Stephen Shore, Véhiculaire & Vernaculaire @ Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975

Stephen Shore's current exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier Bresson is well-timed as people like me have America, cars, energy, and their relationship to each other on our minds. It's interesting to look at at Shore's best known photographs fifty years later, knowing what we do now about America, photography, and the car as vehicle of freedom, and independence. In America, the car is the enabler of mobility, not only in the obvious ways, but socially, economically, and today, it has become a political issue. Shore's snapshots and prints are nostalgic, showing an era when things were different. In the 1970s, the car was embraced as the carrier of so much promise and prosperity. 

The big Chevrolets, Dodges, Cadillacs in Shore's Uncommon Places series reminded me of my childhood, watching American cop shows on television. The thrill of watching the yank tanks—as we called them in Australia—ride the bumps and potholes in chase scenes around densely populated cities with their bad suspension was what kept kids like me entertained for hours. Watching the body separate from wheels on their axel was a neverending wow factor. These were the icons of what it meant to be American. Big cars, bad cops, and no following rules on the road. 

Stephen Shore, Meagher County, Montana, August 5, 2020

Once I looked past the nostalgia of my childhood, I recognized the isolation, loneliness and desolation of the worlds in Shore's photographs. Whether or not it is the isolation and emptiness of the American soul, I am not sure, but in this age of unexpected animosity and racial discrimination, it's difficult to look at Shore's photographs and see only perfectly composed vacant lots and empty streets. To a contemporary viewer, these spaces conjure up images of all the violence and injustice that has taken place in such streets over the years. But this is not necessarily the point of Shore's works. Rather, they show how the car has taken over the landscape and urbanscape of America as well as its psyche. 

Stephen Shore, 21st and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, PA, 1974

This exhibition emphasized Shore's use of moving vehicles to picture the vernacular of American life. Even though these images are taken from moving cars, trains, and more recently, drones, the worlds they represent are static, empty, like ghost towns, perfectly composed nowheres, rarely with anyone in the streets. He often sees the "uncommon places" from unusual angles, making them curious, pushing us to look at everyday worlds we might otherwise not bother to notice. In Ravena, NY for example, we see highways and train lines caving up the face of the American landscape, dominating the environment. We see the land cleared to make way for vehicles, taking pride of place, ignoring needs other than its own.

Stephen Shore, Ravena, NY, 2021

Beyond carparks filled with cars, the photographs show highways, gas stations, advertising signs, landscapes carved up for cars, towns built to accommodate cars, with parking spaces taking up over half the road, highways like rivers coursing across otherwise empty landscapes. Of course, today, we look at the car differently; it is the cause of the destruction of the environment, the problem for the next generation, the making of billionaires from oil money. Today, we are too well aware that greed for oil to drive our cars and fly in planes has led to the destruction of the global south for its natural resources. Shore doesn't really comment on that side of the automobile culture that booms in the postwar years across America. He is more interested in how the car has been given priority in the construction of space, and its consequent isolation of people. Yes, it is possible to travel from coast to coast, but it also brings about the end of conversation, on trains, on sidewalks, on a walk through nature. Nevertheless, it is a testament to the power and longevity of Shore's photographs that they continue to speak to the most pressing concerns of our times.

Dominique White, Deadweight @ Whitechapel

Dominique White, The Swelling Enemy, 2024

Dominique White's small exhibition of four sculptures, Deadweight, at the Whitechapel Gallery has received great reviews. It's an innovative series of works that raises provocative questions about the ocean and all that flows with it in this age of awareness around environmental destruction, the legacies of colonialism, industrialization, and forced migration. However, the exhibition is perhaps more conceptually provocative than the works themselves. White spent time in Italy working with craftspeople and historians, effectively researching the history and materials of shipwrecks, flotsam, piracy, and the movement along trade routes over centuries. The historical details are not as apparent as the integration and exploration of specific materials.

Dominique White, Dead Reckoning, 2024

The works engage questions of the detritus of industry and colonialism secreted by the ocean over centuries. Iron rods, chalk, rafia, driftwood are sculpted into emblems of all that has been discarded from the travels of merchant ships, slave ships, and the adventures of industrial modernity. In Dead Reckoning, for example, iron rods tangled together, rusted by time immersed in the Mediterranean, reach into the air like tentacles, as though transformed into a threatening monster-like animal. In another work, rafia and string holding chalky bundles drip from rusted rods. The organic materials look to have been eroding in water over centuries. These works give the impression that everything discarded by human pursuits will grow uncontrollably at the bottom of the ocean. While they may be invisible, apparently wasting away, another eco-system is busy at work. Certainly, decay and simultaneous constant movement and transformation are characteristics of the underground world shown in White's sculptures. 

