Image World

Once Upon a Time

2012-01-29T08:17:00.000-08:00

The camera, set low to the floor, pans around the well-mannered room. The rug is Persian, the sofa white. The requisite art posters (The Water Lilies, an Orientalist painting) hang on the white walls, and well-tended houseplants sit on the floor.

A cat saunters in and is soon joined by another. With another sweep of the camera – it revolves to provide a continuous 360-degree feed – more cats (kittens!) appear, then a dog and then a cockatoo.

But then the rabbit hops into view. Another revolution reveals a macaw now perching on a side table. Off camera, a goat bleats. With each subsequent pass, another barnyard species appears: ducks waddle past, chickens strut, a couple of piglets root around, a llama, a cow, a pony.

And they all make themselves at home: the birds groom one another, one of the pigs sniffs at the camera lens, the ducks check out the next room, the cockatoo and a kitten get into a dust-up, a goat knocks down one of the houseplants and starts munching, and eventually just about everyone takes a drink out of the goldfish bowl.

For 25 minutes, the camera patiently records the unfolding wreckage.

Like Catherine Chalmers' video Safari, Corinna Schnitt’s Once Upon a Time puts its animal subjects in a human context. But where Chalmers plunges her cockroach hero into a Homeric epic – we follow the little guy through an Odyssean journey – Schnitt imposes no narrative. Rather, her camera remains neutral throughout, impassively watching as the animals do their animal thing.

Setting all these domesticated animals loose in a quintessentially domestic setting – the middle-class living room – Schnitt plays with ideas of domesticity itself, with civilization and instinct in a delightful face-off. And all the wreckage aside, animal instinct ends up looking pretty good.

Schnitt’s menagerie may make an unholy mess but, except for that kitten-cockatoo squabble, they all manage to get along in a scene that unfolds like a 21st-century Peaceable Kingdom.

Click here to see a clip from Once Upon a Time.

A List of Reasons to See Lists*

2011-08-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-01T14:04:00.000-07:00

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

The Streetlight Sublime

2011-07-24T13:13:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-16T09:06:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-09T16:04:00.000-07:00

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

Killing Beavers

2011-06-24T06:55:00.000-07:00

At breakfast the other day, I heard a radio report that the gray wolf has been removed from the endangered species list. Part of a budget deal, the move was cheered by some, decried by others, and taken as an opportunity to manage the animals by Fish and Game departments.

"Wolves are classified as a big-game animal in Idaho," a Fish and Game official said, "and we fully intend to manage them like we do our other big-game animals that we've done successfully, bears and lions, for example." Already the department has sent out helicopters to cull the pack: wolves have been killing off too many elk.

Beyond the oxymoronic implications in the phrase wildlife management, the story left me thinking once again about our fractured relationship with animals and how it reflects the even deeper fissure that has so preoccupied artists and thinkers of the modern era: our fractured relationship with our selves.

The Intervention Paradox
The photograph at the top of this post comes from Joann Brennan's long-term project Managing Eden, in which she documents scientists' efforts to maintain the balance between human and animal needs. Titled Contraceptive Testing, the picture shows scientists with the Colorado Division of Wildlife inserting a catheter in the animal's neck so they can monitor contraceptive drug levels in its bloodstream. This work, along with that of the other photographers in this post, are included in at Earth Now, an exhibition curated by Kate Ware at the Museum of New Mexico, and featured in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. (I'll be posting more on what looks like a great show.)

You can imagine Letterman getting his hands on this one: maybe all they really need in Colorado are some of those Idaho wolves. Like a lot of wisecracks, that insight gets to the central conundrum. We must intervene because we have intervened: if we hadn't intervened then, we wouldn't have to intervene now. But can we stop intervening? And how?

Brennan scrutinizes our tangled relationship with wildlife. She describes her work as "looking for moments of contact between man and animal. I feel these moments tell us something about the complexity of our relationship to nature. Through making this work, I have come to realize that our perception of nature and our relationship to wildness is precarious and full of paradox. It can no longer thrive unassisted and more than ever before, nature depends on us."

As in Contraceptive Testing, Brennan photographs the work of research scientists focused on habitat and population management. She's also documented alternative capture systems developed by the National Wildlife Research Center to develop humane, non-lethal tools to manage predators that attack livestock. She's looked at habitat manipulations: a bat house for bats displaced from University of Florida stadiums pens that enable researchers to study birds, electric fencing to keep animals from raiding crops.

The picture above depicts a (failed) effort to protect beehives from black bears: the Colorado Division of Wildlife provided the fencing, but installation fell to the hapless owner. In an irony reminiscent of the Idaho wolf-Colorado elk puzzle, another photographer in this exhibition, Brad Temkin, offered up the picture at left. That image -- Beehives, Chicago -- comes from his Rooftops series documenting the green roofs that have been planted on the top of the city's civic buildings where black bears are few, even on the ground.

What To Do?

The people portrayed in Daniel Handal's collective portrait provide one answer to the dilemma: sustainable, small-scale farming. These photographs, from a larger series Between Forest and Field, document the latest back-to-the land movement as it's playing out in the Hudson River Valley. The young farmers he's portraying, says Handal, “are looking for ways to build a saner, healthier life for themselves and their families while providing healthy, locally grown food for their communities.”

In effect, their full-on rejection of factory farming is an attempt to sidestep the paradox: rather than intervention in the form of industrial agriculture, they opt for collaboration with the natural world. As admirable as the idealism and enterprise of this generation of small farmers may be -- and as seductive their slowed-down, bucolic lives may seem -- their model relies on customers who can afford to pay a premium for their produce.

Don't get me wrong: I'm one of those urban-dwelling, farmers-market customers. But it seems to me that, with a world population approaching seven billion -- more than half of them living in cities -- the locavore movement needs to figure out how to scale up.

We may really need those Chicago rooftops.

A Cautionary Tale

I'll close with the story of Phil Underdown and his family, dedicated environmentalists who moved to the Adironacks to be close to nature. Shortly after their arrival, a colony of beavers established themselves in the creek that runs along one side of Underdown's property.

