16 Sep Book Review: Alec Soth, Advice for Young Artists

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/insights/alec-soth-advice-for-young-artists/

Tim Smith-Laing considers Alec Soth’s latest photographic offering.

Alec Soth, Advice for Young Artists (2024). Embossed linen hardcover with tip-in, 72 pages. 26.6 x 27.3 cm. Published by MACK. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

‘Patience is all’, wrote Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet (1929). If someone is to be an artist, he stated, they must learn to stand like a tree through the seasons of life unafraid that summer might not, this time, follow spring. ‘In this,’ he wrote, ‘there is no measure of time, a year, ten years, are nothing.’

Alec Soth, from Advice for Young Artists (2024). Published by MACK. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

As Alec Soth notes in the interview attached to his latest publication, Advice to Young Artists (2024), it is a fine thing to say, unless you happen to be impatient—which most young artists are. In fact, despite speaking as if from the Olympian heights of aesthetic maturity, Rilke wrote those words when he was just 27.

At 54, Soth is twice as old, and twice as sceptical about his own claims to authority. Titled with quizzical irony, Soth’s Advice to Young Artists is—with the exception of a few gnomic images of post-it notes—wordless. Even the interview, with its careful disclaimers of authority, is casually slipped into the book on a loose leaf: an open invitation to lose the words altogether and concentrate on the pictures.

Alec Soth, from Advice for Young Artists (2024). Published by MACK. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

Fans of Soth will recognise in these images the increasingly low-key and elusive turn of his work since 2016. Having made his reputation by seeking out the left-behind and eccentric denizens of deep America in Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004) and Niagara (2008), Soth’s recent work has turned its back on the occasionally predatory and manipulative dynamic of the roving portraitist. Across his two most recent publications—I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating (2019) and A Pound of Pictures (2022) his gaze has grown incrementally indirect, the intense scrutiny of his subjects shifting into something gentler though no less attentive, his compositional eye ever subtler and more strange.

Alec Soth, from Advice for Young Artists (2024). Published by MACK. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

The images gathered in Advice to Young Artists add to the ongoing shift with a kind of return to roots. Inspired by Walker Evans’s late, snapshotty polaroids of students met on trips to universities, Soth began inviting himself to undergraduate art programmes, offering advice and tutorials in trade for—as he puts it—’hanging around and pretending I was an art student’.

The result is a selection of images that captures the kind of teaching meant to transform learners into doers. Lessons in composition recomposed, they add to Soth’s changing style an ironic doubleness. Demonstrative forms appear within the kind of studio mess that is edited out by the selective eye of the learner but left carefully unedited by the photographer.

Alec Soth, from Advice for Young Artists (2024). Published by MACK. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

In the first photo, the white cast of an écorché, propped up on a Camille Pissarro catalogue, turns its back to the butt-end of a plug-in radiator; elsewhere a mirror, carefully placed against a velvet curtain amongst glass decanters on a Turkish rug, is too dusty to reflect any of them. In another image, Soth himself appears, as if lost, behind a promiscuous tangle of still-life props scattered on disordered plinths. Lit with a heavy flash reminiscent of Evans’s Polaroid SX-70, the shots hover on the verge of over-exposure: a kind of rebuff to the textured perfection Soth normally favours in his large-format work.

Alec Soth, from Advice for Young Artists (2024). Published by MACK. Courtesy the artist and MACK.

As in A Pound of Pictures, Soth is one of the rare photographers who can pull off this kind of meta-reflection without drowning in irony. The portraits of students scattered through the classroom scenes show that this, too, is attention carefully and kindly paid. Oblique as the photos in Advice to Young Artists often feel, they nevertheless add up to something strange and satisfying. The cliché that hovers is of the teacher learning more than the students; Soth, as few others could, manages to give it new meaning. —[O]

Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists is available to purchase from MACK.

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/insights/alec-soth-advice-for-young-artists/