Berkeley photographer Katy Grannan at Fraenkel Gallery
Published 4:21 pm, Friday, March 21, 2014
In her latest show at Fraenkel, Berkeley photographer Katy Grannan extends her ongoing series of portraits made of, and in collaboration with, people she engages on the street. The collaborative aspect matters both to the subjects and to viewers because it permits us - and them, and Grannan - to imagine that they have chosen the aspects under which they appear in her images. But the pictures leave us wondering.
Viewed in a positive light, Grannan's work makes themes of the human ruins of empire and of uncertainty as to the control that everyday people can have over the selves they present to the camera and the world.
Even those in the most straitened circumstances try to keep up a sign language of grooming and attire, demeanor and attitude. But in American society, stratified by education, by wealth and subjection to risks, "the hidden injuries of class," as American sociologist Richard Sennett termed them long ago, will surface.
Of these injuries, hidden in some measure even from those who have suffered them, Grannan makes hay.
She approaches her subjects and solicits their collusion in her work. That process may be her art's true, and least available, content. But their collaboration does not extend to editorial input. And it gives insufficient cover to Grannan's project of getting people to expose the misfortunes, hidden or flaunted, that her subjects have suffered at the rungless end of the American economic ladder.
Only one picture in her show - "Anonymous, Modesto CA" (2013) - hints that Grannan might have critique as well as exploitation in view. This image looks up at a woman of indefinite age, though not young, strained and wind-burnished, staring into the distance under raking sunlight, a white-washed wall at her back.
Grannan must know, as her subject probably did not, that the pose reprises with ambiguous irony a cliche of pre-Cold War communist propaganda: the post-revolutionary worker or farmer gazing toward the better world in birth, her expression electric with hope or resolute purpose or both.
Against the background of the past 40 years' economic assault on American workers' rights and hopes, "Anonymous, Modesto ..." and the other portraits here read as a dossier of humanity squandered by a morally bankrupt profit system.
In the present ideological context, the individuality that contemporary portraits purport to highlight - especially as Grannan practices the genre - counts merely as documentation of personal failure, unneeded lessons in self-blame from a culture pathologically committed to "personal responsibility" as the driver of misfortunes ordained more often by structural inequities.
A lineage exists for Grannan's work, stretching back to the Depression-era portraits of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. But the precedent to beat, as Grannan surely knows, is Richard Avedon's "In the American West" (1980). Avedon (1923-2004) pitched his outdoor photo backdrop and camera by the roadside and shot willing subjects, from the same class stratum that Grannan taps, who happened by. His series, in steely black and white, casts a colder, yet more inquisitive eye on its participants, and evokes a more credible sense of discovery.
Grannan has some new black-and-white work at Fraenkel, but in a nicely cinematic register. Institutions aside, who can afford to hang Grannan's portraits on their walls?
Only people whose class position has to make us wonder why - to gloat? to puzzle? to pity? - they would want her specimens of social defeat staring back at them every day.
Stoller in his stride: Contemporary sculpture has exploded since the turn of the millennium.
Partly responding to an upward-spiraling art market, partly from a lack of means to evoke a stressed-out world made porous by virtual reality, sculptors from Paul McCarthy and Urs Fischer to David Altmejd and Thomas Houseago have powered a new monstrosity in figurative sculpture.
I have often accused Bay Area sculptors of appearing to try too hard, but in today's context, work such as Kirk Stoller's at Romer Young looks refreshingly unforced and free of anxiety about its reception.
As in much of his earlier work, Stoller continues to compose with scavenged materials: bits of wood, Plexiglas and metal, facets of which he may coat with sleek, bright color.
"Untitled (rainbow)" (2014) is built upon a fragment of curved railing whose sawed-off spindles permit it to arc upward and away from the wall, above eye level. Three other wood elements, accented with fresh or timeworn color, and a square of orange Plexiglas, spring from the arc's apex.
The sequence recalls the progress of forms in early 20th century Russian avant-garde abstraction and the lilt of 1960s' steel constructions by the late Anthony Caro.
Other pieces in Stoller's show make reference to Cubism and perhaps to the notional contraptions of Richard Tuttle.
Stoller amplifies the redemptive impulse behind many sculptors' uses of found objects. His work generates improbable feelings of uplift, but it stops short of optimism, respecting - as so much bombastic contemporary art does not - "the great blank of what's next," in poet Peter Gizzi's phrase.
Kirk Stoller: Thrown a Curve: Sculpture. Through March 29. Romer Young Gallery, 1240 22nd St., S.F. (415) 550-7483. www.romeryounggallery.com.