Every bit as intent on settlement as their human neighbors, the beavers dammed a creek, felled trees, and wreaked havoc with the septic system – and a reluctant Underdown hired a trapper. His series, Trapper’s Lament, documents the aftermath: what was left behind after the beavers were removed.

As Underdown writes, “I recycle, I drive a Prius, I give money to environmental organizations … and I kill beavers.”

One way or another, don't we all?

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P.S. Google "Earth Now" and, if you're like me, your first hit will be from the U.S. Geological Survey. The site displays images taken by the Landsat satellites as they orbit the Earth.

The Death Mask in the Darkroom 1

2011-06-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

On June 15, 2010, Frances Rodick died in a Montreal nursing home at the age of 91. Suffering from Alzheimer's since the 1990s, she had, in one sense, already passed away from the world she shared with the rest of us into some other, completely private place.

When she died, her son, Frank, did something that was once commonplace but now has the power to shock. He made a photograph of her.

A Modern Taboo

Another friend once confessed to me that he had taken a post-mortem photograph of his grandfather, and the undertone of shame in the telling was unmistakable.

Even Rodick, whose art plunges wholeheartedly into the realms of nightmare, seemed just a little uneasy about what became of the image he'd snapped. [Pictured above: 97537 (Frances Rodick, in death), no. 1].

As he puts it, “Making this image … was like doing something that got out of hand and became a crime of sorts. Before I knew it, I'd gone further and in directions other than I expected. It made me feel like there was a third person involved somehow, but that third person was me, like looking in a mirror and not, for a time anyway, recognizing one’s own reflection.”

At this juncture, such photographs are evidence of a taboo broken. But it was not always so.

Early in its history, the camera was used quite freely to record the remains of the deceased. Many of these pictures depicted children, whose passing would have been particularly hard-felt. They were, often, the only visual record of the departed, and they must have seemed a godsend to bereaved families.

Those pictures might also be understood as the modern world’s answer to the ancient practice of making death masks. The impulse to preserve a likeness of the dead has resulted in far-flung and persistent rituals, with cultures from the Egyptian to the Aztec and every era from Classical Rome to 19th-century Europe leaving behind death masks.

This history – the death masks, the post-mortem pictures – can be read as a story of domestication. All these images, from the Egyptians on, were intended to save the dead. The urge is to hold on to the pharaoh, the king, the poet, the beloved — as though we could prolong the life by making a cast of the flesh.

We want very much just to keep on living and living, and yet we know full well that we won't.

A Brief History of the Death Mask

Today, the most famous death masks are those that were used in Egyptian burial rites starting in the Middle Kingdom (2025-1700 BC). Made of plastered linen, they were placed over the mummified face to protect the dead from evil as he made his way to the afterworld.

The ancient Egyptians believed that, in addition to your body, you were in possession of a soul, a life-force, and a face. When you died, these elements were loosed from the body. But to join the “blessed dead” in the afterlife, they needed a vessel: the body itself. Hence, the exceptional attention to preserving the physical remains – the mummification – and all that provisioning, the foodstuffs, the household items and, for the very wealthy, the statues, called shabti, that would act as servants in the afterworld. Even among the poor, the surviving family was expected to drop food off every now and again for the departed.

The most famous of these funerary masks is that of Tutankhamun, whose tomb was discovered in 1922 by a British archaeologist Howard Carter. In the process of excavation, Carter and his team wrought a fair amount of damage, cutting off the limbs and head and more or less forcibly removing the famous gold mask, which had become fused to the face over the centuries.

In 2005 forensic scientists set out to reconstruct the pharoah’s face. Led by Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, three independent teams of physical anthropologists and forensic artists drew on 1,700 cross-sectional CAT scan images of Tutankhamun’s skull to create a likeness of the boy king. Two of the teams – one French, the other Egyptian – knew whose skull they were looking at but an American team, serving as the control, worked blind. All three busts came out looking remarkably alike. More than three thousand years after his death, the boy king got a new death mask.

But the Egyptians weren't the only ones to engage in the practice. In ancient Rome, families made a wax impression of the family patriarch when he died; they used it in the funeral procession but then placed it on the household altar, preserving it for as long as the wax held up.

A similar custom prevailed in Medieval Europe. At the death of the king, the court painter immediately made a death mask that served as the model for a full-scale likeness. Great care was taken in making these objects. Given real hair, clothed in the royal robe and crowned, the figure lay in state for a week and then accompanied the coffin (carrying the actual corpse) in the funeral procession. The wax death masks are long gone, as are many of the effigies, but go to Westminster Abbey today and you can see a wooden figure of Edward III, based on his death mask and carried at his funeral procession (above).

In France, these royal effigies didn’t survive the Revolution, but the practice, adapted to a more democratic age, survived. In 1761, Philippe Curtius, a doctor of Bern, took into his household his young niece, whose her father had died in the Seven Years War. Curtius was particularly skilled at crafting anatomical wax models and taught his niece, a precocious six-year old named Anna Marie Grosholtz, the craft.

In 1776, they moved to Paris to open a salon where he put on display waxwork models of the great men of the day. Anna herself made many of these figures – among them, Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin – and proved so adept at the craft that she was summoned to Versailles to teach Louis XVI’s sister.

According to her later account, those court connections landed her in prison during the Revolution and, there, her captors compelled her to create death masks from the decapitated heads of the Royals and, later, Danton, Robespierre, Marat, and others.

Whatever its truth, the tale served her well when she emigrated to England, where there was little love lost either for the French or its Revolution. In 1794, Curtius died, and the following year, his niece married Francois Tussaud and brought the collection of wax figures to Britain. She remained there for the rest of her life, first touring her exhibition up and down the isles and later settling it down in a hall in Baker Street. The show included the original collection of life masks of Enlightenment celebrities, but the real draw was the Chamber of Horrors — the death masks of the Revolution’s perpetrators and victims.

Death and the Photograph

The democratic aspirations of the French Revolution notwithstanding, Mme. Tussaud's waxworks were reserved for kings, philosophers, scientists – the "great men." No such efforts would ever have been expended for the masses. For the great unwashed, we would need the camera.

