In the fall of 2009, Simmons ordered a customized, high end Love Doll from Japan. The doll, designed as a surrogate sex partner, arrived in a crate, clothed in a transparent slip and accompanied by a separate box containing an engagement ring and female genitalia. Simmons began to document her photographic relationship with this human scale ‘girl’. The resulting photographs depict the lifelike, latex doll in an ongoing series of ‘actions’, shown and titled chronologically from the day Simmons received the doll, through to the present.

The photos reveal the relationship Simmons develops with her model. The first days depict a somewhat formal and shy series of poses with an ever increasing familiarity and comfort level unveiled as time passes. A second doll arrived one year later. This new character, and the interaction between the two, reveal yet another dynamic in composition – both formally and psychologically.

The Love Doll Day 31 (Geisha), 2011

In search of a stage for her Love Doll, Simmons turned to her own home, transforming it into an artfully staged, color coordinated, oversized dollhouse. The Love Doll series is not only a reminder of Simmons’ past examinations of the dollhouse, but also engages with adult fantasies and fetishes, infused with an even more potent sense of desire and regret.

The Love Doll Day 11 (Yellow) 2010

Widely known for her work with human surrogates (dolls, puppets, cut outs, etc), this body of work is Simmons first attempt to portray a life-sized non-human subject. A central figure in the Pictures generation, artists who came to prominence in the late Seventies and early Eighties, Simmons’ work has been featured in major international museums and collections for over three decades. Her Objects on Legs remain iconic photographs from this time.

The Love Doll Day 25 (The Jump) Fuji Matte print, 2010

Other works by Laurie Simmons

EARLY BLACK & WHITE 1976 – 1978

Woman Purple Dress Kitchen, 1978

EARLY COLOR INTERIORS 1978 – 1979

Woman Opening Refrigerator Milk to the Right, 1979

WALKING & LYING OBJECTS 1987 – 1991

Magnum Opus II (The Bye-Bye) 1991

Walking House (Color) 1989

Walking Gun, 1991

Walking Cake II (Color) 1989

THE INSTANT DECORATOR 2001 – 2004

The Instant Decorator (Pink and Green Bedroom_ Slumber Party Really Crowded), 2004

The Instant Decorator (Plaid Living Room) 2004

Performance art is generally experienced live, but what documents it and ensures its enduring life is, above all, photography. Yet photography plays a constitutive role, not merely a documentary one, when performance is staged expressly for the camera (often in the absence of an audience), and the images that result are recordings of an event but also autonomous works of art. The pictures in this exhibition, selected from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, exemplify the complex and varied uses artists have devised for photography in the field of performance since the 1960s.

Many artists have experimented with the camera to test the physical and psychological limits of the body. Not all performances exert such dire demands on the body, although many have entailed a sustained emotional engagement on the part of the artists: Bas Jan Ader photographed himself crying for the camera, and Adrian Piper used photography to chronicle a physical and mental state induced by fasting and writing in isolation.

Adrian Piper
Food for the Spirit. 1971.
Gelatin silver prints, printed 1997, 14 1/2 x 14 3/4″ (36.8 x 37.5 cm) each.

Some artists enlisted the camera as an accomplice in experiments with identity.Vito Acconci used photography to record and then reflect on his attempts to feminize his body by plucking his body hair and hiding his genitals between his legs; and Lorna Simpson turned to the photographic archive as source material, combining found 1950s pinups with her own performative self-portraits, in which she emulates the poses, outfits, and settings of the earlier photographs.

Lorna Simpson
May, June, July, August ‘57/’09 #8
2009. Gelatin silver prints, 5 x 5″ (12.7 x 12.7 cm) each

The exhibition also presents political dissent enacted with the photograph in mind. Ai Weiwei took pictures of his hand, middle finger extended, in gestures of disrespect toward national monuments typically photographed by tourists, and Robin Rhode appears to interact with objects drawn in charcoal on dilapidated walls, exploring rites of consumerism and dispossession in his native South Africa.

Ai Weiwei
Study of Perspective – Eiffel Tower. 1995–2003. Top right: Ai Weiwei. Study of Perspective – Mona Lisa. 1995–2003. Bottom left: Ai Weiwei. Study of Perspective – Tiananmen Square. 1995–2003. Bottom right: Ai Weiwei. Study of Perspective – White House.
1995–2003. Gelatin silver prints, 15 5/16 x 23 1/4″ (38.9 x 59 cm) each.

Staging Action attests to the complex ways in which photography, with its ability to both freeze and extend a moment in time, pushes against the grain of mere documentation to constitute performance as a conceptual exercise that can be appreciated in the absence of a performing body.

