John Miller presents a recent iteration of his long-standing photographic project, The Middle of the Day, together with a related video work, Walking in the City, at Abattoir. It is the artist’s first exhibition in Cleveland. The artist will be present at the opening reception and a text by Michelle Grabner will accompany the exhibition.
All the photographs were made between the hours of noon and 2 pm. They are urban cityscapes, made on the streets of New York, LA, New Brunswick, NJ, Berlin, Glarus, Switzerland, Zurich, Llodz, Poland, and Cala Mondrago, Mallorca, Spain, over the past few years. The Middle of the Day project began in 1994. The first series (1994-2009), toggles between New York and Berlin where the artist lives in the summer. It has occupied Miller over periods since then, and has appeared in various iterations in exhibitions and artist books.
Miller came of age on the heels of Conceptual art, and is associated with the Pictures Generation; as such the photographic image remains important to his work across all media as an artist and critic. Societal observation and the role of the artist within it is a familiar subject for Miller. In his essay The Ruin of Exchange—on Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Nostalgia of the Infinite (1912-1913), Miller considers, among several topics, aspects of the empty urban landscape. “It is always too late in De Chirico’s piazzas…That is the mystery and melancholy of the street.” “The public square dreams itself. Pedestrians are sleepwalkers.” Those words could easily apply to the figures seemingly trapped in solitary musings while striding through New York’s hectic daytime landscape. Verfremdung, or the alienation effect, figures in Miller’s photographs and video works, while always leaving space for the artist’s sly humor.
John Miller was born in 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio, and lives and works in New York and Berlin. Along with Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, Miller was part of an influential group of artists who studied at CalArts in the 1970s. In 2016, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented the first major American survey of his work. Miller has also had many one-person exhibitions in Europe, most recently at the Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland. Others include the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunsthalle Zürich; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva; Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France; and Kunstverein Hamburg. He has participated in major group exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; CAPC Musée D’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; and MoMA PS1, New York. His work was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial and the 2010 Gwangju Biennale. His writing and criticism have appeared in Artforum, e-flux, and Texte Zur Kunst and has been compiled in the publications The Price Club: Selected Writings, 1977-1996 (JRP Editions and the Consortium, 2000) and The Ruin of Exchange (Geneva and Dijon: JRP-Ringier and les Presses du Reel, 2012).
Miller penned a text on Dan Graham for the exhibition, Cleveland Rocks, held at the Transformer Station/Cleveland Museum of Art in 2016.