A List of Reasons to See Lists*

If you're in New York sometime in the next few months, Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists' Enumerations from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art is worth the visit:

1) because it's small in size, the perfect fit for the back pocket of a summer's afternoon.

2) because it's large in spirit, embracing the visual and the literary in a free-ranging conversation.

3) because it's made room for good writing:

a. H.L. Mencken:
"11. I believe in and advocate monogamy. Adutery is hitting below the belt. If I ever married the very fact that the woman was my wife would be sufficient to convince me that she was superior to all other women. My vanity is excessive. Wherever I sit is the head of the table. This fact makes me careless of ordinary politeness. I don't like to be made much of. Such things please only persons who are doubtful about their position. I was sure of mine, such as it is, at the age of 12."

b. Robert Morris, proposing alternate names for earth art:
"Dirt art. Dirty art. Bogs. Geometric quagmires. Square swamps. Minimal muck. Suspicious spongy unsound sod. Gray grass. Slow quicksand. (No rock gardens). (No plants). (No flowers). Plains, heaths, holes, and quick rises. Straight and narrow paths, or no paths at all. (No lanes, bowers, gazebos, nests, hiding places). No hairy grabbing vines. To tormented trees: not even any plane trees. No bushes, golfers or ducks. Nature at her fatuous flat chested best."

4) because it looks good too.

a. Benson Bond Moore: Study of Ducks

b.Oscar Bluemner: List of Works of Art, May 18, 1932

c. Adolf Konrad: Packing List, December 16, 1963 (at the top of this post)

5) because it's light-hearted.

a, Charles Green Shaw's Bohemian Dinner may be dated in the details (not so many Russian cigarettes these days), but stands as a clever snapshot of an evening's excess that ends with "The appearance of the check / The dropped jaw / The emptied pockets / The last penny / The bolt for the door / The hat / The street / The lack of car fare / The long walk up town / The limping home / The Bed."

b.Gordon Newton's voucher to Sam Wagstaff, itemizing rent ($50), materials ($70), Food ($15), and Bad Habits ($5).

6) because it doesn't shy away from tragedy either.

a. Germain Seligman's 1947 List of Objects To Transfer to the USA makes a formal claim to the post-occupation French government to reclaim Nazi-looted family possessions.

b. Carol Thompson's List of Bob Thompson's Paintings and Drawings Destroyed by Fire, 1977 is self-explanatory. Forty-five works were lost in the fire.

c. Henry Ossawa Tanner's undated Notes on His Childhood recount the bitter experience of racism in America.

7) because it's full of the ordinary stuff of life.

a. Elaine de Kooning's notes for a 1954 tax return, claiming a loss of $1,987.74.
b. Leo Castelli's to-do list, from 1968, with a reminder to get travelers' checks right there next to "Phone Nauman."
c. Margaret de Patta's list of orders for jewelry, with each completed item carefully crossed off.

8) because it's an object lesson in how the profound stalks the quotidian.

Franz Kline's grocery list is a masterpiece of the ordinary: "Corn flakes / Milk / Oranges / Bannanas / Cream / Cokes / Bread / Eggs / Bacon / Toilet paper / V8 Juice."

When he died, the list was found in his coat pocket.

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* Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists' Enumerations from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art is on exhibit at the Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY) until October 2, 2011.

The Death Mask in the Darkroom 4: The Death Mask Redux

My previous Death Mask post offered a sampling of contemporary photographs focused on the subject of civilian death*. But the urge to look death in the face isn't limited to photographers, and the death mask itself has had something of a minor renaissance in recent years. 

In the UK, the sculptor Nick Reynolds is perpetuating the tradition. Reynolds has one of those resumes so improbable you wouldn’t dare invent it: his father masterminded the Great Train Robbery back in 1963, he himself served as a Royal Navy diver in the Falklands War, and he currently tours with Alabama 3, the British band that gave us the Sopranos theme song. Oh, yes, and he casts death masks on the side.

 Reynolds generated a fair amount of press for creating the death mask of John Joe Amador, a 30-year-old convicted murderer executed in Huntsville, Texas, in August 2007.

Where Reynolds is all sincerity, Tracey Emin approaches the death mask with characteristic cheek. Emin mines her own life relentlessly for her work: her signature installation, My Bed, featured her own unmade bed, littered with used condoms and bloodied underwear. Cast from her own face, her Death Mask is more of the same — albeit less of a gross-out — and not, of course, a true death mask. In an act of stupendous chutzpah, this world-class narcissist elects herself – in advance of the event – for post-mortem commemoration, offering up this time-warped version of herself as though a specimen in some far-future museum.

With her bad-girl attitude and relentless navel-gazing, Emin is easy to dismiss. She may be famous, but like her fellow YBA Damien Hirst, she inspires a lot of eye-rolling. That said, the way that Death Mask plays the line between life and death seems at the heart of the much of the work under consideration here.

In particular, two photographers -- Torben Eskerod and Alida Fish -- have also used the mask to explore that territory; in both cases, though, the masks are cast from life, not death. Of the two, Eskerod has taken the more strictly photographic approach: his Register series consists of color photographs of plaster life masks, made in the 1940s by a Danish dentist. Eskerod, whose work focuses almost exclusively on the human face, is interested in the emotions revealed. And that expressive quality makes them seem like very lively death masks indeed.

To make her Altered Identities images, Fish created a digital composite that merged a flesh-and-blood portrait with an image of the subject's life mask. In the hybrid image, she's reworked the material to create subtle transitions between skin and plaster, portrait and cast (life and death?).

Fish compares the process of making the casts to that of taking a photograph, with both becoming "an archaeological artifact, devoid of context." And, yet, as with Eskerod's, you can sense the life beneath the mask. It's not just that the flesh is itself is firm and rounded, full of energy and air, but these faces, half-mask, half-flesh, are alive with personality.

For a glimpse of the difference between the living and the dead take a look at this image, one from a collaboration between the German photographer Walters Schels and the journalist Beate Lakotta. To make this series, Life Before Death, the couple asked terminally ill people to allow them to accompany them during their last weeks, to take their portrait in life and then, again, after they had died. For a video about the project, click here.

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* In thinking about this subject, I've deliberately stayed away from battlefield images. War photographers, by definition, trade in death, But what I'm interested in here is the report from the domestic front -- and the choice to look when we don't have to.

Next in the series: Body Art