Empty Pleasures

John Haber
in New York City

Wijnanda Deroo and Andrew Moore

Joe Pflieger and Sarah Jones

Photography has found a place in museums and a place in popular culture. It has taken to the city and taken to the road. It walks right in and takes their portraits in prints when no one is around to see.

When Wijnanda Deroo documents the Rijksmuseum's renovation, she leaves it open whether the empty museum or the photograph is closer to art. When Andrew Moore heads upstate, he finds only another photographer and his dreams. When Joe Pflieger and Sarah Jones document their own dreamy landscape of horses, gardens, and high-performance cars, they give it the look of museum architecture as well. They recall the medium's early years. Back then, long exposure times meant not just blurring traffic, but making it vanish. If the contrast between desires and absences sounds Freudian, not even art photography can disdain empty pleasures.

Night in the museum

One may not think of the Rijksmuseum as a space for contemporary art. One may not, that is, unless one has seen it empty, as a space apart. Wijnanda Deroo has, and she finds a near abstract perfection in bare walls, drop cloths, and floors strewn with rubble. The museum underwent a major renovation, starting in 2004, and the Dutch photographer dropped in several times a year until its reopening in April 2013. A documentary film by Oeke Hoogendijk has tracked its progress, and the Rijksmuseum's Web site makes the changes look suitably polished, but Deroo is not interested in process or finish. She strips away workers and scaffolding in search of space, light, and color.

The building dates to 1885, when Pierre Cuypers combined Gothic columns with Renaissance symmetry and simplicity. For the reopening, the firm of Cruz y Ortiz undid previous renovations and restored period details, but museums these days are expected to grow and to attract a wider public, not to revert to a more stately past. The Spanish architects added an Asian pavilion and, of course, shops and restaurants. They created a new entrance and converted two inner courtyards, both postwar additions, into that bane of new museums, an atrium, in two parts connected by a passageway. MoMA since its 2004 renovation, the Morgan Library under Renzo Piano, the Queens Museum, and the Whitney in the Meatpacking District, eat your heart out. At least unlike MoMA's plans for the future, they did not have to destroy anything as valued as the former Museum of American Folk Art.

They also ran five years over schedule and way over budget, in case you had any doubts that this is a very big deal. As if to shout major renovation, the rehanging leaves exactly one work in its old place, The Night Watch. In a night at the museum, Rembrandt will be watching. Deroo, too, has her presiding deities, but less comforting ones. A pitying Madonna looks down from her pillar, and portraits of the Dutch upper class under strapping tape appear tied up by kidnappers. Still, by and large only a few art objects remain, on their way in or out.

They leave behind an unexpected kind of art, its very modernity rooted in an older museum fashion of decorative arches and colored walls. Deroo sets the geometry of wood flooring against the planes rising behind. A black wall frames a door opening onto only the black rectangle of another wall, like a black painting for Ad Reinhardt. The Rijksmuseum has galleries for Art Nouveau and, in the 1950s, Cobra—a northern European art movement that included Karel Appel. Still, one knows it best for Dutch painting from the age of Rembrandt and Jan Vermeer. And empty there is hardly a trace of Expressionism to be seen.

There is, however, room for theater, with Gothic sculpture among the performers. Mary and the angel of the Annunciation stand on their platforms past a stepladder, moving pallets, and entrances and exits stage left and stage right. You fill in the script. The sheer intensity of museum lighting suggests a stage set, as in the long, slim shadows cast by equipment left behind. James Casebere might have photographed the cloistered arches above white halls, only he would have built them himself as a scale model. It might be a box, but not a Minimalist box by Donald Judd or what Ilya Kabakov calls his Empty Museum.

Maybe the story has redeeming lessons for other museums. The stacked white boxes of the New Museum on the Bowery might work just fine if they did not have to hold art—and if people did not have to circulate from floor to floor. Tourists reliably line up for the Guggenheim regardless of what is on display inside, and Frank Lloyd Wright would have liked it that way. Deroo set a goal of photographing neglected spaces, from Indonesia to Kansas, but also Tavern on the Green in Central Park. And the tourist trade is driving its restoration, too. Better head there now, before the people.

A shot of whiskey

When an artist leaves the big city for the Hudson River Valley after thirty-nine years, he might be in search of a new life. For Andrew Moore, it was just another good reason to pick up his camera and revisit American art. Four years later, it is a show in Chelsea as well, as "Whiskey Point and Other Tales." It should have anyone asking where he has been all these years and what he has found. It could be a stage in his life or a point of origins for American art. Now in his sixties, he is still on the lookout for both.

It might seem a strange move. Thirty-nine years is a long time, long enough for many a career and long enough, too, to mark him as a city boy. Past series have taken him to Times Square theaters and the factories of Detroit. And the first thing he did after his student days was to head for New Orleans to record patterns of change in urban life. Come to think of it, many of those factories had fallen into disuse or decay since Charles Sheeler painted and photographed them starting in 1927, and Moore took care to compare and contrast their views. Decay will always have its appeal as the picturesque, but Moore knows enough to temper sentiment with precision.

