Erica Baum shows at Metropolitan

Late June – December, 2013This exhibition examines the ways in which artists have used the camera to explore subjects close to home—the quotidian, intimate, and overlooked aspects of everyday existence—during the last four decades.  As the counterculture swelled in the late 1960s, daily life as it had been lived in Western Europe and America at least since the cookie-cutter 1950s came into question. Conceptual artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s often turned to an “A-B-C” approach in which the conventions of both art and life were systematically questioned and whimsically deranged. In the 1980s, artists’ renewed interest in narrative and genre—particularly of the cinematic variety—yielded often highly staged or produced images that treated issues of autobiography and memory with a cool distancing.  In the following decade, artists created photographs and videos that confused the real and the imaginary in ways that almost eerily predicted the epistemological quandaries posed by the digital revolution. The exhibition will conclude with a suite of works by young and emerging artists who use minimal means with familiar subjects to make open-ended images combining process and product in novel ways.  The exhibition will include photographs by John Baldessari, Erica Baum, Sophie Calle, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Fischli & Weiss, Jan Groover, Robert Gober, Elizabeth McAlpine, David Salle, and Stephen Shore, among others, as well as video by artists such as Lutz Bacher and Martha Rosler.