MoMA Present 'The Original Copy: Photography of Scuptures' Exhibt, 8/1-11/1

"The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today" presents a critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how one medium informs the analysis and creative redefinition of the other. On view at The Museum of Modern Art from August 1st through November 1st, the exhibition brings together over 300 photographs, magazines, and journals, by more than 100 artists, from the dawn of modernism to the present, to look at the ways in which photography at once informs and challenges the meaning of what sculpture is. The Original Copy is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

When photography was introduced in 1839, aesthetic experience was firmly rooted in Romanticist tenets of originality. In a radical way, photography brought into focus the critical role that the copy plays in art and in its perception. While the reproducibility of the photograph challenged the aura attributed to the original, it also reflected a very personal form of study and offered a model of dissemination that would transform the entire nature of art.

Sculpture was among the first subjects to be treated in photography. There were many reasons for this, including the desire to document, collect, publicize, and circulate objects that were not always portable. Through crop, focus, angle of view, degree of close-up, and lighting, as well as through ex post facto techniques of dark room manipulation, collage, montage, and assemblage, photographers have not only interpreted sculpture but have created stunning reinventions of it.

Conceived around ten conceptual modules, the exhibition examines the rich historical legacy of photography and the aesthetic shifts that have taken place in the medium over the last 170 years through a superb selection of pictures by key modern, avant-garde, and contemporary artists. Some, like Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, and David Goldblatt, are best known as photographers; others, such as Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi, and David Smith, are best known as sculptors; and others, from Hannah Höch and Sophie Taeuber-Arp to such contemporaries as Bruce Nauman, Fischli/Weiss, Rachel Harrison, and Cyprien Gaillard, are too various to categorize but exemplify how fruitfully and unpredictably photography and sculpture have combined.

There will be a panel discussio on Tuesday, September 14th at 6:00 p.m. at the Celeste Bartos Theater on West 54 Street. The panel discussion will be moderated by Roxana Marcoci, curator of the exhibition. It also includes George Baker, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Vice Chair, UCLA Department of Art History; Mark Godfrey, Curator, Tate Modern; Sarah Hamill, Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Oberlin College; and Rachel Harrison, artist. Tickets are $10 for adult; $8 for members; and $5 for students, seniors, and staff of other museums. They can be purchased at the lobby information desk, the film desk, or online at www.moma.org/thinkmodern.

Photo Credit: Horst P. Horst; costume for Salvador Dalí's "Dream of Venus."