PopWars

We heard the crackle of limbs breaking. We were eating dinner, and when we looked toward the window we saw a big oak slowly lean down the hill and then came the crash. It took two other trees down with it like dominoes. Before you know it two of our neighbors were looking at the mess in the middle of the road. We scurried down the hill and picked up enough debris to let the mailman through. Someone had already called the firefighters, and they hopped out of the truck with chainsaws, cleared the road, and left the rest for us.

I picked up the recent Cornelia Magazine at Rochester Contemporary. The yellow and black publication is a visual arts review for Western New York and Southern Ontario, and I turned to it hoping we hadn’t missed a great show during the four days we spent in Toronto. We did—Annie McDowell’s work at two seven two.

Issue #20 includes a fascinating article by Alexa Kanarowski about “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,” the pivotal 1975 exhibition at the George Eastman House. It is the second most-cited photography exhibition in history, a turning point in photography, a radical shift away from traditional depictions of landscape. Yet, at the time, the show looked more ordinary than radical—ordinary, as in “Ansel Adams photographed landscapes, and you photographed this for the walls of the Eastman?”

The Eastman’s website entry on this show says: “The question persists as to why this unassuming exhibition came to be so widely known and understood as the seminal event in which photography’s landscape paradigm shifted away from the sublime, ushering in a new era of theoretical approaches. Of those who did see the exhibition, few seem to have thought themselves in the presence of a turning point; paradigm shifts are rarely recognized except in retrospect.”

William Jenkins studied at Visual Studies Workshop and was the Curator of Twentieth-Century Photography at the Eastman in 1975. He selected ten then-young American photographers—Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel—for his show “New Topographics.” The Baltz photo above could be an Ed Ruscha painting. Photography in the seventies found a seat at the Modern Art table.

I was an art major at IU but only lasted a couple of years. When I moved back here I took a job as a graphic artist with the Rochester Police Department, a one-year position paid for by a grant, and one of the benefits was they would pay for a college class. So, in that one year I took Photo 1 and Photo 2 at the U of R. Bill Jenkins was my teacher. I remember him liking the Stones’ “Exile on Main Street.” He took us through the darkroom techniques directly into art. I eventually finished with a BA in Studio Arts from Empire State College, and those photo classes were the best classes I took.

In Cornelia, Alexa Kanarowski writes, “for all its economic fatigue, Western New York offers a fertile ground for reimagining approaches to topography and photography. Our stagnation is not purely decay but a pause, a long exposure in which the latent image continues to develop. A New New Topographics could foreground our entanglement with the climate, data, and capital systems we’ve built.”

We started the evening at Rella in the triangularly shaped space where the original Pyramid Arts Center was on the corner of Marshall and Monroe across the street from where Miles Davis debuted songs from what would become “Bitches Brew.” We sat at the counter and split an order of the Seafood Salad (calamari, scallops and shrimp) with lemon vinaigrette and an order of Shrimp Sliders. They reminded us of the roasted salmon sandwiches we had in Sausalito last year. Spanish is spoken in the open kitchen and Reggaeton music is on the sound system. We each had a glass of Primitivo wine.

The front wall at RoCo has never looked better. “Anne Havens | Sue Havens,” a mother-daughter show, opens with a bang with this collection of Anne Havens sculptures. Anne’s palette is represented, and her playfulness is on full display. We found it hard to move on from here but eventually left to congratulate Anne, who was holding court at the far end of the gallery.

I showed Anne this photo on my camera and she asked if I got the titles. “The titles are important,” she said. I could not fit the first one in my photo so I’ll list that as “not shown.” From left to right — “Climb The Bones” (not shown), “The Artist’s Life,” “Holy One,” “Sieves,” “Chariot,” “Spectacle,” “Barque,” “Lead Belly,” and “Steps.”

Anne Havens’ artist book, “Early Sculpture 1992–1997,” is available as a free ePub download:
Download “Early Sculpture”

We knew we would see more people in the park than we have seen all year. It was 70 as we walked along the beach. It felt so good to see people in mostly black T-shirts with such pale skin. And on our way back we stopped at the garden to pick a bag of over-wintered mâche, our first harvest of the new year.