Selected Artists:

1. Ana Mendieta

Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations)
January–February 1972
Chromogenic color prints, printed 1997, 19 1/4 x 12 3/4" (48.9 x 32.4 cm) each

2. Bruce Nauman

Studies for Holograms
1970. Portfolio of five screenprints,20 5/16 x 26" (51.6 x 66 cm) each

3. Rong Rong

East Village, Beijing, No. 8
1995. Zhang Huan performs Metal Case, Beijing, June 1995. Gelatin silver prints, 21 3/16 x 14 1/2" (53.8 x 36.8 cm) each.

4. Rong Rong

East Village, Beijing, No. 81. 1994. Zhu Ming performs in Beijing, September 1994. Gelatin silver print, 21 3/16 x 13 1/8" (53.8 x 33.3 cm).

5. Valie Export

Action Pants: Genital Panic
1969. Screenprints, 26 3/8 x 19 5/8" (67 x 49.8 cm) each.

6. Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman.

Untitled
1980. Chromogenic color prints, 15 x 23" (38.1 x 58.5 cm) each.

7. Lucas Samaras

Auto Polaroid
1969–71. Black-and-white instant prints, 3 3/4 x 2 15/16" (9.5 x 7.4 cm) each

8. Matthew Barney

Cremaster 3: Gary Gilmore
2002. Chromogenic color print in plastic frame. 53 1/2 x 43 1/2" (135.9 x 110.5 cm).

9. Laurel Nakadate

Lucky Tiger #151. 2009. Top right: Laurel Nakadate. Lucky Tiger #169. 2009. Bottom left: Laurel Nakadate. Lucky Tiger #181. 2009. Bottom right: Laurel Nakadate. Lucky Tiger #186.
2009. Chromogenic color prints with ink fingerprints, 4 x 6" (10.2 x 15.2 cm) each.

10. William Pope.L

Foraging (The Air Itself/Dark Version)
1995. Iris print, printed 2001, 34 1/2 x 31 1/2" (87.6 x 80 cm).

Jeanne Dunning’s photographic, sculptural and video work explores our relationship to our own physicality, looking at the strange and unfamiliar in the body, gender and notions of normality.

Bodies and food have been important subjects for Dunning since 1990, when she created the series Samples. The work involved photographing mundane fruits and vegetables at close range to resemble human organs–a skinned tomato that evokes a swollen tumor, for example. In 1996 she began to make her own edible concoctions: thick, flesh-colored puddings and homemade icings. In this exhibition, a tapioca-like substance appears in several photographs, oozing down angles of the body or forming a pool under the head of a sleeping woman. The nature of the liquid remains ambiguous, alluding to sweet and vulgar things. Thus the images themselves can cause both attraction or repulsion, depending on the instinctive reaction of the viewer.

Dunning’s work stimulates an irrepressible desire to look. In her photographs of women with mustaches and the insides of nostrils (dating from 1988), she encourages viewers to stare at what would normally be taboo. The same principle is at work in her recent photography. Each picture sets up a curiosity–something is often strange or unreconciled. This is especially true in her pictures of women. By emphasizing the crucial details or aberrations, Dunning refuses to let viewers passively indulge in female beauty.

Jackson’s new book, “Alison Jackson: Confidential,” published this month by Taschen, is a parade of provocative images conjuring the A-list actors, musicians, politicians and 15-minutes-of-fame celebutantes who seem, whether we like it or not, to knock around in our consciousness. The images feel “real” enough to make you look more than twice. Their jittery focus and seemingly rushed, imprecise framing make them that much more “authentic,” as though they were caught on the fly or procured through a peephole.

Some think of Jackson’s images as satiric — and there is something shocking/embarrassing about seeing someone with her skirt up, both literally and metaphorically, that can inspire a nervous or knowing chuckle. But Jackson isn’t simply playing pranks. She sees the work as commentary. “I’m trying to raise questions about photography,” she says.

“The very nature of photography. I question it — media imagery — as deceitful,” adds Jackson, who recently touched down in L.A. on business — mostly TV and publisher meetings and to prepare for an upcoming gallery show. “So you think you’re looking at the queen, but in fact you’re looking at Jane Smith. I’m proving that you can’t rely on your perception when it comes to photography. The camera does lie.”

The photographs are narratives, fueled by the public’s imagination, that sink the viewer into a scene, mid-moment, and they’re perfectly portioned for our shortened attention spans: George Bush and Tony Blair in an impromptu hootenanny in the sauna, Britney Spears pigging out at the gym. Jackson’s photos fill in blanks at the same time that they raise questions. They’re images that can satisfy our speculations so precisely that they seem inevitable.

Although Crewdson has described himself as an ‘an American realist landscape photographer’, he makes filmic images that strongly reference TV programmes such as The Twilight Zone or films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind that deal with fantasy and the paranormal. In this series of intensely, almost luridly coloured and exuberantly detailed images, Crewdson employs a cinematic, directorial mode of photography, the culmination of weeks of planning and complicated, behind-the-scenes production.

