ANTONY GORMLEY in Madison Square and HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON at MoMA

British sculptor Antony Gormley cast himself in iron or fiberglass and these 31 naked men have arrived in New York - 4 on the ground of Madison Square Park and 27 on rooftops and ledges of the Flatiron District. It's a re-invention of the sculptor's 2007 Event Horizon that invaded London's South Bank and the Thames River and the idea of an NYC event had been tossed around unsuccessfully since the mid-80's. Gormley really caught the public's attention when he got on of the commissions last summer to sculpt Trafalgar Square's empty Fourth Plinth the other rocks in the Square occupied by statues of the famous dead. Each visitor had an hour of fame standing aloft.

Most New Yorkers will bathe in ignorance of this event not even batting an eye. But what Gormley has achieved is a more a conceptual work raising questions about who might see all those almost unseen Paul Auster-esque moments in the big city - the invisible artisans of the architraves who are both material and metaphysical. Gormley could have chosen a plinth idea for Manhattan and it would have been gossiped about in the same vein as the all those cow sculptures that dotted the pedestrian pastures a decade ago. But there's something more quietly insidious about Gormley's manifestations - the invidious inverse of a delirious New york.

CosmicViva's own rooftop installation. In true NYC one-upmanship she became a sound sculptor;)
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The temporary office of artist Banksy releasing his film Exit Through the Giftshop in NYC.

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Arguably the best known photographer of the C20, Henri Cartier-Bresson is an unmissable MOMA show. So well known are his images that the mind plays games on itself trying to work out which photos are the unseen one-fifth of the show. Moreover, one of Cartier-Bresson's favorite quotes was from French painter Degas: "[it is] wonderful to be famous as long as you remain unknown."

Cartier-Bresson died in 2004 and MOMA's show is the first major retrospective since (83 B/W prints). And so often, a famous artist's estate is governed by a perhaps well meaning but difficult spouse. In Cartier-Bresson's case, though, his second wife (1970) Martine Franck is a well-known photographer in her own right and a member of the Magnum Photos agency (Phaidon just published a new selection of her photos in their 55 Series). Since 1964 she's been documenting Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil (the company seen last year at New York's Armory) and in 2003 Franck founded the Fondation Cartier-Bresson from which most of the hitherto unseen photos originate.
Martine Franck discusses what her husband would have made of new digital technology (CosmicViva bribed her bankrupt Brit ex-boyfriend with free exhibition entry and coffee to conduct the interview)

Visitors to the show are initially met with huge maps of the photographer's world travels and in an NPR interview, Martine Franck expressed her admiration for and amazement of her husband's ability to be in the right place at the right time: "I think Henri had an innate intuition of what was going on in the world and what was important. I mean, you were in India when Gandhi was assassinated. You were in China when the communists arrived... You were in Russia at the right time." As Franck stated in the video interview, her husband's photos were equally about choices: "the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event, as well as the precise organization of forms that give that event its proper expression" wrote Cartier-Bresson. In 1952 his first book Images à la Sauvette was published - The Decisive Moment (English edition). The title was from his preface in which he quoted the 17th-century writer, Cardinal de Retz: "There is nothing in this world that does not have its decisive moment".

The Decisive Moment was reiterated at the exhibition's launch by curator Peter Galassi: "you become who you are through exposure to the outside world around you...photography as a great medium for meeting the world." Perhaps this is why Cartier-Bresson's photos never seem to loose an iota of power no matter who he snaps (both celebrated and not with a hand-held Leica) an no matter how many times they are viewed. Martine Franck was asked in an ArtInfo interview about her own work, do you see photography as a tool for describing difference?
"A tool for describing difference? Maybe I do express difference in my images. I’m sure I express loneliness. I hope I express happiness. But you know, I never think about these things when I photograph, because what I do is so instinctive. I happen to meet people and then I photograph them; I don’t have any strategy about it. It’s not done in any purposeful way."

The show travels to the Art Institute of Chicago (July 24 - Oct. 3); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Oct. 30 - Jan. 30); and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (Feb. 19 - May 15).Martine Franck at the launch of MoMA's exhibition Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

all video and photos on this site copyright 2010 CosmicViva unless otherwise attributed
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