The camera recast a practice that had focused exclusively on the elite into something for anyone with the means to hire a photographer. Now anyone’s image – not just the king’s – could be preserved for the ages.

Like the wax figures of the French kings, post-mortem photographers made every effort to preserve the illusion of life. The subject, often a young child, was typically depicted in an attitude of sleep – as though the deceased might awaken at any moment.

By the time these pictures were made, the American conception of death had evolved from the stern Puritan notion so clearly exemplified by the death’s head and winged skulls that crown 17th-century headstones throughout New England. In the Puritan world view, we are all sinners deserving of eternal damnation. God in his mercy does elect a handful for salvation, but we have no way of effecting our fate. Since even the most devout may be cast into the pit of Hell, death offers no comfort, no guaranteed ticket to Paradise.

By the 19th century, the imagery of death – lambs and angels and beautiful dreamers – reflected a gentler view of death. The religious revival that swept the country at turn of the century – the Second Great Awakening – replaced strict Calvinist notions like predestination with the far more optimistic belief in redemption through inner faith. Believers could take comfort in the idea that, come the Resurrection, the righteous departed would awaken and be reunited with family in the heaven.

The imagery of death reflected this new evangelical spirit. In funerary art, the grim angel of death is replaced by weeping willows, winged cherubs, and lambs. In post-mortem photographs, death is similarly romanticized: the deceased, especially children and women, are depicted as beautiful dreamers.

Hung in the parlor, sent to friends and relatives, or worn in lockets or pocket mirrors, these pictures offered comfort to the bereaved. In the 19th century, when photography hadn’t yet saturated the culture, sitting for your portrait might have easily been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Hence, the market for the post-mortem photograph: if you hadn’t been photographed during your lifetime, the image made after death would be the only possible visual record of your existence. (For a comprehensive study of the subject, see if you can get your hands on Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America by Dr. Stanley B. Burns or Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, by Jay Ruby.)

Back to the Beginning

As I was researching this piece, I stumbled on Undying Faces: A Collection of Death Masks, a charming book published in 1927. It’s my source for the bit about Medieval kings, but it got me thinking. The author, Ernst Benkard, envisions the history of the death mask as a linear story, a progression from a world ruled by religion and magic to the one bequeathed to us by the “healing skepticism” of the 18th century.

In this view, all those early examples – Tutankahmun, Edward III – were made merely in service to superstitious funeral rites, whereas the kind made by Tussaud enacted the Enlightenment ideal of individualism. But how is making a death mask of the 18th-century German poet Gotthold Ephraim Lessing any less “superstitious” an act than making a death mask of the 17th-century king Henri IV?

If you think about what has driven this history, you can indeed discern a number of proximate motives: a religious responsibility to usher the dead into the next life, the societal need to mark the transition of power, a psychological desire to comfort the living. Step back, though, and you might suspect that all these folks are chasing after the same, unanswerable question: what is death anyway?

None of those historical motives come into play in Rodick’s work. The product of a doubt-filled era, 95537 defies any of the small comforts offered by the Egyptians or the Victorians. More savage than domesticated, more Puritan death’s head than beautiful sleeper, it promises no comfy afterlife, provides no solace to the bereaved. Rather, it proposes death as the end. Full stop.

So how does 95537 fit in? Although Rodick offers none of the comforting visions of continuity proposed by all those who've crafted death masks before him, he is – like them – transfixed by the mystery.

Next in this series: The Window & The Mirror

Hollywood & the Coming Apocalypse

2011-06-18T14:12:00.000-07:00

The Judgment Day has been rescheduled, but that's no reason for us to stop thinking about End Times.

Here's a video link to the Slovenian critical theorist Slavoj Zizek on Alfonso Cuaron's film adaptation of P.D. James's dystopian vision The Children of Men. To listen, click here.

And here's Zizek on disaster films, from an interview on Haaretz.com:

"Apparently it's so hard for us to imagine a new global utopian project based on work and cooperation, that the only way we can entertain the thought is to pay a mental price of extreme catastrophe. What fascinates me about disaster films is how circumstances of vast catastrophe suddenly bring about social cooperation. Even racial tensions vanish. It's important at the end of Independence Day that everyone pulls together -- Jews, Arabs, Blacks. Disaster films might be the only optimistic social genre that remains today, and that's a sad reflection of our desperate state. The only way to imagine a utopia of social cooperation is to conjure a situation of absolute catastrophe. Disaster films might be all that's left of the utopian genre."

See you October 21.

Photography in the Aftermath: Part 4 (Rwanda again)

2011-05-01T14:53:00.000-07:00

As we all know, the objective and mission of the photojournalist is to show us the reality of the world. And in order to capture that reality, they go to dangerous and tragic places at the expense of their lives. I see them as the conscience of our humanity; they represent for me what is left of our humanity. -- Alfredo Jaar

By no stretch of the imagination would anyone call Alfredo Jaar's Rwanda Project photojournalism. Yet, to my mind, this body of work -- an epic, six-year, multi-media project -- provides one of the most intriguing models for still photography in our hyper-connected, streaming-video world.

Fueled by Jaar's obsession with the Rwandan genocide and, more specifically, the outside world's failure to respond, this project is an extended meditation on the role of the photographic image in the public forum. The unfolding of this project over the course of six years traces Jaar's struggles to reanimate the documentary photograph.

Jaar traveled to Rwanda in August 1994, just after the killings had ended, and took something like 3,000 pictures -- of the wrecked cities, in the refugee camps, at massacre sites.

But the pictures defeated him.

So for his early works, he drew on sources other than photography. His first series, which he would title "Signs of Life," came about when he stumbled on a wrecked post office. There, he bought up the last of its picture postcards produced, in happier days, by the Rwandan Office of Tourism and depicting the standard tourist sites -- wild animals, mountain views, scenic lakes. At the same time, he began collecting the names of survivors of the genocide and incorporated them into messages that he inscribed on the cards. CARITAS NAMAZURU IS STILL ALIVE! RUBANDA TRESIFOLI IS STILL ALIVE! Then, he mailed the postcards off to friends and colleagues around the world.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with Conceptual Art recognizes the reference to On Kawara's postcard series from 1969-70. "I am still alive!" his message read. But where Kawara's work is laconic, Jaar's is gut-wrenching. Gone is the dry (solipsistic?) wit, to be replaced by a passionate cri de coeur.

