Double Exposure at Godt-Cleary Projects asks well-known contemporary photographers to pair images—presumably to pursue that treasured postmodern conceit that meaning derives from context. And in some cases, these visual couplets comment on each other neatly.
Take Nan Goldin's Joey in my mirror, Berlin, 1992 and Joey in my mirror, NYC 1999, whose pairing automatically imposes upon the two portraits a commentary on aging. Or Barbara Probst's Exposure #1 (2000-2002), which neatly illustrates the photographer's practice of capturing an instant from multiple perspectives. A figure takes a leaping stride, viewed laterally in one color print, isolated in a diamond of rooftop in a nighttime urbanscape in the other.
But each of these pairings also speaks to another postmodern ideal: the unreliability of images, particularly photographs. Goldin's subject in a mirror comments on photography's at-times-dubious mirroring of reality (it's "my" mirror, after all), while Probst's prints frankly acknowledge their artifice—a camera is visible in the level view of the instant. Throughout the show, you find that the dueling contexts play second fiddle in the photographers' medley of postmodernist themes.
Either of the two prints in Vanessa Beecroft's Vogue Homme (2002), in which a nude female model headstands, front and rear, next to a man in a black business suit, sufficiently questions notions of gender and appearance without the other. Alfredo Jaar's blurred photograph of a Rwandan refugee derives no particular power or poignance from repetition. It's simply a sharp observation of both the urgency of the subject's flight and the hazy passing of his plight in the media's eye.
Then you have photographers such as Uta Barth, whose Untitled (02.1) (2002) carries forth her project of focusing only on the unoccupied foreground of scenes, or Bill Jacobson, who shoots everything out of focus, calling attention to the fact that the camera does not work like the eye, as the indistinct urban views of #3839 and #3561 purport to reveal. Both illustrate, instead, the potential weakness of a postmodern idea as a visual inspiration.
Yes, yes, we know: The camera selects and sometimes lies, and the mind does the work of assembling and interpreting the image. Can we stipulate these points and get on with making interesting images?
That said, it's worth noting that the show overall is engaging, and it's refreshing to have a venue in town presenting work with which you might have an intellectual quarrel.
(Double Exposure continues through June.)
From this seat of cerebral ferment, we turn to the town's doctrinal shrine of contemporary art's shortcomings: the Las Vegas Art Museum. With each show, the museum's text panels seem to wax more shrill with regard to curator James Mann's anti-postmodern idée fixe. The artists in Fifteen Santa Fe Artists are, one panel asserts, resurrecting the visual art of painting from its late- and postmodern grave. To some eyes, perhaps, but on the whole, Fifteen Santa Fe Artists has the air of a Sunday painters' guild's annual show—and some other city's guild, to boot. In an all-too-postmodern manner, theory appears to have trumped judgment and taste.
From this melange of reheated classicism, tepid abstraction and standard landscapes a few artists emerge. Frederick Spencer's tightly wrought, mysteriously mystical paintings would make a fascinating show alone. The same can be said for Geoffrey Laurence's large-scale heroic paintings, which set contemporary figures against putti-littered murals. Sharp stuff, particularly Hold Fast, with its grim and gritty trio of seated, armed soldiers.
But aside from offering no proof of that purported aesthetic redemption, Fifteen Santa Fe Artists gives no indication of why Santa Fe should be searched for it. The show has its high points, but no reason for being. (Fifteen Santa Fe Artists continues through May 22.)