As efficient and magical as digital photography has become, nothing can compare to the raw, visceral quality of a film print. Maybe it’s the surprise factor, the photographer’s inability to really know what they’ve got until it’s too late, but film assumes a significance and power digital SLRs still have trouble competing with.
     Malick Sidibe’s new exhibit, “Other Africa”, is a small collection of black and white prints influenced by the people and street scene of Bamako in the 1960s and 70s. The images capture the infectious spirit, rhythm, and lightheartedness of post-colonial West Africa at a time when immense shifts of the paradigm and culture were taking place. Whether it’s a staged portrait or a spontaneous dance move, there’s a refreshingly honest, intimate quality to the gelatin prints.
     Sidibe purchased his first camera in 1956 when he was about 20 years old. From night clubs to boxing matches to riverside picnics, he soon became the only photographer documenting the kinetic street culture and pulse of the neighborhood. Sidibe’s insider status permitted him access to an era bubbling over with impulsiveness and life. His studio became a popular hangout and he would regularly set up portraits with the youth that hung out there, reinventing his subjects using outrageous costumes and props. The results are spur-of-the-moment glimpses of West Africa in the crux of curiosity and optimism. The results are a revelation of Sidibe’s deep passion for people and his country.

Rapper, actor, author, television host, reserve policeman, Twitter megastar, and, yes, basketball legend, Shaquille O’Neal is perhaps the consumate populist Rennaissance man. This month he extends his reach with a new role as curator and muse for the much-buzzed about art show Size DOES Matter at Chelsea’s FLAG Art Foundation. The show, which sets out to display work where size is a central component, boasts an impressive catalogue of artists — Jeff Koons, Anselm Kieffer, Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close, and forty others — and offers an excellent opportunity to experience some fantastic pieces. Whether or not these pieces deal with size is a separate matter.
     Shaq personally selected or commissioned the artwork from a list put together by FLAG, and his choices range from pinhead-size sculptures of the First Family to wall-size paintings of body parts, rap stars, and dead Chinese dictators. Highlights include Kieffer’s portrait of a young Mao, a masterful example of the artist’s thick impasto; Koons’ “Beach House”, a frenetically erotic pastiche of swimsuits, deck chairs, and breasts; and Richard Dupont’s lifesize sculptures of himself that play with twisting perspective. A nine-foot-tall photograph of Madonna and her audience, taken from afar, demonstrates each person’s insignificance, while nearby, a collossal sculpture of a table and chairs inspires feelings of childlike joy and awe.

In this digital age dominated by free media-sharing and instant mobile uploads, photographer Wolfgang Tillmans restores hope in our fading ability to discern beautiful images. German-born Tillmans, known for his rapturous club photos of British i-D, brings to Andrea Rosen Gallery through March 13 a show with the full intensity and point-and-shoot bravura of those seminal nineties spreads. Pictures in the Place of Others, featuring seemingly extemporaneous snapshots of contemporary life, captures tender expressions, natural phenomena, and shimmering skylines. Witness Heptathlon, wherein Tillmans catches an athlete in momentary abandonment; in Ostgut/December Edit (at the entryway of the installation) he assembles chaos with signature panache. When so many photographs bear the markings of deliberation, Tillmans’ appear purely spontaneous. His work thus retains a captivating, timeless quality (perhaps accounting for the unlikely correlations drawn between his irreverent hipster and the Caravaggio nude). An exercise in unkept formalism, Pictures in the Place of Others finds balance in its unapologetic use of color and premeditated, if imperceptible, exhibition layout.
“In a way, to reconcile or address the randomness of the world today is the biggest task, to let it all in, but still hold course…. I’m interested in the mind being stretched by trying to pull this world of pictures together.”

Our image of modern architecture is black and white, quite literally. It’s an image of black ribbon windows in white stucco walls, of slender steel columns behind clear panes of glass. James Welling’s contemporary photographs of architect Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House, on display now unitl March 6 at Regen Projects, richly confuse this image.
     Welling has captured the house, a landmark of American modernism, with a digital camera and handheld lenses in a series of layered, intensely colored photographs. The prints in the show offer a view of the building that’s tactile, textured, and surprisingly tender.
     Most canonical photographs of the house look on it orthogonally, so that its glass skin seems to disappear and its entire structure to dissolve into its manicured surroundings. Welling shoots slightly eccentric perspectives that take in more of the glass and the landscape, and complicates these views by layering them with fields of strong color. This treatment brings out the stubborn physicality of the building. Immense red and green sunspots mottle a glass wall. An orange-colored spill of light reveals the rough surface of an interior carpet.

I first witnessed urban interventionism at an intersection in La Serena, Chile in 2009. I watched transfixed as a young performer expertly juggled five plastic pins in the middle of the road. He completed his routine and gave a quick bow before darting quickly from one car window to the next, collecting money from drivers’ outstretched hands, jumping back onto the sidewalk seconds before the light turned green again. Though this is a loose example of public art, during the course of my travels through Chile and Argentina, I witnessed beat boxers, mimes, dance troupes and cheerleaders all with the same technique, using the intersection as their stage.
     Urban Interventions: Personal Projects in Public Places, due out this March, could very well turn the new art movement into a household word. A creative conglomerate of graffiti, activism, and found street art, the book pays tribute to the most exciting wave of artwork to hit public spaces since Banksy took Bristol by storm in the late ’90s. Urban interventions use ordinary outdoor components to transform everyday landscapes into interactive artwork for the masses. As a result, alleyways become galleries, bus stops morph into studios, and street signs act as canvases.

