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"Unmissable" (The Guardian) - the first UK retrospective of one of the world's most innovative and influential artists and street photographers.

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"Unmissable" (The Guardian) - the first UK retrospective of one of the world's most innovative and influential artists and street photographers.

This event is part of our Past Programme

Final weekend!

We're expecting it to be really busy - especially 2-4pm. We recommend visiting earlier or booking in advance to avoid disappointment.

For more than sixty years, Daido Moriyama (森山 大道 b. 1938) has used his camera to interrogate and revolutionise the way we look at the world with his dense, grainy images. Even today, Moriyama's pioneering artistic spirit and visual intensity remain groundbreaking.

The exhibition traces the path of a photographer who transformed the way we see photography and questioned the very nature of photography itself.

Forget everything you've learned on the subject of photography for the moment, and just shoot. Take photographs - of anything and everything, whatever catches your eye. Don't pause to think.

The retrospective focuses on different moments of Moriyama's vast and productive career - beginning with his early works for Japanese magazines, interest in the American occupation, and engagement with photorealism. The show then moves through to his work from the self-reflexive period in the 1980s and 1990s, following on to his explorations of the essence of photography and of his own self, reflecting on reality, memory and cities through tireless documentation and the reinvention of his own archive.

Fittingly, Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective, brings together more than 200 works and large-scale installations, as well as many of Moriyama's rare photobooks and magazines, for the first time in the UK. One floor of the gallery has been transformed into a reading room - a dedicated space offering a rare opportunity to spend time with his legendary publications.

Immerse yourself in Moriyama's world at The Photographers' Gallery, showing until 11 February 2024. Tickets available now.

7 things to know about Moriyama

Learn more in this quick guide about Moriyama, a name synonymous with avant-garde photography.

Read more

Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective was curated by Thyago Nogueira, Instituto Moreira Salles.

Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective is the product of a three-year research period, and is one of the most comprehensive exhibitions ever mounted of this artist's work. It is organised by Instituto Moreira Salles in cooperation with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation.

Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective Reading Room supported by Ellen Yiwei Wang.

Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective is supported by

Own a print

Prints from this exhibition are available from our Print Sales, prices from £1,250 + VAT. All profits from Print Sales support the public exhibitions programme at The Photographers' Gallery.

Enquire about availability now

Become a member

Members enjoy free, unlimited access to all our exhibitions, whilst supporting our educational programmes. Your support helps to provide a home for the next generation of photographers.

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Shop the exhibition

An incredible selection of books, magazines and exhibition posters are available to shop online or in store now, including signed copies. The impressive exhibition volume features more than 190 chronologically arranged images that reveal Moriyama's constantly evolving career, which reframes his legacy, and is certain to become the definitive publication on Moriyama's work.

Buy now

You may also like

Learn about Daido Moriyama's unique photographic style in this quick guide

Exhibition

Don't miss out - closes Sunday 2 June! Discover the key moments in the unparalleled career of London-born photographer Bert Hardy (1913-1995, UK) at The Photographers' Gallery

Our Bookshop is one of London's best and most treasured independent centres for photography book lovers.

Our specialist space to discover photographers, buy prints and build collections.

Learn about Daido Moriyama's unique photographic style in this quick guide

Exhibition

Don't miss out - closes Sunday 2 June! Discover the key moments in the unparalleled career of London-born photographer Bert Hardy (1913-1995, UK) at The Photographers' Gallery

Our Bookshop is one of London's best and most treasured independent centres for photography book lovers.

Our specialist space to discover photographers, buy prints and build collections.

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Zany, Cute, Interesting
Sianne Ngai

Harvard University Press books are not shipped directly to India due to regional distribution arrangements. Buy from your local bookstore, Amazon.co.in, or Flipkart.com.

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ISBN 9780674088122

Publication date: 10/05/2015

The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.

Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute's involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.

Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman's poetry to Ed Ruscha's photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity's only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.

Praise

Sianne Ngai has written an important book which harks back to the heyday of the leftist literary theory of the 1980s, and is none the worse for that. Dense and demanding, occasionally meandering, [it is] equally at home with I Love Lucy and conceptual art, Theodor Adorno and Jim Carrey... Laudable and ambitious... In order for art to fulfill its role and for criticism to survive, 'aesthetic theory' needs to develop new and powerful concepts which reflect both art's changing nature and its ubiquity. This challenging and important book takes the first steps in this task.