Jaar's second effort to engage with Rwanda was made for a public art project, originally in Sweden. Asked to create works for 40 lightboxes installed throughout the city of Malmo, he stripped his message down to its barest element: stark black on white text that repeated the words "Rwanda, Rwanda, Rwanda" -- on the theory that, since the news reports and photographs had so utterly failed to move us, maybe yelling would work.

Not until "Real Pictures," the third in the series, did Jaar begin to deal with the photographs themselves, but only by entombing them. He selected 60 images of the thousands he had taken, printed them, and then shut them away in black linen boxes on which he silkscreened written descriptions of the image within.

On first encounter, you might easily have thought you had wandered into an exhibition of neo-Minimalism. Like "Signs of Life," this installation spoke to recent art history as well as to current events. But unlike Donald Judd or Carl Andre, Jaar was very much interested in expressiveness. The gallery space where this work appeared was darkened, much like a Medieval chapel, and walking through the installation was a somber experience. Jaar describes this piece as “a cemetery of images.”

After the fourth installment, a text-based projection called "Slide + Sound" that provides a timeline of the genocide, Jaar began to unveil some of his photographs. But his strategy remained decidedly anti-spectacular.

"Let There Be Light" consisted of 10 lightboxes that projected names of massacre sites -- Cyanhinda, Kigali, Butare, Mibirizi, and so on -- and an 11th box that displayed a sequence of four photographs. Each image depicts two young boys, their backs to the camera. In the first, one holds his arm around his friend. Before them is a circle of people witnessing something we cannot see. The sequence remains with the two boys as they watch, tighten their embrace, and finally turn away from the sight before them.

"The Silence of Nduwayezu" is likewise circumspect. Jaar met Nduwayezu in the Rubavu Refugee Camp. A five-year-old who had seen his parents macheted to death, Nduwayezu did not speak, could not speak, for weeks after the murders. For this piece, Jaar presented a mountain of 35mm slides, all of the image he had taken of Nduwayezu's eyes, and invited us to look into the eyes of this child who had seen what he had seen.

In an Art 21 profile, Jaar describes his struggle with the Rwanda Project, "There must be a way to talk about suffering without making the victim suffer again. How do you represent this, respecting the dignity of the people you are focusing on? That’s why the Rwanda project lasted six years. I ended up doing twenty-one pieces in those six years. Each one was an exercise of representation. And how can I say this? They all failed. I kept looking for the perfect way to communicate that experience to my audience. Of course, there is no way: you cannot represent reality. The work is always the creation of a new reality. So how do you build this new reality that, one way or the other, translates the lived experience?"

Perhaps Jaar is right. Perhaps all these pieces did fail. Perhaps that's all they could ever do because, at the end of the day, photographs are no substitute for experience. To make a photograph, or any other representation of the world out there, is to abstract (literally, to take away). So how can we expect anything more from the camera than a post-mortem of yesterday's news?

Still, look into the eyes of Nduwayezu and try to forget what you know about what he saw and about what we chose not to see. And tell me that what Jaar has shown you doesn't matter.

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You can see Jaar's Rwanda Project at his website, where you'll also be able to read the excellent essay "A Sea of Griefs Is Not a Proscenium: On the Rwanda Projects of Alfredo Jaar," by David Levi-Strauss. In addition, you might want to read the Brooklyn Rail interview with Jaar, Levi-Strauss, Phong Bui, and Dore Ashton (where I found the quotation that opens this post).

Photography in the Aftermath: Part 3 (Oil)

2011-04-27T18:20:00.000-07:00

No stranger to the post-industrial sublime, Ed Burtynsky might seem like a curious inclusion in an honor roll of photographers looking for a human face in the wreckage.

After all, isn't he the guy who made ship breaking (top) look like something out of the Romantics' playbook? [above left, Robert Hubert, The Arc de Triomphe and the Theater of Orange, 1787.] The scenes Burtynsky depicts are sublime, so monumental as to seem the province of the gods rather than of humanity.

But the sheer scope of the Oil series, which traces the movement of oil as it courses its way through the global economy, means that, if he’s intellectually honest, he can’t let us off the hook. So we get the whole story, starting with the oil fields of Alberta and California,

and proceeding to the oil refineries and supertankers (both here in Texas).

He can't resist Detroit and, like Moore, gives us a glimpse of that city's catastrophic decline.

But he goes beyond the scarred landscapes and post-industrial ruins. Breezeway, Pennsylvania (below) has been a thoroughfare since before the European settlement. Today, at the junction of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Interstate 70, the town is a monument to American automotive consumption, a crossroads of fast food joints, gas stations, motels, and few residents.

Traveling across the planet, he then shows us the cost that those who live at the other end of the economic spectrum pay for our excess. For as sublime as the image that opened this post may be, the larger series from which it is extracted depicts the underbelly of our prosperity.

To sidestep the labor and environmental regulations that industrialized nations impose, shipping companies with junkers to dispose of sell them off to shipyards in developing countries. Workers dismantle the hulks by hand, with little to no protective gear, and the materials they handle include asbestos and PCBs. Burtynsky's images were made in Chittagong, Bangladesh, one of the leading ship-recycling sites in the world, but they might be snapshots from the Inferno.

As Burtynsky says, "These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times."

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Next up: Alfredo Jaar and more from Rwanda. The best for last?

Photography in the Aftermath: Part 2 (Rwanda)

2011-04-24T07:10:00.000-07:00

In our age of instantaneous communication, what is left for the still camera? Is it truly stuck with the unenviable task of clean-up? Does the noble tradition that gave us Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange, Eugene Smith, Danny Lyon and Susan Meiselas now just putter around in the rubble? Is there another way for photography-after-video to engage in the civic discourse?

