Artists. The Brooklyn Rail - JUL-AUG 2016 - Art. Art Over the last two decades Wolfgang Tillmans has redefined what photography can look like within a fine art context, with his deceptively casual images of everyday human scenes and objects. His photos from the early 1990s of friends and rave culture catapulted him to fame, embodying the exciting and pioneering nature of his work. For decades, Luc Tuymans’s paintings have plumbed the nature of images—charting the limits of their personal and political functions. Before the opening of his latest solo show at David Zwirner Gallery, Tuymans spoke with Jarrett Earnest about temperature in paintings, their instantaneous decay, and the balance between violence and tenderness. For Thomas Roma and Leo Rubinfien, two photographers who came of age when American giants like Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, and Garry Winogrand were redefining the black-and-white medium, conversations around the practice of photography are fist-shaking discussions of life, tears, vulnerability, and ethics.
‘The Dog Really Confused Things’: Another Side of William Wegman. William Wegman, Inside Outside, 2014, oil and postcard on wood panel. William Wegman bought his first dog in California after responding to an ad in a Long Beach, California newspaper that said, “Weimaraners $35.” He called the new pet Man Ray. Wegman had trained as a painter, but as a graduate student at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana in the mid-1960s, he abandoned the medium, he says, due to the popular notion at the time that painting was dead.
He turned his attention to photography and video, and the dog kept wandering into his shots. “He’d get in the way, but he looked really amazing,” Wegman told me recently. “So I found some things for him to do.” A different view of Wegman’s career is on display through this weekend at two galleries in New York: Sperone Westwater, exhibiting the artist’s so-called postcard paintings, and Magenta Plains, which has a selection of his drawings, mostly from the 1970s. 8 French Art Terms You Should Know. This French compound, which literally translates to “placing on stage,” or “putting on stage,” is one of the most misunderstood of all art terms. First used in theater around the year 1833, the phrase originally referred to all of the visual effects overseen by a theater director—including compositional design, lighting, and the placement of actors.
In other words, the mise-en-scène encompassed all of the visual features on the stage that gave a performance its look and feel. Nowadays, mise-en-scène is a term used by art critics and historians to describe the setting of a film, performance, or photograph, especially those with cinematic qualities. For example, in her “Kitchen Table” series of photographs, Carrie Mae Weems takes as her mise-en-scène a family kitchen table, staging scenes of everyday life that examine racial and gender stereotypes and calling attention to the constructed nature of photography.
—Sarah Gottesman. Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery - Artists.