The Streetlight Sublime

Metropolis 39°53’N 75°15’W, otherwise known as Philadelphia (where I live).

To make this – and the others in her Lux series – Christina Seely first consulted a NASA map that records nighttime light production worldwide and then set out to photograph cities in the three most light-polluted regions.

  

According to Seely’s website, the top three – the United States, Western Europe and Japan – are collectively responsible for something like 45% of the world’s CO2 emissions and, joined now by China, consume the lion’s share of the world’s energy resources.

Seely is one of those artists emerging now whose work engages what I would call the civic realm. They don’t draw the same attention as the Gagosian crowd, and they can seem quixotic (consider Mary Mattingly’s Waterpod Project). But, bless them, they’re out there, working on the borders between art and activism. In Seely’s case, that means serving as a principal in the Civil Twilight Design Collective, which has proposed, among other things, lunar resonant streetlights as a way of mitigating light pollution, reducing energy consumption, and re-introducing the diurnal cycle to urban-dwellers.

I come from a generation where describing art as politically engaged might suggest 1970s-style agit-prop, but this new crew seems a tad less self-righteous, more willing to negotiate, more grown-up. For one thing, they seem to understand how complicit we all are in the mess we’ve made for ourselves, and they’re less certain that they’ve figured out all the solutions. As social action, their ideas can often look mighty modest – to wit, all on their own, lunar resonant streetlights aren’t going to solve the energy crisis – but, then again, that modesty may just be pragmatism in disguise.

A Little Sublimity

That maturity (wisdom?) plays out in the Lux series. Seely makes no bones about how ambivalent these images are: as she writes, they reveal “the immense beauty produced by man-made light.” 

To draw our attention to the ubiquity of the phenomenon, Seely has buried the identity of the cities she’s documenting. Each image has the same basic title – Metropolis – followed by its geographic coordinates. To figure out exactly where we are, we have to do some digging.

As Seely explains it, this naming device is meant to focus us less on the individual site than on “the interchangeability of urbanization in these areas and their unilateral impact on the global environment.” 

True enough, but it contributes as well to the sense we have, as we first gaze at the pictures themselves, that we’re witnessing a near-infinite view, a little bit of the Sublime.

I think of Turner without the melodrama [Turner’s Keelmen Heaving Coals by Moonlight, 1835 at left; Seely’s Metropolis 50°48’N 4°21’E (Cologne) at right], or Rothko without the detachment [Rothko’s Blue, Green and Brown, 1951, left; Seely’s Metropolis 41°54’N 87°39’W (Chicago), right].

Of course, “a little Sublime” is a contradiction in terms. The Sublime, by definition, is uncontainable, beyond measurement – huge.

So while the individual photographs, gorgeous even in reproduction, invite us into a kind of Romantic swoon, the series experienced as a whole snaps us out of it. As we dig around Seely’s website, searching out our hometown, we return to the bounded world, the anti-Sublime where all those cities are drowning in the artificial light of the environment we’ve made for ourselves.

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Seely’s work is currently on display in the Earth Now, an exhibition curated by Kate Ware at the Museum of New Mexico, and featured in the accompanying exhibition catalogue.

  

The Death Mask in the Darkroom 3: Some Photographs

Third in a five-part series. Read the previous post here.

It’s a truism of contemporary life, particularly contemporary American life, that we avoid the idea of death like the plague. In this, not entirely spurious interpretation of how we live now, Americans hide away any and all reminders of their mortality. We sent our elderly off to die in old folks’ homes, but when that nomenclature started sounding too frank, we renamed them (nursing homes) and renamed them again (retirement communities) and again (continuing care centers). We removed cemeteries, no longer called burial grounds, from the center of town to its outskirts. We talk about funeral “homes” and call the deceased “our loved ones,” “the departed,” anything but “the dead.”

Like many a critique of contemporary society, it sounds good. Problem is, it only takes in half the picture. Consider the following pictures, offered in chronological order, of the dead and soon-to-be.

 

Josef Koudelka’s Jarabina, 1963.

 

Emmet Gowin’s Rennie Booher, Danville, Virginia, 1972.