Thinking about those question in my previous post, I thought first of Jonathan Torgovnik’s Intended Consequences series. Torgovnik is a photojournalist of the old school who’s been a contract photographer for Newsweek since 2005. Visit his website and you’ll see classic breaking-news work, much of it assignment-based (the Haitian earthquake, elections in Guatemala, meth addicts in America).

But with Intended Consequences, he entered into the story long after the news had broken and the media apparatus had moved on to the latest disaster du jour. These pictures, many of them double portraits, depict Rwandan women and their children born of rape during the 100-days-long genocidal fury that scorched their country in 1994.

But rather than the ruins of war, the “wreckage” Torgovnik portrays is literally human. As with much documentary work, the meaning of these pictures is deepened by the accompanying text – the women’s testimonies about what happened to them. The narratives the women tell are, sadly, of a piece: about the killing, about slaughtered family, about repeated rape, gang rape, abduction, sexual brutality, HIV, and, for some, a chilling and thoroughly understandable ambivalence about their own children.

But Torgovnik is interested in far more than recounting a nightmare: “My project is about Rwanda but it’s not about Rwanda,” he says. Many of the militia who killed and raped in Rwanda escaped, setting up for business in neighboring nations. “The same guys who were raping in Rwanda are raping today in Congo,” he explains.

In 1968, Cornell Capa wrote, “The concerned photographer finds much in the present unacceptable which he tries to alter. Our goal is simply to let the world also know why it is unacceptable.”
In 2008, Torgovnik explained, “What I’m trying to do really is to show the consequences and, hopefully, through this project and through seeing how severe these consequences are people will maybe be a little more active and help people who are going through it now. Yes, Rwanda happened 14 years ago but it’s still happening today.”

“It’s beyond my understanding how the world is letting this happen now,” he adds. Like the classic concerned photographers that Capa acknowledged 40 years ago, Torgovnik wants to wake us up to, and take responsibility for, the nightmare of our collective making.

Click here for Part 3.

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Note: Jonathan Torgovnik has also produced a series of videos that incorporate the still images, film footage, and the interviews. You can view them here.

Photography in the Aftermath: Part 1

2011-04-20T15:48:00.000-07:00

Roger Fenton: The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855

Paul Seawright: Afghanistan, 2002

We've been seeing this kind of thing for quite some time now, haven't we? For some decades, a whole slew of documentary photographs have been looking like reincarnations of their 19th-century forebears.

Arnold Genthe: San Francisco after the Earthquake and Fire, 1906

Robert Polidori: 5000 Cartier Avenue, New Orleans, 2005

George Barnard: Ruins in Charleston, South Carolina, 1865-66

Joel Meyerowitz: from Aftermath, 2001

Digging up these time-traveling pairs is a fun game, one I could play for hours, but sooner or later I begin to ask myself, What's going on here?

Documentary photography wasn't always so. Back in the 1970s, when I started studying the medium, the street shooter was still king in the documentary world. My teachers -- this was at ICP, the Mother Church of the Street Aesthetic -- held up Cartier-Bresson and Kertesz, Robert Capa and Garry Winogrand as the exemplars of all that was great about the still camera.

Even Joel Meyerowitz, the doyen of the large-format, started out on the streets. But somehow, the guy who plunged headlong into the crowds to make images like 46th and Broadway, back in 1976, evolved into the man who lugged an 8x10 camera to Ground Zero to make the stately images that comprise the Aftermath series.

It's not exactly news that, sometime in the 1970s, the whole "if it's not good enough, you're not close enough" decisive-moment aesthetic -- street photography, for short -- began to lose its stranglehold on the documentary world. A lot of things contributed to its demise, but the most pertinent for my purposes is the emergence of the video camera as our major news delivery device.

To put it baldly, video beat photojournalism at its own game. Of course, the photographers still showed up -- still do show up -- for the battles and the revolutions. But they're not at the red-hot center of the action anymore because video is just so much better at creating the illusion that you are there, in the action, in the present tense, than any still photograph ever could.

Now that we can turn on our computers and watch a video stream of the tsunami in Japan, the still camera doesn't stand a chance. Or, to be more precise, it doesn't stand a chance at recapturing its you-are-there glory days. What it can do, and do quite movingly, is survey the wreckage.

Everybody's Doing It

Once you start looking, you realize this style of working is ubiquitous, with both hard-core news hounds and Chelsea gallery artists snapping away in the wreckage.

So David H. Wells (above), who started out as a straight-ahead newspaper shooter, and Todd Hido (left), who got his MFA from Cal Arts, are both documenting the foreclosure crisis after the fact of the actual foreclosures.

Or the New York Times photographer Joseph Sywenkyi (left) and Robert Polidori (below) both show us what's left of Pripyat, Ukraine, after the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown.

Of course, what's missing here are the people involved. In some cases, their absence may be a blessing. Do we really want to see people being evicted from their homes? To look at the bloated bodies of Katrina victims?

"Look on these works, ye Mighty, and despair"
Putting these truly legitimate qualms aside, I nonetheless find myself wondering about the implications of this larger trend. At its most aestheticized -- I think here of Andrew Moore's lush images of what's left of Detroit (below) and just about anything by Polidori -- this kind of work can all too easily indulge our Romantic taste for beautiful ruins, for the post-industrial sublime, and in the process ignore the very real human costs and elide over the thorny questions of human agency.

Andrew Moore: Model T Headquarters, Detroit and The Rouge, Detroit

These images, with their exquisitely rendered decay, speak of the vanity of human striving and the ineluctable passage of time. But the Rouge isn't Ozymandias's shattered statue lying in the barren desert. Its demise has everything to do with deals made and policies enacted -- with decisions people made. Nor is Detroit some antique land, but rather a struggling city populated by our fellow citizens.

So my question is: Can this documentary genre -- aftermath photography -- speak to us about the people living in New Orleans and Detroit? Or is photography after video only able to survey the wreckage?

I'll take up that question in my next few posts. Here's Part 2.

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Note: If you're interested in this way of thinking about the images that surround us, take a look at Lawrence Weschler's Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. David Campany's Safety in Numbness is also excellent on this history -- his take on the Street Aesthetic as an historically bounded phenomenon is brilliant -- and I'm beyond indebted to him for kicking off my line of thinking.

