Departments
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Week of 18 September 1998 |
Vol. II, No. 6 |
Feature
Article
On-the-road show clicks with pop musicians' pix
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Patti in Taxi, 1995, from the
exhibition Two Times Intro: Photographs by Michael
Stipe, 8 x 10 inches, silver print.
Photo courtesy of the
Photographic Resource Center
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By J. Nicole Long
Michael Stipe found his voice singing; Allen Ginsberg found his in poetry. And in photography, both found a way to chronicle the arts scene of their times.
The exhibition Two Times Intro, on display through October 23 at the Photographic Resource Center (PRC) in Boston University's Morse Auditorium, features the photographs of Michael Stipe, lead singer of the pop group R.E.M. Ginsberg, pictured with his camera, is one of Stipe's subjects.
Derived from Stipe's book, Two Times Intro: On the Road with Patti Smith, published by Little Brown, the exhibition's title also alludes to music. The phrase "two times intro" is musician's shorthand: find the hook and repeat it twice before introducing the vocals.
Sara Rosenfeld Dassel, director of exhibitions, says the show appealed to the PRC because of its interdisciplinary nature. "The exhibit demonstrates the perspective of artists whose music is well known. The images," she says, "are visual snatches of their musical aesthetic."
In addition to Stipe's black-and-white photographs, the exhibit includes drawings by Patti Smith and Polaroids by Oliver Ray. Smith, singer and songwriter, first exhibited her drawings in 1978 alongside photographs by longtime friend Robert Mapplethorpe. Her drawings have since been presented in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Ray, songwriter and member of Smith's band, uses an old Polaroid camera that he found near Detroit. His work has been exhibited in galleries in Boston and New York.
Like Stipe's songs, his photographs are suggestive phrases and free associations. His photographic style ranges from straightforward traditional images to grainy abstracted fragments. "Because Stipe originally conceived the photographs as a book -- to be printed on paper -- the graininess of the images hung here evokes the texture of newsprint," says Rosenfeld Dassel.
After weighing spatial and thematic considerations, Rosenfeld Dassel arranged the exhibit in roughly five groupings: photographs by Stipe that are self-conscious of the medium he's using (by including the camera in the photo, for example); Ray's Polaroids; Stipe's photographs about his relationship to people; Stipe's landscapes about his relation to space (often open space with some unique detail, like a string of lightbulbs); and Smith's drawings. "The individual pieces hung next to each other create a sense of continuity and interrelation," says Rosenfeld Dassel.
The opening of the show also facilitated a new kind of inter-relation for the PRC, whose audience, she says, is usually professional photographers. Assessing the opening night crowd, Rosenfeld Dassel says that Two Times Intro bridges postmodern sensibility and the more traditional act of viewing art in a gallery. "At the opening," she recalls, "there were many young people here. It was clear to them that this is a serious show; it's not just about rock and roll, but about aesthetics and how someone sees."
For more information regarding PRC exhibits and service, call 617-353-0700 or visit http://www.bu.edu/PRC.