[tweetmeme] Manhattan is coming to Madrid! 400 images “not suitable for conventional tourists”… Mixed Use, Manhattan (Photography and Related Practices 1970s to the present) “represents those Parisian spaces from the 19th century which Walter Benjamin used to talk about” says Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofia modern art museum. Spaces & venues which continue to exist nowadays and for which artists have found new uses.
Mixed Use, Manhattan is an exhibition about the uses and pictures made of New York City beginning with the intensive period of de-industrialization and neglect in the 1970s and counterpointed with recent works by artists who, well aware of their predecessors’ practices from that earlier moment, continue to find aesthetic potential in the city.
The show will include several important photographic series: Peter Hujar’s nighttime photographs taken in 1976 on the West Side of Manhattan from the Meat Packing district south to the financial district; Alvin Baltrop’s Hudson River pier photographs from the decade 1975-86, most of which have never before been shown; David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York, 1978-1979, and, more recently, a number of Zoe Leonard’s photographic projects from the late 1990s forward, including the Tree + Fence and Bubblegum series.
Other photographic series, video installations, and films by Matthew Buckingham, Moyra Davey and Emily Roysdon, among others amplify these core works and attest to the vitality of their legacy, as artists continue to engage with New York in ways that suggest how urban space may be made truly public.
The photographic series show the atypical tradition of the city, “unauthorised uses” of the city public spaces says Crimp. From the night series by Peter Hujar (taken in 1976) which cover all the streets in between Meatpacking Disctric (filled with underground & homosexual bars at the time) & the Financial District, to the deteriorated portrait of East Broadway captured by Christopher Wool.
The most famous & most exploited city in the world (well, only a part of it) will have it’s own little space at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid from June 10th to September 17th (hey… plenty of time right?). And this one is in Madrid!