Movie Time

2011-03-06T09:30:00.000-08:00

The hot ticket in Chelsea earlier this winter was The Clock, a 24-hour video installation by Christian Marclay. A piece of appropriation art, The Clock unfolds in real time, a 24-hour collage of clips from thousands upon thousands of films and videos in which clocks and watches tick off the time and characters inquire about, announce, or otherwise fret over the time of day.

It’s a rich, multi-layered concoction. The Clock is, first and foremost, a clock – a sleight-of-hand construction that functions perfectly as a timepiece. Part of the delight in watching this epic is that you can set your watch by it: when the on-screen clock says 1:15, it’s synced to your time. I know how long I watched because we arrived just before that 1:15 mark and, when we decided to move on, it was 2:44 on screen.

But The Clock is more than a piece of stage magic. People were lining up, in frigid February weather, to see this high-concept work because it is mesmerizing on just about any level.

If you want your artwork brainy, The Clock is for you: a meditation on the history of film and the way it pervades our lives, it is deconstructs cinematic time. The conventions of filmmaking that have been developed since its introduction in the late 19th century to create the illusion of temporal logic, of a narrative unfolding along coherent lines. Today, most movies skip lightly over time, eliding and compressing narrative time; years pass in seconds and the past flashes back in expository loops.

The Clock gives the lie to that experience and reveals film at its most essential: as the time-defined medium.

The first films to be publicly projected were snippets, none longer than 49 seconds, of “real life.” The very first, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, depicts just that, a stream of workers, mostly women, poring out of the factory gates at the end of the work day. At its public debut in 1895, this proto-documentary film was joined by nine others, equally remarkable for their seemingly unremarkable subject matter: a father feeding a baby, a man jumping onto a blanket, a street scene in Lyon. (You can watch them all here.) Lumieres’ proto-documentaries didn’t bother with narrative. What fascinated them and their audiences was the recording of movement in real time, what a contemporary observer called, “a life surging.” These little vignettes are, in a way, film in its purest manifestation.

Not long after those first films of commonplace scenes appeared, the movie industry was born, and filmmakers created a new vocabulary for story-telling, chopping up and rearranging snippets of filmed time at will. If you think about it, they effectively invented a new experience of time, one that spools out more like time in a dream than time in life.

In The Clock, Marclay asks us to think hard about cinematic time, using the premier device of narrative filmmaking – editing – to explicitly restore time as the central preoccupation of the medium. That he does so without boring the socks off his audience is a mark of his brilliance. Watching The Clock is an exercise in split consciousness: you are certainly aware of the way that film manipulates time, but you also become immersed in the mini-narratives Marclay has embedded in the piece.

Most of what’s been written about the piece focused on the ubiquity of clocks – wristwatches, clock towers, cuckoo clocks, alarm clocks, or simply people declaring the time. If that’s all Marclay had done, The Clock would have been another high-concept, high-tedium piece of conceptual art unlikely to be pulling in SRO audiences.

What’s spellbinding about The Clock – what keeps the gallery-goers glued to the screen for hours on end – are the stories, the fragmented narratives that Marclay has embedded in the grand narrative-that-isn’t. Some appear only once, like a stranger glimpsed just once through a train window and then gone forever. Others weave in and out, starting, then stopping, and then starting up again. So if you want your art poignant, The Clock can deliver that as well.

In the section I saw, there were indeed clocks abounding: wristwatches, wall clocks (a lot of which came straight out of the 1950s), the clock tower in Fitzcarraldo, more wristwatches, a time-fuse bomb sequence in a cellar, plus Orson Welles telling Joseph Cotton, “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switerzland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Sean Penn was selling his Rolex to a skeptical Good Ol’ Boy, Woody Allen strode the streets of New York, Angelina Jolie peered through a pair of binoculars, and Fox Mulder bellied up to the bar. Woven in and out, Peter Parker raced against the clock to make a guaranteed 29-minute pizza delivery: first, Mr. Aziz, the archetypal fed-up boss, handed off the order with a get-it-there-on-time-or-else directive. A few clips later, Peter glanced up at a clock tower. Another few clips – Fox knocking one back – and the hapless Peter arrived, late, with his forlorn stack of pizza boxes.

What’s hard to capture in any description of The Clock is the artfulness of Marclay’s editing. Snatches of (filmed) life follow on one another’s heels, tumbling onto the screen all at once, like snatches of (real) life. 2:15 – and virtually any other time you care to mention – is packed with snippets of stories.

Leaving the gallery (reluctantly), I couldn’t help but think about all the other lives, all the other people making their way through 2:47 in the afternoon, and all their stories, some of great import but most the insignificant stuff of daily life: a stroll down Broadway, a late pizza delivery, an afternoon drink.

Out of Here

2011-02-13T13:03:00.000-08:00

Krzysztof Wodiczko was born in Poland in 1943, during the Warsaw ghetto uprising – a fitting start for an artist whose great subject is the trauma of war and conflict. In 1980, he began projecting large-scale images onto architectural facades and public monuments. Staged in cities around the world, these ephemeral spectacles are acts of political engagement. Ordinary folk – people from the neighborhood – star in the projections; their hands, faces, whole bodies flicker across the grandiose architecture of power: government and corporate buildings.

A 1986 site-specific piece called The Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York, for example, cast images of the homeless onto the public statuary of the then-gentrifying Union Square.

In 1999, Wodickzo focused on the hands of survivors of Hiroshima and projected them along the riverbank below the A-Bomb Dome. Speaking in an Art 21 profile, he said of this work, “The river was where people jumped to their death because they thought that it would help them to cool their burns, but in fact it only contributed to a quicker death. Those are the events or scenes recalled by some of the memorial projection participants and artists who were speaking through the building, as if they were the building, looking at the river and seeing all of this again – the bodies floating, the people jumping in. At the same time, the river continues its flow as if nothing has happened. There is fresh water coming. The river is like a tragic witness – but also a hope – because it’s moving.”

