Philip-Lorca diCorcia Lucky Thirteen at Pace Wildenstein

I thought this the best of the shows I saw on September 8. Mark Weiner and I were wandering from show to show before the crowds arrived. Christ, did you see that mass of ground artists' flesh that pressed itself into the Chelsea gallery casings during the opening evening festivities. Next year maybe we should get an "Official Opener" to throw out the first canvas or some such. You know, someone like Alex Katz shows up and tosses an 11x14' canvas through the doorway of Gagosian and the crowds cheer wildly. I think it gets more extreme every year, awesome and fantastic! A world under desperate pressure is a fascinating thing!

Mark and I disagreed about this show. He wasn't impressed with the photos, complaining that they lacked a narrative. He prefers a more candid and less posed moment. All I want is some emotional connection in front of a work of art. Some poetry and feeling. I don't care what it's about, content is superfluous. Case in point - the beloved movie this summer was about Penguins! It ís all about the HOW. If I feel the manipulation or if I've experienced it before by a better artist, I will walk right out and forget all about it. These days the art seems to be less about innovation and more about manipulation. It leaves one wary.

At first I was put off. Strippers, fantastic. My first thought was yet another Feminist or Marxist critique. After the Greenfield-Sanders show at Mary Boone a few months back I felt that maybe di Corcia was trying to keep up. But I started to look. I didn't see any of the glamour of that show, none of the star power. In these works there was that trademark flash of Caravaggio light, but instead of acting like a hip come on, it made me look harder. I started to find classical allusions in the poses and saw a heady interpretation of a contemporary type of Hellenism. This brought me to the idea of strength and extreme contortion tied to a heavy sexual symbolism. I was jolted to a reverie on Michelangelo. His Last Judgment, painted in lurid electric colors, is like a day at the Village Equinox gym. Beautiful, straining tormented muscles grouped in tableaus of life or death moments. Believe me, to clean and jerk is not an easy thing and Buonorotti knew this. Caravaggio later took this posed physicality and combined it with photoreal effects. The latter Michele isolated and exposed a contemporary experience of tormented flesh that still resonates today. This technique still has visual punch.

Di Corcia carries this historical thread into these photos. In the past he isolated figures on the street with strobe lights giving the mundane passing of life a dramatic cinematic quality. For this series he finds a ready-made. These dancers are dramatically lit, isolated and on view. The cinematic is already there. The subjects are deliberate in defining a visual experience of a moving form and charging that vision with sexual tension. These bodies are wrapped about poles, muscles tense, heads down feet up. Like the figures in the Last Judgment these dancers are falling into hell or sweeping up to heaven. Especially poignant are the figures full face and upside down. The exertion of the pose, the stark confrontation with a straining face, the feigned ease of a still moment, the naked sympathy of tortured limbs and twisted torsos, and the strength of the dancers' compositions are spotlighted and isolated. There is nothing pretty or glamorous here. The dancers' attempts at hackneyed flirtation, the clear platforms, the g-strings, the carefully applied stage makeup are an artificial and unsatisfying come on. These symbols of sexuality become meaningless to the larger physical struggle. Is our attraction to the archetypes of reproduction or to the Hellenistic human drama? This is hard work and you can see it taking its toll. What is on parade here is sheer power. It's the power of our own fascination with flesh, what it means, what it does, and how it works. These photos document and confront that fascination showing us a hard and distinct beauty.

I recommend a stop at Lucky Thirteen.

 

 

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