-Robert Eaglestone, Times Literary Supplement

Sianne Ngai gives us once again a radiantly idiosyncratic study of that which we never thought to examine and that which we now understand to be crucial to our daily experience as social beings. Under Ngai's quick eye and deft hand, the zany, the cute, and the merely interesting reveal their pertinence for the history and historicity of aesthetic development, the intimacy between quotidian materiality and philosophic inquiry, and the collisions among modernity, art, labor, and performing bodies.

-Anne A. Cheng, author of Second Skin

Sianne Ngai's new book is a major work of aesthetic theory: challenging a beauty-based aesthetics, closing the gap between aesthetic theory and artistic practice, and offering irreverent categories that work across disciplines and periods to make better sense of our cultural experience. Our Aesthetic Categories takes up the mantle of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, and here Ngai becomes the leading cultural critic of our day.

-Jonathan Culler, Cornell University

This wonderfully original book (I hesitate to call it 'cute, zany, and interesting,' but that wouldn't be wrong) invents fresh and incisive new categories for that tired old study called aesthetics. Maybe such categories could even transform the field itself, but they certainly transform the way we look at contemporary literature and culture (which Sianne Ngai knows with startling extensiveness), and maybe they will also end up transforming our outlook on the art of the past as well. Our Aesthetic Categories is in any case one of the most exciting new theoretical books to come along in some time.

-Fredric Jameson, Duke University

With unparalleled originality, ambition, and insight, Sianne Ngai reimagines aesthetic theory for our time. Building on her work in Ugly Feelings, Ngai insists on the significance of minor, ordinary aesthetic experience. Our Aesthetic Categories displaces the centrality of beauty in aesthetics and illuminates the social processes at work in ubiquitous and taken-for-granted acts of judgment. This book will make you feel the present differently.

-Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania

Awards

2012, Winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize

2013, Winner of the Ray and Pat Browne Award - Best Reference/Primary Source Work in Popular and American Culture

Author

Sianne Ngai is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, winner of the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize. Her work has been translated into multiple languages.

From this author

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Our Aesthetic Categories - Harvard University Press

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The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire.

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In the introduction to The Memeing of Mark Fisher, Watson writes that the book is 'laid out here in six more-or-less standalone chapters', leaving the reader to assume that each chapter is self-contained and their consequences to be theorised independently. Yet, in his final chapter, entitled 'Psychedelic Dreams: Marcuse, Fisher, and Acid Communism', one finds a coherent vision that provides direction for the late Mark Fisher's 'Acid Communism', a vision that synthesises the work found in the preceding chapters. Perhaps Watson's comment is best understood as an attempt at modesty, then. Whatever the intention, however, his latest release is a testament to the importance of reading both the Frankfurt School and Fisher in light of our present conjuncture, not only theirs, and is an effort that is far from modest in its scope and consequence.

Building on his earlier work, also published by Zer0 Books and titled Can the Left Learn to Meme? ‒ in which various twenty-first century pop culture instances are investigated under the guise of a collective imagination, such as Netflix's Stranger Things and its widespread resonance, the video series Don't Hug Me I'm Scared and its propensity for millennial sensibilities and the inherent fraternity found in online gaming communities ‒ Watson depicts a constellation that forces us all to take seriously online leftist movements in light of a thorough reading of the Frankfurt School's main proponents (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse) and, of course, Mark Fisher. Watson opens his work by situating it against the backdrop of a larger political moment, namely that which has come to pass since the death of Fisher in 2017: the lights of seemingly burgeoning left-wing movements in both the United States and the United Kingdom, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn respectively, have been defeated, and number 45 has both started and finished his term as president. Covid-19, meanwhile, left all but the wealthiest of us looking down the barrel of (some of the) constraints that the working- and under-classes have been subjected to for far too long: ''going nowhere, doing nothing, and with no forecast date of release from these prison-like conditions.'' (1). We might say, then, that Fisher's dictum that ''the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it'' (2010: 2), appears more tangible than ever, and its repackaging into memes throughout various Facebook groups ‒ such as the one founded, and eventually closed by Fisher ‒ and different internet forums ranging from Reddit to 4chan only reaffirms the impossible situation that the left finds itself in today: what do we do when the resistance against commodification has itself become commodified?

Watson's answer lies in the battleground of online culture today, one in which he sees a warm hope for the online left in the tradition of modernist philosophical aesthetics. More precisely, Watson implores internet content creation as a cultural endeavour that could begin to open cracks in capitalism's totalisation, which is fitting given that Watson credits many of the ideas found in the book to the online movement he co-runs, The Acid Left, and accords with Fisher's final remarks in Capitalist Realism. Watson finds different remedies to our current impasse in the Frankfurt School's large assemblage of essays, books and letters: Adorno provides direction for memes in the guise of artistic abstraction; Benjamin through the constellation of (digital) objects by which one can understand our current standing; Horkheimer via a rethreading of philosophising the (online) Other; Marcuse's alliance with the student movements of the 60's supplies an actual meatspace vision for a counterculture that the Left can tap into today.