Dominique White, Ineligible for Death, 2024

In a video accompanying the exhibition, White talks about her time in Italy on a fellowship, visiting various Italian port and inland cities. She talks of the ephemerality of sea journeys, the history of slavery as it is written on the walls of store facilities in Palermo, of the industrial energy of Genoa, the ironworks in Todi, making of bells in Agnone. White's reach for these ancient traditions and activities is fascinating. Certainly, the sculptures show the care and craftsmanship that have fashioned their strange objectness. 

Dominique White, Split Obliteration, 2024

What is less convincing is the connection being made between questions of racial oppression and White's sculptures. Of course, slavery and trafficking, migration and colonization are inextricable from the stories of the ocean. However, it's difficult to see these histories in the sculptures themselves. Otherwise, this small exhibition of four creepy sculptures is well worth a visit. Don't miss out on the video. 

Oscar Murillo and Jannis Kounellis @ Tate Modern

Oscar Murillo, The Flooded Garden, 2024

There is a richness of treasures on exhibition at Tate Modern at the moment, such that it's easy to spend a day wandering and waxing lyrical. I was particularly charmed by the Oscar Murillo installation in the Turbine Hall because it is another exhibition inviting participation. Murillo has hung canvases on makeshift walls inside the Hall, inviting visitors to leave their own expressive marks in a colour palette determined by Murillo. The whole work is supposedly inspired by Monet in his garden, and there is definite resemblance. The colourful, flowing lines in blues, pinks with touches of yellow and green are fresh and vibrant summery images. There are indications of water moving softly in the light and a sense of immersion in light, airy days at Giverny. The line to enter the section of canvas in the process of being painted was long, and I was happy to leave it to children. Because, even more compelling was Murillo's Surge series in an adjacent room. 

Oscar Murillo, The Flooded Garden, 2024

Colourful paintings on paper are attached to plastic white chairs, reminding us of the mutli-functions of art. The plethora of paintings come together in a darkened space to form a community, as though chatting in a square over aperitivo in Murillo's native Columbia. Alternatively, the community of paintings are protesting, reminding us of the placards carried in protests. Around the edges of the space, huge canvases hang as though encircling the protest placards, protecting them from the anti-protesters. The same vibrantly coloured loose brushstrokes cover the canvases, expressing the continual movement of the sea, and those who ride its waves. Still swayed by the inspiration of Claude Monet's late abstractions, Murillo was concerned to explore the darkness and blindness experienced by Monet in his later years. For Murillo, blindness and blurriness is a social condition. The installation itself successfully illustrated blindness, while the works themselves shone their vibrant light throughout the darkened space. The paintings were joyous and light-filled, while the sense of impending danger was carried by the low lighting and the clustering of the placards on chairs, huddling together inside the circle. But that, of course, is just as Monet would have seen it.

Jannis Kounellis, Bells, 1993

Upstairs in the Artist Room, the Greek artist Jannis Kounellis enjoyed rooms of his own. The darkness and threat of his pieces was of a completely different nature from that in Murillo's ocean gardens. But Kounellis's works were among the most compelling on display in the museum. Kounellis is another of those artists who works in steel to make it do things that we don't expect. In the sculptures and installations at Tate Modern, there is something extremely foreboding in his use of steel with other materials that don't go together. Manufactured steel and natural materials such as wood and cotton fabrics are bound together to create impossible and uncomfortable structures. Simultaneously, steel is made beautiful in its interaction with other materials and through display. 

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 2005

In one, terrifying work, railway sleepers in the shape of a V, entrap an expressive splash of black paint. The containment of steel speaks to a kind of violence and terror that is everywhere present in Kounellis's work. Knives, meathooks, scissors and other dangers abound in these very powerful sculptures. In one of the most convincing, a rainbow of glass rocks hang like a curtain, framed again by steel girders. The curtain sits next to a rolled steel coal store, spilling with coal. Hanging above the pile of coal is an unlit paraffin lamp. The multi-colored glass rocks are beautiful, the pile of coal and extinguished lamp reminding us of the danger down below. The installation is supposed to have a wall made of a coal behind the curtain of glass, an addition that would threaten the jagged glass rocks. This was not present in the work's display at Tate Modern, but it's easy to imagine how it would give a sense of the pressure weighing on the glass, the threat of mining literally pushing from all sides. With Kounellis, there is always a threat, always a violence just waiting to happen, or having just taken place.  

Jannis Kounellis, Coal Sculpture with Wall of Coloured Glass, 1990-2005

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Jannis Kounellis, Coal Sculpture with Wall of Coloured Glass, 1990-2005

All in all, it was a treat to see so many Kounellis sculptures in one place, opening the possibilities of using materials against themselves to show the contradictions and inconsistencies of the twentieth century. Fascinating.