Gordon Parks at Jack Shainman Gallery

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This is a good exhibition. I'm going to cast aside all critical -cynical- impulse and just state the fact that this exhibition should exist and glad its here in one place. It should be bigger, it should be huge, put every single portrait from Parks' Chicago portrait studio up on the walls - even if it's all for sale - it will at least be here archived under the painful white light of contemporary art. Make it hurt. I am reminded of Ruby Frazier, because they "confuse time and conflate eras, make chronology slippery, and deny a continuum of progress, inherently anti-nostalgic" - a question of why today can look like 30 years ago, and  30 years ago look like today. Antidote to nostalgia photography. "We have facial recognition tech in the palms of our hands and water we can't send through pipes."

Moyra Davey, Peter Hujar at Galerie Buchholz

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And art often feels like a process, technology, for imprinting nostalgia. Casting banality in bronze, silver, with a halo of rose. "Nostalgia a toxic substance used to preserve our memories in formaldehyde's rose tinted veil." Photography provides "immediate packaging: that inherently elegiac medium also promises preservation of someone's sight of you." So you get to preserve your recognition like pickled pigs and call it romantic. Nostalgia's artistry becomes its own technology. I don't think this is implicit to art. Against this someone like LaToya Ruby Frazier's grayscales confuse time and conflate eras, make chronology slippery, and deny a continuum of progress, inherently anti-nostalgic.

See too: Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz, 

LaToya Ruby Frazier at Gavin Brown

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Ruby Frazier's photos appear as from some distant past because surely we can't believe it's the present; photos from last year seem in some nebulous era that surely isn't this new millennium the complications of the black and white and registering of historic tumult. We have facial recognition tech in the palms of our hands and water we can't send through pipes. Perhaps this would seem a paradoxical if we didn't know the facial tech was manufactured in buildings surrounded by suicide nets and towns were destroyed when companies could find cheaper backs to stand on.