In Crewdson’s photographs a collision between the normal and the paranormal exists which serves to transform the familiar suburban landscape into a place of wonder and anxiety. This series of images has become increasingly dark, penetrating the psychological disquiet at the heart of the American family.

Several of the images possess narratives that are mythic in proportion and seemingly driven by a sense of quasi-religious task and ritual. In Crewdson’s suburban re-working of the well-known Ophelia myth, a young woman floats calmly on the mirror-like surface of her flooded living room, her frozen impassivity reflective of all the characters in this series.

In other images, subjects are engrossed in odd, domestic chores such as carving holes in the living room floor or uprooting a huge tree from the rafters of an otherwise standard bedroom. Flora and fauna are amassed in abundance – an enormous mound of flowers is built in the middle of a residential street, a mass of brightly coloured butterflies escape from a garden shed and a strange, upright pole entwined with climbing flowers and plants emerges from beyond a living room window.

Often these photographs present a single isolated figure and the feeling that these strange encounters evoke is of stealing a glimpse of something shameful that should be hidden – something private, enigmatic or transgressive. Threat and danger intermingle with a bucolic sense of suburban bliss. One image depicts an upturned bus, lorded over by a group of teenagers; another is a chilling image of a young girl in pyjamas who stands mesmerized outside her home, beckoned by a man from the empty school bus, the paternal goodwill of the small town becoming something far darker and sinister. Threat is everywhere and danger is a short walk down the garden path.

These eerie and evocative photographs recall the films of independent American filmmakers such as David Lynch or Todd Solondz who explore surreal suburban dysfunction and the terror that lurks beneath everyday life.

Anna Gaskell crafts foreboding photographic tableaux of preadolescent girls that reference children’s games, literature, and psychology. In Gaskell’s style of narrative photography,of which Cindy Sherman is a pioneer, the image is carefully planned and staged; the scene presented is artificial in that it exists only to be photographed. While this may be similar to the process of filmmaking, there is an important difference. Gaskell’s photographs are not tied together by a linear thread; it is as though their events all take place simultaneously, in an ever-present. Each image’s before and after are lost, allowing possible interpretations to multiply.

Gaskell’s girls do not represent individuals, but act out the contradictions and desires of a single psyche. While their unity is suggested by their identical clothing, the mysterious and often cruel rituals they act out upon each other may be metaphors for disorientation and mental illness.

In wonder, Alice’s instability is invoked even at the level of presentation: the varied sizes of the photographs refer to her own growth spurts and shrinking spells. Gaskell’s allusions to Carroll’s story, however, are not always so playful. The seven versions of Alice in override alternate roles as victim or aggressor.

They try to control the changes to Alice’s body by literally, physically holding her in place—a potent metaphor for the anxiety and confusion experienced by children on the verge of adolescence. hide (1998) derives from a Brothers Grimm tale of a young woman who disguises herself under an animal pelt so that she might escape her own father’s proposal of marriage.

Gaskell addresses this psychologically loaded subject matter with images of girls wandering in a gothic mansion illuminated by candlelight. Here the psyche in question has been fractured and fraught with terror by a perverse father’s look, a voyeuristic gaze.

Untitled #12(Wonder Series)
1996, C-print 60 x50 inches

Untitled #8 (Wonder Series)
1996, C-print 30 x40 inches

NAN GOLDIN is a photographer whose work is a record of her life.

In exhibitions and in books, she has included some self-portraits, a few of which presented devastating views of her own self-destructiveness. But, she suggests, no portrait of her could be complete without the people she loves and what’s around her. ”The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” the work in which she first documented her friends and herself, her scene, forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last 20 years.

Nan after being battered, 1984

For the past few years, Nan Goldin has been keeping a personal diary that is no doubt one of the most moving stories ever. Her slideshow of photographs captures the whirlwind of life: love, death, illness, but also celebration, the fragility of human relations, hope and despair. This new work created for the Louvre pairs her own photographs of faces and bodies with photographs she has taken of artworks in the museum.

“Scopophilia,” which means “love of vision.” Goldin’s photographs have always reflected a desire to grant immortality to those she loves through her art — a drive that became even more poignant when she lost many of her subjects to the AIDS crisis. Always a spontaneous artist, in her most famous body of work, titled “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” she held up a mirror to the life that she and her circle of friends — including junkies and drag queens — led in 1980s New York.

Nan Goldin: Ryan in the Tub, Provincetown
1975 © Nan Goldin

Goldin doesn’t intend to continue with the same kind of highly intimate photography that has become her signature. “I don’t want to show my life to the public this way anymore. It’s cost me a lot and I don’t want anyone to know anything about my life today,” she said.