In 2001, video projections of the women who work in the maquiladora factories played on the façade of Tijuana’s Centro Cultural, their testimony of exploitation, sexual abuse, and violence shared with an audience of more than 1500 of their fellow citizens. [For an idea of what this work looked like – and how Wodiczko works – watch this Art 21 excerpt.]

The Veterans Project
This month, Wodiczko brings his singular vision to Galerie Lelong in New York, with …OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project. In the intimate projection of Flame that has been installed in the front gallery, the image of a candle flame flickers with the voices of veterans’ tales of Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a quiet piece, with the flame responding to the men’s mumbled memories, and it stands in introspective contrast to the larger, more dramatic scope of …OUT OF HERE in the back gallery. [To hear Wodiczko on Flame and see what it looked like in a 2009 projection at Governors Island, click here.]

At its start, …OUT OF HERE resembles a modest version of Monet’s Waterlilies. Projected across the tops of three walls of the darkened gallery is a band of windows. They’re grimy, but we can see blue skies and billowing clouds and the sounds of the street make their way inside. We hear kids playing soccer outside and women talking to one another – is it Arabic?. A truck – a Humvee? – stops nearby. From a passing radio, we hear Obama speaking about the war. Suddenly a soccer ball shatters one of the windows. A helicopter approaches, the whirring is almost soothing but its shadow across the sky strikes an ominous tone in what has seemed simply a lazy, summer’s afternoon.

Suddenly, the peace is broken. Another window is shattered, this time by sniper fire; smoke billows up from an IED explosion; and throughout we hear the voices of fear – those of soldiers and civilians alike.

A child is hit. We hear the voice of an American medic, urging his comrades to get the kid, and we hear also the panicked orders to “get out of here.” And so the wounded child is left behind.

What that summary doesn’t capture, though, is how little we really know about what is happening. The scene transpires in what seems both an eternity and a millisecond, and throughout, I struggled to understand. Who was out there? Was one of the soldiers hit as well? What the hell was happening?

The genius of Wodiczko’s staging lies in the way he limits the information we receive. Standing in the darkened gallery, we see only hints of the skirmish outside (the billowing smoke, the shattered windows) and hear only the confusion of combat (the gunfire, the panicked voices). From these fragments of information, we construct a narrative – but it proves as confused and unresolved as the combat itself.

What is the tale that’s told? An ambush shatters the peace of an otherwise ordinary day. A child is killed in the crossfire. A patrol of soldiers retreats. Standing there in the blind space of the gallery, we really don’t know much more.

Except that, in the way of video loops and wars, the sad saga will repeat, over and over and over.

City Gardens

2011-01-26T17:04:00.000-08:00

Two exhibitions currently up at The Print Center in Philadelphia take a look at our relationship to the land: I wrote about Stalking the Wild Asparagus, the upstairs show that focuses on the neo-back-to-nature movement, in an earlier post. Downstairs, Daniel Traub offers his view of the landscapes – by turn, sublime and suburban, tamed and sinister – hidden away in the mean streets of the inner city.

At first glance, this selection from Traub's Lots series might be mistaken for just another exercise in the Dusseldorf school of taxonomic photography. But Traub’s pictures, although as seemingly unassuming as one of the Bechers’ grids of abandoned industrial structures, are tender rather than dispassionate, slyly Romantic rather than sternly empirical.

Traub, who splits his time between China and the States, grew up in Philadelphia. For this series, he returned home to document the city’s mean streets, once-prosperous neighborhoods now marked by emptied-out factories, crumbling row homes, and vacant lots.

As the title suggests, this series focuses on those vacant lots – or, to be precise, vacant single-property lots that are bounded by row homes in varying states of occupancy and repair. Lots is part of Traub’s larger exploration of the neighborhood; a companion series, Inner City, offers up a collection of street corners and streetscapes, backyards and building facades, and portraits of neighborhood residents.

The pictures in Lots are, quite simply, landscapes, with the houses that stand on either side of the small plots serving as frames. You could leave it there – except that, taken together, these images lay out a fairly complete picture of the different ways we have of relating to, and imagining, the land.

In some of these images, the nature that insinuates itself into the city grid is wilderness, pure and simple. In North Nineteenth Street near West Cumberland Street (left) or North Forty Third Street near Wallace Street (at top of this post), for instance, the densely packed lots seem to be reverting, uncontested by an exhausted civilization, to forestland.

In others, though, the scene reads as expansive English landscape, with beckoning vistas that promise escape into a benevolent nature. Or as a Whitmanesque vision of the possibilities offered up by the open, American road: “the world before you the long brown path before you, leading wherever you choose.” (Above: Cecil B. Moore Avenue near North Marston Street.)

Others menace, invoking one of those Grimm tales of children lost in the dark wood populated by adult monsters (the cannibalizing witch of the Grimm tale, the neighborhood molester of a “ripped-from-the-headlines” Law and Order episode). Abandon hope all ye who travel too deep into the wilderness of North Fifteenth and West Boston Street (left).

Still others, fighting back the nightmares, seem intent on replicating compact suburban settings, complete with their cropped-lawn promise of order and safety. Look an image like North Twenty Fourth and North Master Street (above) and you see civilization in action. Whoever is tending to that vacant lot – tending the neighborhood fields – gives me some small hope for the social contract.

Summing up this series, Traub commits himself only to the basics: “Some are strewn with trash and debris, while others are lush and verdant.” But in his statement about Inner City – the related series that takes a longer view of these same neighborhoods – he inches closer to the deeper meaning here: “I am drawn,” he says, “to this raw urban landscape, which hovers between collapse and regeneration, decay and possibility.”

We can hope.

Back to the Garden

2011-01-23T07:22:00.000-08:00

Stalking the Wild Asparagus – one of two exhibitions currently on view at The Print Center in Philadelphia – brought back memories of my one brush with hippie communal life.

It was 1975, and I was visiting friends of the brother of a roommate of my then boyfriend. The setting was suitably idyllic: southern New Hampshire in the summertime. The young women, my age and already mothers, invited us to share their meal, served at one long, outdoor table and involving, as I remember, lots of brown rice. The young men were long-haired, shirtless, and gently solicitous of their children who, again in my memory, were all tanned and golden-haired.

