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Leo Rubinfien at Robert Mann - New York - Brief Article

Art in America, March, 2002 by Edward Leffingwell

At first glance, there is little to recommend Leo Rubinfien's photograph of a sleek glass wall that fills the frame, both sections of a double glass door angled out onto an ordinary day. The photographer excepted, no one seems to care about the mountains of no obvious distinction in the background, or the swath of anonymous urban growth running to a strip of shoreline and a bay. This is something seen in passing, the unintended by-product of the day--no postcard for a tourist, no iconic view. But this scenic nullity is A View from the Sugar Loaf (2000), showing what from most other conceivable points of view is one of the most memorable sites in the world. And it is among Rubinfien's choices for an exhibition of chromogenic dye coupler prints that speaks of the alienation and introspection of travel, from the point of view of one who knows about these things.

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One category within his genre of forgotten time en route is "windows." Businessmen gesture from the windows of a corner suite in In the Tokyo City Hall (1992), the metropolis stretching out beyond, reflected in the glass that makes the men seem transparent. A vaulted ceiling rises above a glass-walled balcony ringed with spectators in At the Tokyo Stock Exchange (1996), recalling Andreas Gursky's 1990 view of the same location (different subject, altogether different point of view). A traveler smokes a cigarette and looks away from the window of a moving train. A girl in Reeboks, khakis and an oxford snlrt, seated next to an airplane window, dozes over a magazine article headlined "How to Get Time on Your Side." A tousle-haired young man sits by a window at a table littered with a coffee cup, two glasses, two cans of Coke and a pack of cigarettes, reading the English language China Daily, passing time in Peking (Rubinfien consistently uses the city's former name). An older man stands by a bulkhead, addressing an unseen fellow passenger. Shot through a window, with no one else in sight, Over Lake Michigan, Leaving Chicago (1994) conveys the sense of time suspended in passage and the solitary romance of the traveler who endures.

The images followed one another cheek by jowl with mild variations on a chilling and familiar theme, the places between places. A detail of a billboard shot in Prague showed a variation of a reclining traveler resting by a window, in an outfit that recalled the 1940s, the image an assembly of benday dots in faded green and yellow. The exhibition concluded with an examination of a placard advertisement in a Peking store, a close-in frame of a consumer holding a cellular phone. He presses the "connect" button, as though engaging a video conferencing capacity. A woman's face appears on the monitor before him, seemingly summoned by his call. This most recent photograph in Rubinfien's exhibition is emblematic of his subjects' suppressed desire to reach out and touch, implicit in his representations of their isolation.

Leo Rubinfien at Robert Mann - New York - Brief Article

Art in America, March, 2002 by Edward Leffingwell

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