Bernd and Hilla Becher, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Allan Sekula

Bernd & Hilla Becher

Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Allan Sekula

Although I already knew of them and they of me, and we had, I think, communicated on Facebook, I first met Calla and Max in Berlin in the summer of 2012 when I walked into their space Times Bar. I had just ended a project space in the West Village that was part of a constellation of spaces happening at that time in New York around which people showed art and drank and slept together and I was deeply curious to seeTimes Bar, which I knew was serving a similar need in Berlin. And which was already garnering a mythic aura through channels of early social media.

Earlier that summer I had seen images of a show they had just opened at T293 in Naples of photos taken in Athens and performatively installed by Joe Kay, Calla’s future ex-husband and Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Max’s future ex-husband. For it, Lutz-Kinoy and Kay dipped their hands in white paint and while following a script to install the works had left prints on their sides as a sort of visual record of their hanging with everyone playing a role; artists, dealer, art handler, lover, etc. Those works, still among my personal favorites, were to become a sort of index to all of their subsequent projects - extracting physical objects, mostly photos, through a milieu of performance, work and love, embedding them with a realness that feels rare nowadays.

For the show here at OKEY DOKEY KONRAD FISCHER, the duo is showing headshots of actors who have performed with them at their current project, New Theater Hollywood, a serious business and fully operational theater that seeks to provide a physical space around which a community can form, in addition to being a creative outlet, a place of employment, and perhaps lastly but importantly, a source for their art works.

Calla writes of the works:

We must all decide professionally who we are – but with actors these images are more slippery. We do not know if we are looking at the actor performing herself, her ‘real’ self, her ‘professional’ self. The actor may be in the green room, but in a headshot, they are never off-duty. These images are tools of the mirage factory. In combination they become casts. Potential groups to inhabit stories. Proposed collectives. Conflicts. Resolution.

In Allan Sekula’s video, Performance under Working Conditions, 1973 a trio of actors including Sekula himself, perform the roles of pizza parlor employees doing everything one would expect of pizza shop employees except for anything actually needed to make pizza. Much as Calla and Max highlighted the performative roles of art handler, lover, collaborator and creator together in that show in Naples, the normally unnoticed acts that make up life become elevated here, be they grand or mundane, and question where a role or job begins and ends, especially as it relates to who gets paid and how much.

In Bernd and Hilla Becher’s series shown here, we see eight shots of the same building at Sternbuschweg 362 in Duisburg. The works are an early type of image-grouping which the Becher's referred to as an Abwicklung, a complete encircling with the camera of a freestanding structure, a kind of composite head shot of sorts but of a building.

The positioning of these works in the same room elicits a kind of mood or scene, not unlike what one might encounter in a play at Calla and Max’s theater.

—Matt Moravec