Art Review: "Exposed" @ Tate Modern (London)

"Exposed" is sort of overwhelming--I had to visit twice to see the whole thing thoroughly, because the museum closed 3/4 of the way through my first visit. This sprawling, 14-room show, conceived by Sandra Phillips of SFMoMA, is a look at the ways photography has taken on issues of "exposure," particularly issues of voyeurism and surveillance. It is broadly divided into sections devoted to "The Unseen Photographer," "Celebrity and the Public Gaze," "Voyeurism & Desire," "Witnessing Violence," and "Surveillance."

The sheer amount of space devoted to "Exposed" means that the show can present some material in historically accurate ways that I, for one, have not had the chance to see before. Case in point: anyone reasonably familiar with photography as a tool for exploring sexuality has seen images from Nan Goldin's classic "Ballad of Sexual Dependency," but "Exposed" goes to the trouble of showing them in something like their original form--as a slideshow in a darkened room, set to the music of the Velvet Underground and others. Likewise, Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki's infrared images of couples and groups secretly having sex in parks in 1970s are displayed in a darkened room with spotlights--a reference to their original gallery presentation in the 1979, where guests in dark space were given flashlights to view them.

While the spread and treatment are nice, the show sometimes feels like too much. It needs some cutting and narrowing. The sporadic insertion of images by well-known streetshooters (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank) feels especially intrustive, like big names unnecessarily larding a show that might have been more targeted. I found myself confused: were streetshooters featured because they exposed their subjects in everyday life, or because they hid their cameras for fear of their own exposure as thieves of others' images? That unexplored ambiguity seems, to me, typical of the show as a whole. It feels like the vast range of images gathered here is united only by the many things "Exposed" could mean. I would have liked to see a tighter sense of organizational principal, both historically and thematically, rather than a show that felt guided by the ambiguous pun of its verbal title.

Nevertheless, there's something to be said for capacious messiness. This is a rich show with something to delight (and, I think, surprise) almost anyone, from the photographic beginner to the more seasoned enthusiast. Alongside what I would consider "over"-exposed art historical names, It manages to include a number of less popular images and artists--it was especially impressive, I thought, on issues of celebrity fandom and sex. Cammie Toloui's pictures from the "Lusty Lady" series are a particularly fantastic choice. Shot from her point of view as she worked as a stripper in a San Francisco peepshow, Toloui's grainy black-and-white images occupy some unclear space in the network of gazes that forms between an erotic dancer and her (often exposed and masturbating) audience--a reflexive experience made visible as the reflection of Toloui's nude body in the glass divider blends uneasily with the images of her voyeurs on the other side.

Unfortunately, "Exposed" ends on a weak note, as the last section, which covers the hot-button issue of surveillance, is disappointingly cold. (The exceptions--Shizuka Yokomizo, Laurie Long--prove the rule.) That's less a curatorial blunder than a reflection of what I see as the stagnation of a lot of contemporary political photography. Historical selections can be excused for unfetching aerial images of, say, Normandy on D-Day. But contemporary photographers also seem unable to make surveillance images interesting. They tend towards either dull, grainy pictures of current surveillance tools, or conceptual work that justifies its bland visuals with chunks of text--text which, by the time you get to this room, you will probably be too tired to read. Both approaches seem like poor ways of capturing public attention on issues of pressing social importance.

The whimper that ends this show is driven home by an installation located outside the (surprisingly excellent) gift shop. While it's unrelated to "Exposed," it captures what's broadly wrong with the surveillance part of the exhibit. Called "Night Watch," by Francis Alÿs, the installation consists of a wall-sized array of closed-circuit televisions showing different rooms in the National Gallery. It appears as ponderous (and as boring) as many of the works in the surveillance section, but you stand before it a while anyway, just to look thoughtful--then something moves in one of the monitors.

It's a fox! This incongruous little animal, dashing from room to room of the museum and from television to television in the grid, embodies the kind of surprise and mystery you expect when you take on the role of voyeur. The playful artificiality of this introduction of a wild animal to the museum may offend the high moral seriousness of much of the surveillance work, but it makes you think a lot more about your expectations and desires, as a watcher and as a human being, than the more overtly political work that ends the exhibit…and isn't that, after all, what good art is supposed to do?



"Exposed" runs at the Tate Modern in London through October 3, 2010.

Other takes on the show: 3quarksdaily, the Guardian.

Images, from top, copyright Kohei Yoshiyuki, Cammie Toloui, and Francis Alÿs.