Prompt 1 response

I found many of the exhibits we visited in Chelsea difficult to understand and connect with. I prefer to view a gallery by first looking at all of the pieces and thinking about them, and then looking over associated texts. In these exhibits, I found it hard to think about the works on my own, perhaps due to my inexperience, and couldn't really begin to grapple with the ideas the artists were exploring until I read the gallery text. Some of them were still very aesthetically pleasing or interesting, but I'm still having trouble with the idea that I have to read about the works before I get a chance to interpret them myself, or else I will be missing a large (often critical) part of the piece. As this was our first gallery tour, I'm hoping that I will, over the span of the course, I will figure out how to better view and understand these exhibits.

That said, an exhibit which I did not need explanation for was Stephen Shore's exhibit at 303 Gallery. I will talk about the Israeli half of the exhibit, as certain aspects of it struck me far more than the Ukrainian part. The scenes of everyday Israeli life were a nice break from the common sensationalist media pictures that have been particularly prevalent since this past summer's Gaza conflict. These pictures aptly apply to the press release's use of the word 'quotidian', and are remarkably and unmistakably Israeli. And though I enjoyed the photographs as a somewhat calm and mild approach to Israeli life, I was a little taken aback when I read the press release, and had to double check that it was talking about the same exhibit. 

The release presents this body of work as having to do with a 'zone of itinerant conflict'. It states that "tender portraits become entangled with images of aesthetisized propaganda and the charge of architecture in conflicted space." First, this exhibit showed a single instance of what might, with some stretching, be considered propaganda, when it was in fact more religious in nature, and the text is actually mostly cut off in the photograph. In a militarized country, in which checkpoints, soldiers carrying large weapons, and bomb disposal squads are an inextricable part of everyday life, this exhibit showed not an ounce of conflict. That is not to say that to portray conflict one must place a soldier front and center, or a picture of a crying child, but he either omits it completely, or awkwardly and obtusely inserts overt and disappointing attempts to spell out 'conflict' for the viewer. Jerusalem, a city divided into 4 quarters each with their own religions and politics, was shown as simple and straightforward. The only exception in this portrayal of Jerusalem was a photograph in which a tourist picture of Jerusalem is laid out in front of a picture of Mary with a Bible behind her. Disappointing. Hebron, a large city in the West Bank, was (I feel) shown from an outsider's point of view. There was simply no tie to the release's message. The closest Shore came to 'realizing zones of itinerant conflict' was a disappointingly blunt photograph in which a hand points at an English map of Israel, finger hovering over the West Bank. This picture came across as forced, especially given that every other picture was clearly situated in an Israeli environment, whereas here the artist seems to have just bought his own map in English and pointed at part of it - not exactly subtle. The pieces seem at odds with what the artist or gallery wished to present. These pictures paint a lovely portrait of a particular aspect of Israel, both the people and the land (and the food!). But the aspect that they portray is not the one the press release claims to be portraying. 

I felt like this was an unfortunate missed opportunity. Had the artist more fully embraced a less widely spread domain, or perhaps better balanced the pictures he chose to show, or even simply showed more photos, the exhibit would have felt more complete to me. As it stands now, taken within the context of the press release, this exhibit fails to convince me that it has sufficiently addressed any single aspect of its ambition.