 
Nicholas Nixon's Tom Moran, Boston, 1988, from the People with AIDS series.

 

Hannah Wilke's Intra-Venus Series, #7, August 18, 1992 (right panel of diptych).

  

Film still from Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych, 1992

The selection, admittedly selective, pushes back a little against the notion that we shun the very idea of death: in fact, the pictures become more and more immediate with each passing decade. In the 1960s, Josef Koudelka’s gathering of gypsies around the coffin is such an anachronism — the long skirts and babushkas, the humble cottage with its hand-plastered walls — that it couldn’t possibly implicate us, could it? His subjects look as though they’ve wandered in from centuries before, and his handling of the image underscores this sense of a sanctified time past: the family, feet firmly planted in this world, cluster together in the dark, fallen world while the young woman is bathed in beatific light.

A decade later, Emmet Gowin updates this sensibility only a little. As with Koudelka, the contemplation of the dead is frank: we’re staring really at the body in the open casket. The same reverence is in the room, though, and a similar sense of the past. But here, you feel as though that way of life is slipping away, that the passing of Rennie Booher, “dead now and committed to mystery,” as Gowin puts it, represents the end of something more than an individual woman’s life.

A decade later, the AIDS crisis made death a familiar again, something experienced by the young as well as their grandparents. In Nicholas Nixon’s portrait of Tom Moran, the light — like Koudelka’s and Gowin’s — may still caress, but the details of the scene place this deathbed unambiguously in the present tense. Moran is a young man, and we’re struck by the weight of that fact. But it is those telling details — the hospital-issue nightgown, the neatly furnished room in the background — that ground this photograph so firmly in the commonplace.

With her self-portrait, taken in the 1990s as she was dying of lymphoma, Hannah Wilke strips away the pieties. Gone is the reverential tone: the lighting here is hospital-flat and the setting, as far as we can tell, impersonal. Wilke confronts us straight on, but her expression, though hard to read, doesn't seem confrontational. At times, I think she is pleading and, at others, bored. And when I look again, I think, no, she's just waiting.

Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych lays out like a Medieval altarpiece: the left panel  (featuring video of childbirth) and the right (his dying mother) flank footage of a body floating in water. This piece, like virtually all of Viola's work, may be aiming at the transcendent but, as with Wilke's self-portrait, you're firmly in the contemporary world and the deathbed vigil takes place in an institutional hospital setting.

Fifteen years on, Viola is still contemplating the borderline between life and death. His Ocean Without a Shore video installation, which debuted in the Church of San Gallo at the 2007 Venice Biennale, imagines the dead coming back to the world, if only for a short moment. The piece, constituted of three plasma screens mounted on the church's altars, shows black-and-white footage of individual people emerging from the darkness. As they move toward us, they pass through a transparent wall of water and, as they step through this invisible threshold, the image springs to full-color life. (To get a glimpse of the piece and to hear what Viola has to say about it, click here.)

Viola may be one of the most prominent, and eloquent, contemporary artists taking on the question of life and death. But he's not alone.

Next in this series: The Death Mask Redux

The Death Mask in the Darkroom 2: The Window & the Mirror

Second in a five-part series. Read the previous post here.


“The life of the Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures and maintains itself in it.” – George Wilhelm Frederich Hegel

Nothing if not an enactment of Hegel’s dictum to look the negative in the face and live with it, 97537 (Frances Rodick, in death), no. 2 is a deathbed portrait of the artist’s mother. I hesitate for just a moment over the word portrait, for what Rodick has done here is to conduct a digital autopsy, slicing up his mother’s face and then reconstructing it in one of his signature grids. And the surgery hasn’t been altogether successful: she’s been stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster, all component parts that don’t quite add up.

But, yet, she’s not so long dead, is she? She still has hair, she still has flesh and teeth. Yes, her eyes are closed but she could have simply been sleeping when her son snapped the shutter. The fact is, as is so often the case with this artist, we’re not exactly sure what we’re looking at.

Rodick’s image occupies an in-between space – hovering somewhere between death (as in this Aztec death mask) and life (as in Richard Avedon’s portrait of his dying, but still living, father).