Still, he had left town before to photograph the Great Plains, and he cites the influence of his great-great-grandfather, an artist who followed the course of the American railroad. As that suggests, he might wonder, too, if he had at last returned home. He grew up in one of the fanciest parts of Connecticut, and now he had moved up the Hudson to the Catskills, where residents relish their distance from the city. As a rural dweller might boast, he might even wonder if he had found paradise. It might have helped that he moved just in time to escape shuttered galleries after Covid-19. At the very least, his latest could pass for a fantasy.

Could clouds take on the deep reds of sunset in broad daylight, and could they descend anywhere like this, like jigsaw pieces to fit the buildings below? Could mists nestle into a valley as if arising spontaneously from the ground, much as they enveloped houses in Moore's Detroit? Other mists deepen a grove of bare trees, while lending branches a perplexity of line and color. More light glows on the waters behind them, while other photos make it hard to know what is water and what sky. Sheep cluster for protection beneath more bare trees, while a dog keeps its distance. The dog knows enough to herd them while letting them feel free.

Like a proper paradise, this one has little need for people, but it does have room for him. Moore seems to have found a way to photograph himself at a fair distance as well, immersed in the stillness of landscape, but no: he had spotted a fellow explorer behind a camera overlooking a lake. Was it a follower of the Hudson River School updated for art's media today? (The gallery cites a woman known for fantastic light and colors, Susie M. Barstow, along with Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and Asher B. Durand in the nineteenth century.) Appropriately enough, Moore shares the gallery with Yamamoto Masao from Japan, whose spooky creatures depend on old-fashioned glass negatives.

So what has he been doing all along? For starters, he has always had a weakness for utopias, like old accounts of blue collar America and the settling of the American West, but with awareness of how things can go wrong. Other series have taken him to Cuba and Russia, with failed utopias of their own. For another, he has often found those utopias in past American art. Last, he sees in them an interchange between past and present. You may not need a shot of whiskey before joining the interchange—and settling into the confidence of wealth and class.

Off the road

When Joe Pflieger tackles the American dream, he sure makes it look dreamy. Yet he sought out a decidedly masculine version of the dream, an auto show, where he photographed engine models. His choice of high-tech models should only intensify the testosterone rush. When he compares the close-ups to "formal portraits," he might be speaking of the male psyche. The artist's black frames cut off all but a central shaft pressed close to the picture plane. Stacked planes spiral upward, and pins thrust out to one side, but the engines look motionless, as if lost in a dream.

The show's title, manifest, already proclaims its clarity, while also promising what Sigmund Freud called the latent content behind the manifest content of a dream. The engine housing may look like Brutalism in architecture, only carved from bath soap and dust. Then, too, the photographer could be dreaming the whole thing, with or without male biases of his own. Pflieger uses Photoshop to apply pastel tints, accentuate contrasts, and dissolve mass. Red Cadillac sounds like a fast-food chain, but it is going nowhere fast. Sometimes the spurts of color layered onto gray approach abstraction, in inkjet on acrylic.

Downstairs, he pursues the dream from Death Valley to the Fort Worth Water Gardens, designed by Philip Johnson. Again the scenes are close-up, immersive, and elusive, if also less charged with ambiguity or feeling. These larger compositions divide more neatly, like collage—or maybe like tiles in Windows 8. With a little work, one can make out bricks or cinder blocks along with soil, as a human imprint on the land. Both series recall the tradition of "road pictures," as with Robert Frank or Lee Friedlander crossing America by car or Emmet Gowin by air. Landscape and portraiture were not so far apart all along.

Sarah Jones takes to the road the old-fashioned way, on horseback. Or rather she photographs horses at rest, but with an old-fashioned beauty. Their black coats gleam against black backgrounds, as in archival prints from an era before motor cars. As in "At Grass," Philip Larkin's poem, "The eye can hardly pick them out / From the cold shade they shelter in." Yet they also take on a resplendent fullness. Where Pflieger softens cold steel, Jones hardens organic form and light, but as formal portraits all the same.

Her other subjects, too, suggest memories that refuse to slip away. They include the iron gates of an unseen estate, books, and the museum cases to hold them. Natural forms, too, have the look of wrought iron, whether flower stems or budding branches. Translucency competes with objects close to the picture plane, to make one feel that one could touch the blackness. As Larkin says, "Dusk brims the shadows."

They are not, however, altogether black. White is implicit in the highlights and the glass, but also explicit in orchids. The red of roses pops out from the crystalline darkness, as if hand painted. Look closely, too, and the horses are indeed at green or browning grass. For all the memories, Jones parallels the empty New York of Duane Michals and the contemporary erasure of differences between photography and other media, high tech or low, as with Anne Collier and what a group show called "Strange Magic." She, too, she finds an uncanny clarity in what might pass for a dream.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Wijnanda Deroo ran at Robert Mann through March 29, 2014, Joe Pflieger at Monya Rowe through May 18, and Sarah Jones at Anton Kern through April 26. Andrew Moore ran at Yancey Richardson through January 6, 2024. Related reviews look at Andrew Moore in Detroit and the empty New York of Christopher Culver, Duane Michals, Katherine Newbegin, and Holly Zausner.