In a world subsumed by top tens and to dos, Polish-born photographer Magda Biernat takes aim at our itemized approach to travel. Now running at Clic Gallery through March 2 is her Continental Bounce, culled from a year of transcontinental exploration. Documenting remote spaces through a local lens, Biernat captures Kenya, Australia, and everything in between. Oceanic vistas aside, though, Continental Bounce is no ordinary tourist brochure. Subtly elusive, the exhibit disorients even the most surefooted of jetsetters. Take Tipi Resort in Swakopmund, Namibia, for example, which features an African chalet seemingly plucked from the Sonoran desert. Avoiding major sites in favor of the interstices that define the journey, Continental Bounce is a testament to shifting borders and cultural ambiguity. We sat down with the artist to discover more.

What draws you to interiors and architecture?

Early on, I noticed that I have a good eye for structures and geometrical shapes and combinations of colors. That’s why I decided to go into architecture commercially…. Even though I love good portraits of people, first of all I am taking pictures of spaces.

The new building at Brunnenstraße 9 in Berlin’s Mitte district was recently hailed by Artforum Magazine as “a retroactive manifesto of ’90s-era hypercontextualism” and, more simply, “gorgeous”. What their praise didn’t recognize, however, is that this mixed-use space is not just something to look at but a building to listen to; passers-by can plug their headphones into the inconspicuous silver jack embedded in the building’s concrete and literally hear the otherworldly orchestrations of the structure itself.
     For the permanent sound installation, titled BUG, American artist Mark Bain embedded seismological sensors at various points of the building. Using a force-feedback system, he then converts the micro-vibrations the sensors pick up into audible sound that can be heard by anyone, at any time of day or night — provided they bring their own headphones. External elements such as wind or rain, as well as the mechanical sounds of the elevator, heating system, and underground metro — in addition to footsteps and muffled voices — are all picked upand mixed into an impromptu, experimental composition. Upon hearing the sound, some listeners dance; others have claimed that it gives them goosebumps.

There’s something naughty about Living Architectures, a series of four short films by Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine on view now at Storefront for Art and Architecture, through February 27. Sitting in the dimly lit gallery on worn theater seats and watching them unfurl in continuous loops on the wall feels a bit like visiting a peep show. While each film documents an iconic building by a well-known contemporary architect (Rem Koolhaas’ House in Bordeaux, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church, and Herzog and de Meuron’s Pomerol Winery), it also skillfully exposes it.
     The movies open with images celebrating the formal beauty of these structures before honing in on less pretty physical realities. Footage shows water leaking from the ceiling, floor, and walls of the Bordeaux house. Bird’s-eye interior views of the Bilbao museum reveal poorly resolved geometries and a redundant steel frame. In highlighting these flaws Beka and Lemoine challenge the cultural authority of high architecture, a challenge which seems justified. The buildings they’ve chosen to examine have been conceived ideally, without a deep consideration for practicalities.
     The filmmakers also take aim at the discrepancy between the cool, lucid images of these buildings and the prosaic life that unfolds inside of them. A housekeeper struggles carrying a vacuum cleaner up the perilous winding staircase of the Bordeaux house.  

Marisa Olson is one of PLANET’s longtime art writers, having written major features on Matthew Barney, Olafur Eliason, Terence Koh, and many others. She’s also a pretty amazing artist herself. She’s got a performance piece running this weekend at P.S. 122 in Manhattan.

Economically, 2009 could be viewed a debacle. Fortunately gallery owner and photography enthusiast James Danziger does not measure achievement in terms of the Dow. Validating 2009 with The Year in Pictures, now on view at Danziger Projects through February 27, Danziger displays sublime photography from his personal blog. The exhibition, aimed to provide exposure to contemporary artists, allocates three walls to “photographers who would otherwise not be known to New York gallery going audiences” and one for legends in the medium. Resulting from a selection process boiling down to two criteria — quality and originality — the show is a highly satisfying group of images spanning decades, nationalities, and aesthetics.
     Featuring work by fifteen photographers — Jowhara AlSaud, Chan Hyo Bae, Thomas Bangsted, Mandy Corrado, Stephen Gill, Joseph Holmes, Alejandra Laviada, Greg Miller, David Schoerner, Patrick Smith, Tommy Ton, Scout Tufankjian, Oliver Warden, Katherine Wolkoff and Tsukasa Yokozawa — representing nine countries — Saudi Arabia, Korea, Denmark, Britain, Mexico, Japan, France, Canada, and the US — The Year in Pictures is a compendium of rich artistic perspectives. United solely by the element of color — a mode of photography almost taken for granted now — works were chosen at Danziger’s discretion to encompass a myriad of subjects and techniques.