narratives, resulting in a need for critical reflection on the aesthetic utility of archival practices.
3:00PM, Questioning the Protocols of Display: Artist Phil Chang, writer Travis Diehl, and Duncan Forbes, writer and curator, currently at the Getty Research Institute. Previously Director of Fotomuseum Winterthur and Senior Curator of Photography at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, moderated by Nina Strand, editor of Objektiv Journal, Oslo, Practices central to art in Los Angeles, like that of Andrea Fraser or Christopher Williams, take the context for the display of a work of art to be tantamount to the possibility for the production of meaning. But what about an aesthetic demand for context? Do artistic practices actually produce spaces for display, and not the other way around? What are the external structural forces that govern the protocols of a given exhibition? Amongst the missions of the Scandinavian journal Objektiv, a photo gallery in paper format, is an investigation of the ways in which camera-based art is exhibited, both from institutional and artistic perspectives. Objektiv’s editor Nina Strand will explore these questions further, inviting panelists to look at current exhibition strategies and discuss how to move forward.
5:00PM, American Illusions: Artist Buck Ellison in Conversation with Ryan Linkof, Curator, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Photography has long been used to pull the wool over our eyes. Forever tethered to notions of documentary accuracy and indexical truth, photography is perhaps the most effective tool in convincing us of realities that are not real. At a moment in which photographic media aggressively promote fantasies of personal enlightenment, material abundance, and physical perfection, Buck Ellison's work asks us to look harder at the ways advertising, lifestyle photography, and even the family portrait create illusions that are often too intoxicating to resist. Ryan Linkof will join Ellison to discuss the evolution of his work, and his ongoing engagement with photography's facts and fictions.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 10:00 - 11:00AM 11AM (prior to opening of fair this morning), Docent Tour ~ Keith F. Davis, Senior Curator, Photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Keith F. Davis is Senior Curator of Photography at the Nelson-Atkins and also serves as an advisor to the Hall Family Foundation. He received a master's degree in 1979 in art history from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. After a research internship at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, 1978-79, he became Curator of the Fine Art Collections, Hallmark Cards, Inc. Upon the gift to the museum of the Hallmark Photographic Collection, in December 2005, Davis became the Nelson-Atkins's founding curator of photography. Since 1979, he has curated some 80 exhibitions, many of which have been toured to leading museums across the United States and, internationally, from Sydney, Australia, to Lausanne, Switzerland. In addition to teaching and lecturing widely on the history of photography, he is the author of nearly twenty catalogues and books, including An American Century of Photography, From Dry-Plate to Digital: The Hallmark Photographic Collection, 2nd edition (Abrams, 1999); The Origins of American Photography, From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839-1885 (HFF/NAMA/Yale, 2007); and The Photographs of Homer Page: The Guggenheim Work, New York 1949-50 (HFF/NAMA/Yale, 2009). His various awards include a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986-87) for his work on the Civil-War era photographer George N. Barnard. He was honored to be featured in James Stourton's Great Collectors of Our Time: Art Collecting Since 1945 (Scala, 2007)
11:00AM, Reconsidering the Postmodern Canon: Art Historian Jeanne Dreskin in conversation with artists Harry Gamboa Jr., Todd Gray and Nicole Miller, Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, notions of a "postmodern image," located primarily in photography, emerged within American art world discourses. The appropriative practices of artists later associated with the "Pictures Generation" became paradigmatic of what many critics and art historians saw as this theoretically inflected turn in image-making. In their efforts to articulate photographic shifts way from late-modernist tenets, however, preeminent histories largely foreclosed the inclusion of artists whose work remained invested in sociopolitical concerns and imbricated politics of cultural identity introduced during the civil rights era. Positioning a reassessment of these narratives as a point of departure, panelists will consider expanded, intersectional notions of photographic postmodernism and their relevance to each of their practices, which share efforts to problematize the camera's role in both historical and contemporary constructions of identity.
