MACK The Shabbiness of Beauty－Moyra Davey & Peter Hujar 美的破敗

“Their spheres do not so much collide as coalesce, giving rise to a constellation of shared subjects ... enigmatic yet easy harmonies ... are offset by tensions which run deeper than the tonal schisms between Hujar’s sumptuous blacks and Davey’s simmering greys.” — British Journal of Photography

 

The Shabbiness of Beauty is a visual dialogue that crosses generational divides with the easy intimacy of a late-night phone call. Multidisciplinary artist Moyra Davey delved into Peter Hujar’s archives and emerged mainly with little-known, scarcely seen images. In response to these, Davey created her own images that draw out an idiosyncratic selection of shared subjects. 

 

A voice for marginality, Hujar began taking photographs in the 1950s when he worked in fashion advertising, before he left the commercial world and embedded himself in the New York art scene. His work acted as a mirror to the public appearance of gay life, spanning from the Stonewall uprising in 1969 to the unfolding AIDS crisis in the 1980s, in which he fell victim. The artists meet in their shared formats, their subjects – people, animals, water, and surfaces – the discreet framing of their compositions, and the intimacy and tenderness with which they record. They are also different in many ways. 

 

Side by side, the powerfully composed images admire, tease, and enhance one another in the manner of fierce friends, forming a visual exploration of physicality and sexuality that crackles with wit, tenderness, and perspicacity. Spiritually anchored in New York City – even as they range out to rural corners of Quebec and Pennsylvania – these images crystallise tensions between city and country, human and animal. Nudes pose with unruly chickens; human bodies are abstracted toward topography; seascapes and urban landscapes share the same tremulous plasticity. 

 

These continuities are punctuated by stark differences of approach: Davey’s self-aware postmodernism against Hujar’s humanism and embrace of darkroom manipulation. The rich dialogue between these photographs is personal and angular, ultimately offering an illuminating reintroduction to each celebrated artist through communion with the other’s work. Viewers may quickly find themselves a little lost in the visual dialogue between the two artists. The page numbers are scarce and barely legible, and the photographs follow each other without attribution or title, which are instead listed at the end. This is a blind date of sorts.

 

The book mainly contains black-and-white photographs, with the exception of the final three taken by Hujar of Thek in the late 1960s. This simplicity manifests on an intimate scale; complexity does not require complication. Few photography-focused books triumph as gestalt artworks to the extent that The Shabbiness of Beauty does: the memory of a show, installed in a vanishing building, reanimated through text, and immortalised on the page.

 

Features

• Edition : -
• Binding : Hardback
• ISBN : 9781913620202
• Publication Date : 2021/4/7

 

Materials & Care

• Imported