And maybe that’s the thing about the death mask. It’s also a portrait.

Who Am I?
It’s a long walk from Edward Curtis to Frank Rodick. A product of the 19th-century, Curtis was intent on creating a documentary record — an admittedly flawed record but a record nonetheless — where Rodick is all about subjectivity.

Still, thinking about Rodick's formal choices, I can’t get those Curtis portraits out of my mind.

I’m no expert, but the history of portraiture in the Western world seems to me to take a radical turn with the arrival of the camera. Most traditional portraiture I can recall steps back and looks at the subject from a slight, respectful angle – as if staring straight into the king’s eyes might blind us. I can think of only a handful of self-portraits (most notably Albrecht Durer) and portraits (Holbein’s of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves) that represent the human subject with the clinical, confrontational gaze that Curtis adopted.

And even Holbein put some distance between the viewer and the royal personages.

Who am I? In traditional society, where people were more or less born into themselves, the answer to that question was relatively simple. I am the child of a feudal peon, therefore I am a feudal peon. Self-invention was rare in the pre-modern world, and the portraiture it produced was consequently less searching, more situational than the portrait of the photographic era. As industrialized capitalism began its work of shattering traditional social relations, individuals defined themselves less as social beings — people living inside a nexus of other people — and more as individuals, full stop.

The cocoon of stable social relations disintegrated and we were released into the wide world to figure out, all by ourselves, who the hell we were. From our confusion, from our (vain?) efforts to probe the individual psyche and understand what the self is, something new emerged. You see it in Courbet’s early riff on himself, from 1842 to 1855, that yielded some 20 paintings and drawings in which he hams it up, trying on different personae as readily as Cindy Sherman did more than a hundred years later. (Above, The Desperate Man, 1844-45.)

You see it in Alfred Stieglitz’s extended portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe, about which the subject herself said, “When I look over the photographs…, I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives.”

And you see it in August Sander’s Man of the Twentieth Century, his monumental photographic project that set out to index the German population, and in Edward Curtis’s equally monumental ethnography of the North American Indians.

But Sander and Curtis both took the broad view: unlike Courbet, Stieglitz and Sherman, they were more interested in the society than in the individual. That said, all these artists bore in on their subjects, more often than not with a clinician’s eye. Even the besotted Stieglitz seems intent on conducting a psychological (and erotic) autopsy of his beloved.

Remember You Must Die
The photographer probes. The lens stares down the subject, and the camera exposes the inner person. That’s the idea anyway.

The subject staring directly into the camera lens – directly into the viewer’s eyes – is one of the standard devices of photographic portraiture. In virtually all the images I’ve posted here you can harbor the illusion that you are exchanging glances with another.

Look harder, though, and you see that these portraits leave the question of identity wide open. Stieglitz, Sander, Curtis – none of them offer any definitive solution to the mystery of the self. And, indeed, as with Paul Strand’s Young Boy, Gondeville, Charentes, France or Frederick Sommer’s Livia, the more directly confrontational the shot, the more sphinx-like the subject.

So these straight-on portraits don’t so much confront us with news of the individual as they reflect. Ostensibly probing the identity of the person viewed, they can also be read as a bridge to the person viewing. They serve both as a window and as a mirror. When pushed to their logical extreme, these images can be uncomfortably intimate, drawing us into the realm of another soul, implicating us in another life.

In 97537, Rodick is engaged in a sleight of hand: following the formal strictures of portraiture, he sneaks in an autopsy shot. The image is a straight-on portrait, a representation – albeit highly manipulated – of an individual being. The long, narrow face and high forehead, the down-turned mouth combine to form a distinctive image descriptive of a particular person.

But 97537 is also a death mask, a representation of a corpse, a person now become a thing. The leaching away of color and the collapsed flesh – the vacancy – confirm our sense that the face we contemplate is truly beyond our reach.

You wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that Rodick has simply tricked you, setting you up for a person and delivering a body. Following the logic of the portrait, you peer into this image, looking for clues to her identity.

But what looks back? A person – the gender is virtually impossible to read – who has died: a corpse.

And what do we see in the reflection?

Next in the series: Some Photographs