1:00PM, Photo LA 2020 Honoree Anthony Hernandez in Conversation with Virginia Heckert, Curator, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum, Anthony Hernandez, since at least 1970, has explored with great depth multiple genres of documentary image making. Widely regarded for his sensitivity to light and space while working in a grand pictorial tradition, one of Hernandez's most beloved subjects is the city of Los Angeles. First recognized for his descriptive street photographs of the 1970s, his work employs technical rigor to make clear the complexity of our built environment, complete with the specific nuances of class and race, rendered with photographic accuracy. In more recent projects such as Landscapes for the Homeless (1988-91), Waiting for Los Angeles (1996-98), and Everything (The Los Angeles River Basin) (2003-04), document the city's human presence through the traces and debris left by destructive social forces.Hernandez's work has been shown in international group and solo exhibitions including at Sprengel Museum Hannover, Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, Seattle Art Museum, Le Bal in Paris, The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Virginia Heckert is a curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She is the author of Ed Ruscha and Some Los Angeles Apartments (2013), Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography (2015) and coauthor of Irving Penn: Small Trades (2009).
3:00PM, The Voice of an Institution: Keith F. Davis, Senior Curator of Photography, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and an advisor to the Hall Family Foundation; Jim Ganz, Senior Curator of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum; collector Jan de Bont; Rebecca Morse Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; moderated by artist Carter Mull, What is the "voice" of a collection? What is the "voice" of an assembly of works (in the case of non-collecting institutions)? Why speak of a mute space as having a "voice"? How can a sonic form of communication be used to unpack the productive work a collection can or does do? The history of the individual institutions represented on the panel and their respective strategies for collecting or mounting exhibitions is not to be underestimated. But how do spaces like the Getty, LACMA, and others impact our lives?
5:00PM, Film Screening ~ Marcel Duchamp: The Art of the Possible, with an Introduction by gallerist Robert Berman followed by Q & A with the Film Director, Matthew Taylor, Marcel Duchamp: Art of the Possible (90 minutes) explores the life, philosophy and impact of one of the most influential early 20th century modernists, Marcel Duchamp. The film breaks down Duchamp's ideas and applies them to both historical events and the modernist explosion that blanketed the early 20th century. Art of the Possible isn't simply a biopic. The film highlights how Duchamp's ideas changed the public consciousness of what the image could be, cementing his ongoing relevance to conceptualizing photography.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 10:00 - 11:00AM (prior to opening of fair this morning)Docent Tour ~ Paul Martineau, Associate Curator, Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Paul Martineau, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum leads a Docent Tour. Before joining the Getty in 2003, Martineau worked at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Martineau has organized numerous exhibitions, covering a diverse range of topics spanning the birth of the medium to today. He is the author of over a dozen books and articles, his most recent include: Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography (2018), Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs (2016), and The Thrill of the Chase: The Wagstaff Collection of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2016).
11:00AM, Digressions on the Photographic Narrative: artists Genevieve Gaignard, David Gilbert, Malerie Marder, and Dariush Nehdaran in conversation with Rebecca Lowery, Assistant Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The panel looks at the narrative in contemporary photography – considering storytelling as both an individual and collective practice that shapes us personally, socially, and politically. It gathers a group of artists who engage in varied ways with narrative, using strategies of staging, fabrication, and fabulation to explore its multivalent personal and cultural roles—in the process either metabolizing or elucidating transformations in image making from an indexical or scientific paradigm to a newly liminal relational utility.
1:00PM, Migration ~ Global Processes and Psychic Progression: Moderated by independent curator Suzy Halajian in dialogue with artists Carmen Argote, Carolina Caycedo, and Gelare Khoshgozaran, What if we were to define fragmentation as the key formal condition of a diaspora? As bodies, objects and social relationships move and exchange across national boundaries, the seemingly made nature of a culture shatters across a globe already fraught with nation-states that are only accepting of new citizens once a series of bureaucratic, linguistic and sometimes psychic transformations occur. The implications of hard, technocratic and soft, socially interpolative mechanisms for the control of the movement of people and property are contested as both political tools and critical processes. As borders seemingly harden under our feet, the panelists will consider the relationship between art and migration, and confront the task of defining and redefining a discourse on migration beyond formal terms.
3:00PM, Transmutations of the Clock: Artists Beatriz Cortez, Young Joon Kwak, and Dylan Mira in Dialogue with artist Carter Mull and Michael Ned Holte, independent curator, writer and faculty at the California Institute of the ArtsThe panel will consider various ways in which artists approach time as a site of critical engagement, particularly in relation to what Elizabeth Freeman, in her book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, has defined as “chrononormativity.” With an understanding of the social and political implications of time and its relentless commodification, these artists use performativity, “temporal drag,” and time travel, among other possibilities, as destabilizing agents.