Gregory Crewdson, “Untitled (17),” pigmented inkjet print, 2009
Gagosian Gallery
980 Madison Ave. between 76th & 77th Sts.
Tuesday – Saturday through October 30
Admission: free
212-744-2313
www.gagosian.com
Brooklyn native Gregory Crewdson makes a dramatic turn in his latest series of photographs, on view at the uptown Madison Ave. Gagosian Gallery through October 30. For years, Crewdson has been taking pictures of carefully arranged tableaux vivants that look like scenes from a never-made movie, filled with mystery and intrigue. For “Sanctuary,” Crewdson went to the famous Cinecittà Studios in Rome, a place where Italian and international directors have gone for decades to make the kind of films that Crewdson has alluded to in his previous work. But in this new series, the first he has done outside America, Crewdson shoots the bare bones of Cinecittà, the vacant streets and backlots, with no people present, just stark architecture overgrown with weeds and rusted scaffolding. Crewdson has returned to black and white for the first time in nearly fifteen years, giving the photos, taken either at sunrise or sunset, a haunting quality; in some ways they are a natural progression for the artist, as if they represent what is left after he completes his staged color photographs, leaving behind empty sets filled with similar mystery and intrigue. Many of the photos feature doorways and other openings and entrances (or exits) that serve as additional frames within the pictures; one even resembles a white movie screen. “As with much of my work,” Crewdson says about the series, “I looked at the blurred lines between reality and fiction, nature and artifice, and beauty and decay.” The result is another mesmerizing collection from one of the country’s most inventive photographers. (While at Gagosian, be sure to also check out “Dike Blair: Sculptures and Paintings,” in which the New York-based artist transforms the wooden crates that paintings and sculptures are shipped in into works of art themselves.)
Commissioned by Taipei’s tourism bureau and made by longtime television commercial director Hsiao Ya-Chuan, TAIPEI EXCHANGES borders on being too sickly sweet, lacking any type of real edge. Yet the tender tale about the value of things, from random objects to memories, still manages to hold its own, avoiding being an eighty-two-minute ad for Taiwan travel. When Doris (Gwei Lun-mei) opens up a coffee shop, her friends bring her lots of odd gifts that she doesn’t know what to do with. Her sister, Josie (Zaizai Lin), comes up with the novel idea that people can exchange their own objects for those in the store — of course, while they’re also buying coffee and pastries so she and her sister can pay the rent. Doris and Josie refuse to put a price on anything, instead creating a barter system that could involve storytelling, plumbing emergencies, or a song. Doris becomes particularly intrigued by one customer, Han Chang (Chou Chun-Ching), who has brought thirty-five bars of soap, each one with its own tale. Like Doris herself, TAIPEI EXCHANGES is charmingly innocent but not nearly as quirky as its most obvious predecessor, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s endlessly entertaining 2001 hit, AMÉLIE. Hsiao likes his characters too much to give them the necessary depth, but he does manage to make some commentary on materialism and ethics. On three occasions he adds people-on-the-street interviews, getting strangers’ general reactions to questions that come up in the course of the film — which is set in a space that was transformed into a café and is now a real place where visitors can stop and get coffee and pastries (but can’t exchange anything).