Watson's work, however, is approachable in a way these aforementioned theorists' works often are not and injects a flair of humour that makes this easily recommendable to those not familiar with the theorists he draws from. As Watson writes in my favourite chapter of the book, 'Benjamin and the Digital Flaneur': 'Undertaking The Arcade Project was akin to trying to understand the machinations of today's data capitalism by trawling online shopping pages using a Windows 95 browser.' (63).

Of course, such an undertaking brings to mind Fisher's notion of hauntology in which our current cultural conditions for production are understood as an aggregation and extension of the past, and one can read this via the commodities of our conjuncture. This leads Watson to posit the question of whether 'the audience [can] reconfigure history in new constellations given the proximity of power to the act of viewing in a data economy?' (72) The left, says Watson, needs to compose the fragmented representations of reality found in the likes of memes, Youtube, Instagram, Netflix, etc. and to make from such a composition of the past and future a reformulated economic reality. In other words, the left is already equipped with all it needs to disseminate its politics to the wider world; we just need to seize the memes.

Such praise for an alternative, however, should not make the potential reader think that Watson glosses over the worse parts of the digital world today. Indeed, as Watson readily concedes, the internet may well confirm the Adornian proclamation that the culture industry grants us the freedom to choose what is perpetually the same through the data economy: culture is seemingly more monolithic than ever online, and the choke-hold that giant corporations like Facebook, Google and Twitter have on the web is not the only way in which this pronouncement manifests itself. Clickbait culture, which promotes Top 10 lists and supposedly trust-worthy headlines like 'You'll never believe...' or 'This ... will blow your mind!', is based on equating value with popularity rather than anything else. Similarly, search engines are inherently value-laden, asking us, 'Did you mean ... ?' when we try to search for something out of the ordinary, and promoting web-pages based on a profile of the user, the page-rank and a whole host of other elements unbeknownst to the user through opaque algorithms, rather than the relevant search criteria alone. What agency can the left utilise today in opposing such a hulking infrastructure, then?

In reducing those of the left's most fantastical desires to purely quantitative measurements, so that all desires can be easily satisfied, Watson argues that the behemoths of the data economy have provided us with the (ir)rationality needed: a passionate negation of the existing order that is constituted by an irrational act of consumption. In opposition to further fetishisms of online production ‒ that everyone can have their 15 minutes of fame, for instance ‒ online content production by the left contains the potential to stoke the contingencies for activities in the physical world that attempt to recover our desire and purifies it for the establishment of a communitarian politics. Indeed, Watson's work, given that it was borne through online content production on the left, is a testament to the realisation of such a possibility. Therefore, 'What the online left should be doing in the wake of covid is encouraging far-out creative output that challenges the tendency of the data economy to push us toward quantitative goals both online and in real life.' (100).

Watson, while not affiliated with any third-level institution, presents a work that deserves to be read by both academics and leftists alike, a work that offers quick catching fuel to the fire that is the leftist imagination in 2021 - a much needed remedy for our present political climate, both online and offline. He is a digital heir to the Frankfurt School, the New Left and Fisher, and his next work should be eagerly awaited as we work to diagnose the ever-stranger times we find ourselves in.

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'The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism and What to Do About it' by Mike Watson reviewed by Jack Dignam

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In the introduction to The Memeing of Mark Fisher, Watson writes that the book is 'laid out here in six...

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Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin (both *1981) are acclaimed for a collaborative practice that fuses non-linear films with immersive installations. Rhizome-like narratives and an imploding dramaturgical logic characterize their film and video work. Protagonists embody fluid gender roles and forms of fragmented subjectivity in a buoyant clash of reality TV- and social-media identity tropes. The American duo is currently based in Athens, Ohio. They conceive of their installations as "sculptural theaters" in which viewers themselves become actors.

Welt aus den Fugen
Group Exhibition
Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
May 21-August 14, 2022

Climate change, pandemics and countless conflicts are leading to a fundamental disorientation that characterizes our times: The world seems to have fallen apart. Traditional explanations are no longer adequate to deal with the complexity of the present, which oscillates between digital communication and radical individualism, past, present and an uncertain future. Disoriented between innovation and tradition, Western society is in permanent crisis mode.

