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23/10/2013

Lorna Simpson

Haus der Kunst, Munich

curated by Joan Simon

The first museum retrospective in Europe of Lorna Simpson (born 1960 in Brooklyn, New York) presents the thirty-year career of the critically acclaimed American artist whose body of work reveals a continuity of conceptual and performative explorations in photography, film, drawing, and collage. Using the camera as catalyst, Simpson constructs assemblies of text and image, parts to wholes, commenting on the documentary nature of found or staged images. Her work incorporates yet challenges photographic and moving picture genres to question identity and memory, gender and history, fact and fiction.

Lorna Simpson, who studied visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, and photography at the School of Visual Arts, in New York, had her international breakthrough with photo- text works such as "Waterbearer" (1986). This photograph shows a woman seen from the back balancing on the left an elegantly proportioned pitcher of stainless steel, and on the right a plastic bottle "to indicate lack of abundance", as Lorna Simpson put it. The image can be read as an abstraction of the classical image of a woman balancing the scales of justice. The white shift the woman wears is seen also in many others of Lorna Simpson's works. As a turn-of-the–century shift it has, according to the artist, the function of a uniform; it is timeless, and also insinuates a kind of femininity.

For years, Simpson radically repeated representations of figures turning their backs or refusing to show their faces. By photographing the model from the back, Lorna Simpson consciously withdraws what the viewer might expect to see: the expression on the face and what it says about the person pictured, their emotional state, who they are, what they look like - the whole process of decpihering and measuring. Instead, Simpson's figures turn toward themselves and grant importance to their own person. Besides an underlying historical meaning in the politics of slavery, where racialized power relations were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze, this looking toward oneself can also be interpreted in the Foucauldian sense: "Turning one's gaze on the self means turning it away from others first of all. And then, later, it means turning it away from the things of the world" (Michel Foucault).

With "Twenty Questions (A Sampler)" (1986) Lorna Simpson refers to the parlor game in which one player thinks of a person which the other participants try to identify by asking questions. Simpson's sampler gives only five questions, accompanying four images of the same woman from the back: "Is she pretty as a picture / Or clear as crystal / Or pure as a lily / Or black as coal / Or sharp as a razor." The phrases are obviously of little help in determining the identity. Simspon commented that she tries "to build very complex characters that live outside of a stereotype of time, place, identity, sexuality, and race". As a writer, her text components could stand alone as prose poems, or the shortest of short sotries, or excerpts of scripts. Yet her voicings do not stand independent of her images, and it is the fragile yet forceful dynmic between the two that binds them as one.

Found footage, found by searching on eBay, was used for the first time in "The Institute" (2007). The film was meant as promotional material for an insitution working in speech therapy. Questions are posed to a young black woman, Barbara, to get her to speak. The questions are challenging and have a sad effect, since it is beyond Barbara's ability to have concise answers.

"1957-2009" also began with a find on the internet: photographs shot in Los Angeles from June through August 1957, showing a woman performing for the camera as if in service of a potential career as an actor. "It was fascinating", said Lorna Simpson. "An African American woman in Los Angeles in the late 1950s taking on this project with such consistency and drive in a three-month period". To highlight the performing for the camera, the posing, and the artifice, Simpson decided to mimick the model. For the artist, it was the first time that she herself appeared in the staged replicas. Choosing an environment that looked similar, and coming close to the woman's hairstyle, expression, body languge and facial expressions ("smiling and not smiling"), became a very technical process. Simpson's interaction with the images evolved also to mimicking the model's male companion, who also was among the photos purchased online.

That very same 1957 archival album proved fertile ground for further exploration of role-playing and led to a new work, "Chess" (2013), for which Simpson extracts images of the man and woman playing chess. "Chess" is a three-screen projection. On one screen of the projection is the male character, and on the other the female, with the artist mimicking both of them and animating the game in which they are engaged. Composer Jason Moran is seen on the third video projection, playing his score for the piece, built on the movements of one of his hands being mirrored by the other. Simpson set up the prismatic scene using a five-way mirror, a technique inspired by an early twentieth-century photograph which Simpson had seen in an exhibition at Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"The Institute" also prompted Simpson's work in a medium that was new for her: in 2007 she began to draw. By including the series "Gold Headed", the show pays tribute to this perhaps still least- known part of her work.

The exhibtion was co-organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis, and Jeu de Paume, Paris, in cooperation with Haus der Kunst, Munich.

The catalogue was published by Delmonico Books / Prestel, edited by Joan Simon, with contributions by Naomi Beckwith, Marta Gili, Thomas J. Lax, and Elvan Zabunyan, 216 pages, 49.95 Euro, ISBN 978-3-7913-5266-4.

Support for the exhibition has been provided by Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy, Salon 94, New York, and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris / Brussels.

Organizer
Co-organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis, and the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in association with Haus der Kunst

Image: Lorna Simpson, Momentum, 2010. HD video, color, sound, 6:56 minutes. Courtesy the artist, Salon 94, New York; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris / Brussels © Lorna Simpson

If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact
Elena Heitsch +49 89 21127-115 +49 89 21127-157 Fax presse@hausderkunst.de

Press Viewing Thursday, October 24, 2013, 11 am

Opening Thursday, October 24, 2013, 7 pm

Program plus Sunday, October 27, 2013, 7 pm
Piano concert with Jason Moran
Followed by a conversation between Lorna Simpson and Jason Moran, moderated by Okwui Enwezor

Haus der Kunst
Prinzregentenstraße 1 80538 Munich
Mon — Sun 10 am — 8 pm, Thu 10 am — 10 pm
Admission 8 € / reduced rate 6 €
under 18 2 € / children under 12 free
Combined ticket
2 exhibitions 12 € / reduced rate 10 €
3 exhibitions 15 € / reduced rate 12 €

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