In Sunday's Washington Post, Wolfgang Staehle exhibition was
discussed by their chief critic Blake Gopnik
the link to the site is below. The site also includes a time lapse
video (unfortunately WP website requires registration so I also
pasted the text of the article below).
Best, Magda Sawon
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47072-2004Sep24.html
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For Art Lovers, a Chelsea Morning
New York Gallery Mecca Finally Makes Good on Its Promise
By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 26, 2004; Page N01
NEW YORK
About seven years ago, Manhattan's huge gallery scene, by far the
largest in the world, moved almost en masse from booming SoHo to the
far western reaches of Chelsea, by the Hudson River north of
Greenwich Village. Art began to displace the neighborhood's body
shops and taxi depots. For some time after this Great Migration, the
district was notable more for the quantity and size of its shows than
for their quality. Outside New York, Chelsea was best known for
splashy, sellable paintings that didn't seem to have much chance of
leaving a historic mark.
This year the scene seems to have grown, if that's possible. It now
takes two full days, morning to night, to visit just the best-known
Chelsea galleries. But for the first time that I can remember, doing
the autumn rounds felt mostly worthwhile. There was real variety on
view – of medium, subject matter, approach, scale. More important,
there were a few artists and works that didn't fit into convenient
pigeonholes. There were shows that left questions hanging in the air.
Of the 20 or more noteworthy exhibitions in Chelsea's fall season,
six get a closer look inside this section, with extra images on view
at www.washingtonpost.com/museums.
Wolfgang Staehle is the German-born Internet artist, long based in
New York, whose video installation famously captured live footage of
the World Trade Center as it burned and then collapsed.
During his latest show at Postmasters gallery, Staehle will be
presenting more peaceable live action – or so we have to hope.
One wall-filling, high-resolution video projection shows a series of
still photos of a rustic vista in the Hudson River valley, snapped
every 10 seconds by a live Web camera set on automatic. Rather than
presenting the world in video, as it passes us by, Staehle's piece
gives it to us as a sequence of tableaux. He becomes a kind of
high-speed Frederic Church. It's amazing what pleasure there can be
in watching nature change – or rather, in watching one man-made
picture give way to an oh-so-slightly different view. A visit just at
closing time showed crisply rendered Old Master vegetation fading to
impressionistic black – a Sanford Gifford sunset becoming a Whistler
nocturne. Flattened out and turned into a glowing rectangle on the
wall of a Chelsea gallery, even the most transparent, high-tech view
of nature smacks more of old-time art than of the great outdoors.
In another video projection, Staehle has taken a single classic
landscape view and animated it. By shooting an hour's worth of
Niagara Falls – shades of Church again – and then editing it into
an infinite, seamless loop with roaring sound, Staehle gives us both
a chance to contemplate a single scene at leisure and to absorb that
scene's dynamic flow.
It's the next best thing to being there – no raincoat required.
After all, who needs reality when mediation does the trick so well?
At Postmasters gallery through Oct. 16. Call 212-727-3323 or visit
www.postmastersart.com.
For a video clip from the installation, visit www.washingtonpost.com/museums.
–
Magdalena Sawon
Postmasters Gallery
459 W 19 Street
New York, NY 10011
phone 212 727 3323
http://www.postmastersart.com
–
Magdalena Sawon
Postmasters Gallery
459 W 19 Street
New York, NY 10011
phone 212 727 3323
http://www.postmastersart.com
Wolfgang Staehle / Postmasters Gallery - feature in Washington Post
-
Type: discussion