Link

Exhibitions at Sprüth Magers

Ryan Trecartin is widely known for his influential videos, sculptures, and installations. His highly inventive and prescient work has been crucial to understanding the mutability of language and the totalizing effects of technology and social media on subject formation in the twenty-first century. The exhibition Re'Search Wait'S comes from the ambitious multi-movie project, Any Ever. Trecartin uses poetic, formal, and structural elaborations of new forms of technology, language narrative, identity, and humanity, to portray an extra-dimensional world that channels the existential dramas of our own. Any Ever's core material is the perpetual flux of relationships among characters patterned to form constellations of meaning across the videos.

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Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens
Theodora Allen, Slater Bradley, Lucy Dodd, Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin, Andy Hope 1930, Oliver Laric, Pew Die Pie, Jon Rafman, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sara VanDerBeek, Stan VanDerBeek, Lesley Vance, Andro Wekua
curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen / GOODROOM
January 29-April 2, 2016
Berlin

Bringing together the practice of thirteen international artists, the exhibition Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens appeals to the intuitive mind and creativity beyond referential thinking. Departing from the artists' production, it navigates through narratives in the realm of surrealist animation, abstraction and subjects of new materialism embracing the logic of the internet.

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Ryan Trecartin (*1981, Webster, TX) and Lizzie Fitch (*1981, Bloomington, IN) live in Athens, OH. Selected solo exhibitions include Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin: Whether Line, Fondazione Prada, Milan (2019), Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2018), Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin: Site Visit, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin: Priority Innfield, Zabludowicz Collection, London (both 2014), Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin, Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2011-12), and Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever, which in various iterations traveled to MoMA PS1, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Istanbul Modern; Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Power Plant, Toronto (2009-10).

Public Collections
Ryan Trecartin

Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo

Sammlung Goetz, Munich

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami

Museum of Modern Art, New York

New Art Trust, San Francisco

François Pinault Collection, Venice

Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, RI

Rubell Family Collection, Miami

Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Zabludowicz Collection, London

Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin

Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo

Sammlung Goetz, Munich

Musée d' Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Museum of Modern Art, New York

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

François Pinault Collection, Venice

Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, RI

Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

Rubell Family Collection, Miami

Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf

Zabludowicz Collection, London

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Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin - Sprüth Magers

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Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin (both *1981) are acclaimed for a collaborative practice that fuses non-linear films with immersive installations. Rhizome-like narratives and an imploding dramaturgical logic characterize their film and video work. Protagonists embody fluid gender roles and forms of fragmented subjectivity in a buoyant clash of reality TV- and social-media identity tropes.

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Tetsuo: The Iron Man Original Trailer (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989)

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964 Pinocchio || full, English subtitles

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So it was to be a re-run of 1992, after all. It seems that even elections are subject to retromania, now. Except, this time, it is 1992 without Jungle. It's Ed Sheeran and Rudimental rather than Rufige Kru. Always ignore the polls, wrote Jeremy Gilbert late on election night. "You get a better sense of [...]

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So it was to be a re-run of 1992, after all. It seems that even elections are subject to retromania, now. Except, this time, it is 1992 without Jungle. It's Ed Sheeran and Rudimental rather than Rufige Kru. Always ignore the polls, wrote Jeremy Gilbert late on election night.

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Programmed by the Machine That Kills Bad People, this screening of Carol Morley's *The Alcohol Years* (2000) and Miranda Pennell's You Made Me Love You (2006) foregrounds and unsettles the camera's gaze.

Carol Morley's documentary The Alcohol Years is a deeply personal journey through the filmmaker's past in 1980s Manchester, a period she scarcely remembers. The film is constructed from interviews with friends and acquaintances who knew Morley during this time, each sharing their perspectives on her then-destructive lifestyle. In a vivid portrayal of the city, the film weaves memories and viewpoints, offering a complex and moving picture of Morley's quest to rediscover her lost self.

Miranda Pennell's short film You Made Me Love You is an experimental exploration of gaze and presence, featuring twenty-one dancers interacting with the camera, blurring the line between observer and observed an intriguing commentary on the nature of performance and the desire for recognition in the modern world.

A specially commissioned essay by Sophie Robinson accompanies this screening.

Programme:
You Made Me Love You (2006), dir. Miranda Pennell, colour, sound, 4 min.
The Alcohol Years (2000), dir. Carol Morley, colour, sound, 50 min.

All films are ad-free and 18+ unless otherwise stated, and start with a 10 min. curated selection of trailers.

Red Members gain unlimited access to all exhibitions, films, talks, performances and Cinema 3.
Join today for £20/month.

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ICA | The Machine That Kills Bad People: The Alcohol Years + You Made Me Love You

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A double-bill screening programmed by the Machine That Kills Bad People featuring The Alcohol Years and You Made Me Love You.