Gregory Crewdson in Winterthur

On my walls, you'll see three art posters and a world map. Two of the posters are prints of paintings by Edward Hopper, the American artist (Gas and New York Office). In rough strokes, he paints images of people in buildings, often alone, often sad. I like his style and the way he deals with ordinary lives of ordinary people.

Gregory Crewdson is to photography what Edward Hopper is to painting. When I saw a poster advertising an exhibition of his pictures at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, I knew I had to pay a visit.

Crewdson's motifs are American suburbia and rural landscapes. Most of his pictures are taken around Pittsfield, MA, where he drives around for days to find just the right spot. The right spot, of course, is a nondescript corner of the town, with small commercial buildings or residential homes built in a style that I associate with New England.

There, he stages little dramas. Disaffected people are pictured in quiet loneliness. A story is being told. Something strange and surprising just happened.

The images are beautiful and dreamlike, and undercut with something fearful.

Crewdson's pictures aren't snapshots: They are elaborately prepared. A video at the exhibition showed a 60-man crew preparing a photo shoot at a North Street intersection in Pittsfield. A nondescript car with a woman in the passenger seat stands in the middle of an intersection. The driver side door is wide open, but the driver is nowhere to be seen. For this shot, the street was blocked off for almost an entire day; it was sprayed with water and fog machines clouded up the background. Many photos were taken, but only one was produced: The final, perfect image is often put together in Photoshop, from perfect pieces of all shots, to create a Spielbergian moment.

While there are many similarities to Hopper – lonely people, attention to light – there are also differences. Hopper doesn't care for mysteries and his pictures aren't fine-tuned to perfection, but are painted in rough strokes. Hopper also didn't need Photoshop. Clement Greenberg once said: "Hopper is simply a bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would probably not be such a great artist."

The exhibit continues through August 28, 2006 at the Fotomuseum Winterthur. Gregory Crewdson, 43, is a photographer and art professor at Yale University.

Christo's Gates in Zurich

Credit Suisse, one of the two large Swiss banks, is currently undergoing a re-branding campaign. To create the fuzzy warm feeling that's needed get people to entrust them with their fortunes, they built an gigantic temporary exhibition hall in a prime location of Zurich to show an exhibition of last year's The Gates installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in Manhattan.



I have always been skeptical about Christo's projects, since they seem like such a waste: Thousands of gates and tons of fabric were manufactured for their New York project. Apparently, much of this gets recycled, but only after lots of using up lots of energy.



Still, this exhibition shows that Christo's projects do leave a lasting impression, not by their physical permanence but by becoming a part of the public memory. The images of floating fabric in Central Park are indeed beautiful and the orange color of the gates stands in brilliant contrast to the surrounding winter city landscape, especially in some helicopter shots.



My personal conclusion is that Christo's art is actually "lobbying art": Sure, designing the wrappings and gates is highly demanding artistic work. However, the greatest achievement is getting approval for their projects. For the Pont-Neuf project, it took them 10 years until they got approval from the mayor of Paris (then Jacques Chirac). In New York, they started lobbying the Parks Commission and touring the community boards in 1979 to get permissions.

To have the energy and dedication to convince the 'conservative opposition' of the benefits of their projects requires a blindingly strong vision.

The exhibition also contained a screening of a video about the artists' Pont-Neuf project. The most memorable part of it is where two middle-aged Parisians are loudly arguing about whether or not the bridge's wrapping constitutes art. One of the men closes the scene by saying: "You and me, we don't know each other. We have never met. If the bridge hadn't been wrapped, we wouldn't ever have talked to each other."