3rd of May

blakegopnik:
“ THE DAILY PIC: This is “Nathan with Floral”, a Polaroid shot in 1962 or 63 by Marie Cosindas, and now in an eye-opening survey of similar works by her that closes in a few days at Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York. Cosindas found...

THE DAILY PIC: This is “Nathan with Floral”, a Polaroid shot in 1962 or 63 by Marie Cosindas, and now in an eye-opening survey of similar works by her that closes in a few days at Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York. Cosindas found some success in the 1960s and ’70s, thanks in part to support from John Szarkowski at MoMA (he gave her a solo there in 1966), then seems to have been mostly written out of photographic history. What amazes me is that, among the rigors of Greenbergian abstraction, Minimalism and Conceptualism, the 1960s art world could also find room for Cosindas’s wonderfully fussy, decorative, retrospective and frankly camp sensibility. The camp part strikes me as especially important: I’m fairly certain that “Nathan” in this photo is Nathan Gluck, a gay assistant working in the openly queer environment of Warhol’s studio. (Cosindas also photographed Warhol himself, more than once, including for her “Dandies” series; like Warhol, and Gluck, she got her start amid the frippery of commercial art.)
Gay culture of the ’60s helped break open the boundaries of what kinds of art could count as acceptably avant-garde – absurd prettiness was allowed to challenge capital-B Beauty – and some female artists, such as Cosindas, could play a part in the shift. The truth is, Cosindas’s aesthetic is more radically anti-modern than anything you’ll find even in Warhol, whose style, at its most cockeyed and queer, is still built on a backbone of Modernist rigor. (© Marie Cosindas, courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NY)

(via blakegopnik)

Posted by 3rdofmay

March 5, 2014 4:58pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZK7Y6y19HvImA
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