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Chelsea: Arts & Lifestyles: PHOTOGRAPHY
© Kohei Yoshiyuki, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC Kohei Yoshiyuki, “Untitled,” 1972, Plate 35 “The Park” Mark Morrisroe Chronicles of longing and loneliness By Debra Jenks Kohei Yoshiyuki’s “The Park” at Yossi Milo Gallery is a series of photographs taken in the 1970s in the parks of Tokyo. The project came about when Yoshiyuki accidentally stumbled upon a couple having sex on a balcony. The pictures, however, are not about the sex that occurs in public places. They are about the shock of the unexpected encounter and the phenomenon of watching, and Yoshiyuki invites his viewers to join in on this unsettling exploit — which was apparently too unsettling for Yoshiyuki, because he later destroyed many of the images. Only when Yossi Milo tracked him down did they find enough to mount this show, Yoshiyuki’s first in 30 years. There’s a lot of uncertainty in these pictures, a strange mixture of danger and play, of things getting out of control or a rave gone awry. We feel the vulnerability of the couples being watched, and at the same time, are put in the place of the watcher. In some instances, the peeping leads to groping, and the lovers taken unawares often seem complicit. But what’s being illuminated here, with the aid of infrared film and a filtered flash, are the onlookers. In one photograph, the phosphorescent figures of a group of men crouch and crawl on hands and knees towards the object of interest, which appears as indistinct shapes in a dark recess. In another, two men peer through some bushes, their heads half hidden. Although it’s usually men that do the watching, there’s one photograph of a female peeper kneeling a few inches below an entwined couple leaning against a tree, as a man behind a bush fiddles with his fly. Weegee’s photographs of crime scenes come to mind immediately, as do Cartier-Bresson and his decisive moment or artist-as-provocateur posture. One of Cartier-Bresson’s well-known pictures, taken in 1932, is an image of two men attempting to peer at something through a burlap barrier. We become an observer of the observers. The photographer Nathan Lyons speaks of the photograph as “a reflection of that time and space in which we all exist but often do not choose to recognize,” and perhaps, as Yoshiyuki himself declared in a 1979 interview for a Japanese porn magazine (recently published in Aperture), “maybe there’s a little lecher in everyone.” Like Yoshiyuki, Mark Morrisroe is another artist to be conferred cult status. But in Morrisroe’s case, it has more to do with the artist’s life and various personas, and his longing to recreate himself over again. Larry Clarks’ film “Kids” would be an accurate portrait of Morrisroe’s adolescence. He fled home and a drug-addicted mother at the age of 13 and ended up working the streets of Boston. Morrisroe’s show at ClampArt is an eclectic assortment of oddities, a pairing of kitsch with the classical and the peculiar with the mundane. There is a chaotic assemblage of mediums and formats, including Rayograms, a technique developed by Man Ray using only light sensitive materials; black and white Polaroid “snapshots” alongside large format color photographs; and a vitrine with a torn decoupage portrait and what appears to be a painting of a mushroom. Also in the vitrine are copies of the punk zine Dirt, which Morrisroe co-published under the name Mark Dirt. There’s an air of memento mori that permeates the show, with its sepia-toned nudes, creased Polaroids, and scrapbook aesthetic. His “Woman with Shaving Cream on Head” and “Still Life with Marble Figures,” with its broken bits of memorabilia and scribbling in the margins, are emblematic of Morrisroe’s predilection for curiosities. His fondness of the flaw is an interest he had in common with Diane Arbus. In a photograph titled “Figure Study” from 1985, Morrisroe transforms himself into an object from a still life. We see him curled up like an orb on a beautiful silk chair, surrounded by empty gilded frames and what appears to be a piece of rusted tin ceiling hung on the wall. It’s both gritty and ornate. Morrisroe was part of a small group known as The Boston School — artists who attended the Museum of Fine Arts or Massachusetts College of Art and were working in Boston between 1971 and 1984. Its members included Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jack Pierson, Tabboo! and Gail Thacker. The show in the back room includes photographs from this group in which self-portrait, still life and portraits of friends are the predominate subjects. Like the other artists in the group, Morrisroe’s life and art were inseparable. His art is as real as it gets.
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