New Photography 2010 presents four artists—Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager, and Amanda Ross-Ho—whose photographs mine the inexhaustible reservoir of images found in print media and cinema.

Roe Ethridge:

Ethridge takes his pictures in “editorial mode,” directly borrowing from commercial images already in circulation, including outtakes from his own illustrational magazine work. Lassry defines his practice as one consumed with pictures, meaning with generic images lifted from consumer society, such as Hollywood publicity stills and design illustrations.

Old Fruit, 2010.
Chromogenic color print, 50 x 40″ (127 x 101.6 cm)

The pictures acquire their meaning from the salient way in which they have been shuffled, sequenced, and laid out in nonlinear narrative structures. Combining and recombining already recontextualized images, Ethridge at once subverts the photographs’ original roles and renews their signifying possibilities.

Debora Muller with Tripod 2008.
Chromogenic color print, 43 x 33″ (109.2 x 83.8 cm).

Elad Lassry:

Elad Lassry defines his practice as consumed with “pictures”—generic images culled from vintage picture magazines and film archives. Tapping the visual culture of still and motion pictures, he engages traditions of story-building with images and the ghosts of history that persist in images long after they have been lifted out of their original contexts.

Eagle Glove, Falcon (Kodak). 2008.
Chromogenic color print, 14 x 11″ (35.6 x 27.9 cm).

“I’m fascinated by the collapse of histories and the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph,” he has said. Lassry challenges the means by which a work is structured visually. His vibrant pictures—still life compositions, photocollages, and studio portraits of friends and celebrities—never exceed the dimensions of a magazine page or spread and are displayed in frames that derive their colors from the dominant hues in the photographs.

Nailpolish. 2009
Chromogenic color print, 14 1/2 x 11 1/2″ (36.8 x 29.2 cm).

Alex Prager:

Alex Prager, a self-taught photographer, takes her cues from pulp fiction, the cinematic conventions of movie directors such as Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock, and fashion photography. Resembling movie stills, her unnerving photographs—crisp, boldly colored, shot from unexpected angles, and dramatically lit—feature women disguised in wigs, dramatic makeup, and retro attire.

Desiree. 2008.
Chromogenic color print, 36 x 48 1/2″ (91.4 x 123.2 cm)

Despair, Film Still #1. 2010.
Chromogenic color print, 16 x 20″ (40.6 x 50.8 cm)

Prager’s images explore the construction of images that are intentionally loaded, reflecting her fascination with and understanding of cinematic melodrama.

Julie. 2007.
Chromogenic color print, 36 x 47 1/2″ (91.4 x 120.7 cm).

Los Penetrados (The Penetrated) is a 45-minute film in eight acts. The film was originally shot on October 12 2008, Día de la Raza, or the Day of the Race, which is the Spanish holiday commemorating Columbus’ discovery of the Americas. The film features a mirrored set with ten geometrically arranged blankets positioned on the floor, on which the various possible combinations of male and female and black and white, engage in anal penetration. The faces of the hired participants are digitally removed, rendering them as dehumanized, modular workers in Sierra’s imposed economy.

Acto 1
2008, black and white photograph, 55 x 98 inches

The eight acts are divided into the following permutations: white man/white woman, white man/white man, white man/black woman, white man/black man, black man/black woman, black man/black man, black man/white woman, black man/white man.

Choosing to film on Día de la Raza, Sierra makes an allegorical connection between the conquest of the Americas by the Spanish, and the penetration that occurs in his film. The subject matter of anal sex invites an examination of cultural psychologies of domination and submission as they relate to labor, race, gender, and class. Though conceived upon a mathematical formula, the film’s acts arrive at a succession of fluctuating outcomes, which yield an analysis of contemporary social structures in Spain. For instance, in Act III, seven of the ten blankets are left without performers, due to police pressure against females taking part in the labor. Or in Act V, where the number of passive black male subjects is diminished by cultural insecurities, perhaps born from experiences of racial inequality.

160 CM LINE TATTOOED ON 4 PEOPLE
El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo. Salamanca, España. Diciembre de 2000

Sierra’s projects often employ underprivileged individuals who function as laborers in useless and demeaning activities. These acts have largely been seen as a commentary on the social ramifications of capitalist models. Procedures such as tattooing a continuous line across the backs of his “workers” foreground the artists’ concerns with exploitation.

12 WORKERS PAID TO REMAIN INSIDE CARDBOARD BOXES
ACE Gallery New York. New York, United States. March 2000

He is well known outside of the United States as an agent who challenges notions of the “politically correct” in order to illuminate social incongruities. Stemming from minimal and conceptual practices of the 60’s and 70’s, Sierra’s controversial actions and performances yield evidence and/or documentation in the form of sculpture, photography, video, and installation.