As Edenic as it all was, I understood immediately that I wasn’t cut out for this life. I was a city girl and far too skeptical to believe in the implicit promise of the back-to-nature movement that we could return to a state of grace. Sad to say, recent history bears that judgment out.

But the idea of redemption through nature – “getting back to the garden” – has a long lineage: from the Garden of Eden, to Brook Farm, to The Farm with a whole lot of other stops in between, dreams of paradise on Earth die hard.

Off the Grid

Stalking the Wild Asparagus – impishly titled after the Euell Gibbons' classic 1960 guide to foraging – takes the dream head on, presenting six photographers who document intentional communities around the United States. The tone is distinctly counterculture and, at least for someone who remembers poring over Susan Ainslie’s copy of the Whole Earth Catalogue, tinged with just a little nostalgia.

A case in point, Lucas Foglia’s Re-Wilding images – or at least the ones shown here – could all be outtakes from the 1960s. Foglia undertook this series to see “what a completely self-sufficient way of living might look like.” His search led him to the southeastern United States and a variety of off-the-grid communities with a variety of often-conflicting motivations (the environment, religion, politics).

The Print Center images are drawn exclusively from the back-to-the-nature folks. In one scene, a father and his young daughter soak, buck naked, in a pond. In another, Dad directs a stream of milk directly from goat’s teat to his son’s mouth. And Creek, Kevin’s Land is positively Edenic: here, in a secluded wood, yet another child bathes in the cooling water as his mother watches by.

The photographs from the religious communities, however, paint quite a different picture – one that evokes a different moment in American history. An image like Rita and Cora Aiming, Tennessee, in which a bonnet-clad girl is learning how to shoot a rifle, looks more like the 1860s than the 1960s. (To see them and others from the series, take a look at Foglia’s website.)

When the Snows Come

None of the work on display is strictly autobiographical, but neither is it purely, objectively documentary. (Foglia grew up on a Long Island farm operated along the principles of the back-to-nature movement.) All these artists here have a personal stake in the subject matter – a fact that somehow enriches the imagery.

For Kelly Anderson-Staley – whose Hanson’s Tent at Common Ground Fair, Unity, Maine is the first image you see as you enter the exhibition – that means a childhood spent in one of the eccentric structures she documents. In her Off the Grid series, she depicts houses built by some 30 families living in rural Maine. These people have turned their back on the modern world but, although their reasons vary (environmentalism, evangelism, anarchism), they form what Anderson-Staley describes as “a kind of makeshift community.” (For a glimpse of the people who built these idiosyncratic houses, go to Anderson-Staley’s website.)

For me, the houses called back memories of the treehouse that was the main attraction of Swiss Family Robinson (one of my all-time favorite childhood movies), but for Anderson-Staley, one of them – Staley’s Log Cabin -- is the house she grew up in.

The perspective is welcome – injecting, as it does, some realism into the whole. The Swiss Family Robinson had the good fortune to get shipwrecked on a lush tropical island with a climate that’s a far cry from the interior of Maine. Anderson-Staley does not spare us shots of that landscape in wintertime nor, indeed, of the various privies her one-time neighbors have installed. As she explains in her artist’s statement, “I do not want to over-romanticize this way of living or over-estimate the role it might play in resolving the global environmental crisis….Many of the families in this project describe happiness, even as they recount the daily struggles of survival. It is this mix of attitudes that I am seeking to capture.”

By contrast, Justine Kurland’s contribution to the exhibition is, as she admits, “the fantasy vision of communal life.” Again drawing on the artist’s family experience, her pictures are based on her mother’s life on a Virginia farm not far from a number of back-to-nature communes. Following the allegorizing tradition of pastoralists like Claude Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin, Kurland steps back from the larger scene and places her subjects – nudes – firmly in the landscape.

The resulting scenes are sheer Romanticism: a utopian nowhere populated by naked souls living in perfect harmony: harvesting the crops, scything the hay, lolling around in a peach tree. As lovely as the dream may be, Kurland’s vision leaves out too much for me; I lean more toward Anderson-Staley’s approach. Looking at Kurland’s Arcadians, I worry about the mosquito bites and the sunburn and whatever these poor, unclothed folks will do once the snows come.

Frontier Days

For me, the revelation of this show came with the remaining two bodies of work: Taj Forer’s studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer practices and Adrain Chesser and Timothy White Eagle’s portraits of some of its flesh-and-blood practitioners.

Who knew there were hunter-gatherers alive and well and living in these United States?

Forer’s studies document – and pay homage to – the lost arts of hand-to-mouth survival and the world we lost to industrialization. The Print Center displays three diptychs: one depicting front and back views of what I take to be a hunting blind; a second offering top and bottom views of a hand-woven basket; and the third a fireboard, during and after use.

The work, while drawing on ethnographic tactics, is a record of Forer's own personal lessons in the hunter-gatherer way of life: “I have been spending a lot of time learning how to live off the land in the most simple ways imaginable,” he explains, “and I have been photographing this process … these nearly ‘lost’ ways of being.” (To read an interview with Forer, click here.)

In this series, Forer limits himself to documenting the tools of the trade, with not a person in sight. To get a look at what modern-day hunter-gatherers look like you have to turn to Adrain Chesser and Timothy White Eagle’s The Return. This collective portrait depicts a group of “ordinary” Americans who have opted for a nomadic life – a loosely knit tribe of hunter-gatherers who follow a traditional Native-American way of life, known as “the Hoop.” Their range extends from the Pacific Northwest down into the American Desert (the images were shot in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, California, and Washington).

These latter-day nomads – the two photographs among them – travel with the seasons to harvest native, wild foods; they forage for berries and roots, collect water, hunt and skin small animals, sleep in the open air, and take shelter in wikiups – in short, living out the kind of lives that died, or so I had thought, with the frontier.

----------------------------

Stalking the Wild Asparagus is a beautiful show – at once heart-breaking and cheering. Heart-breaking because, with history in mind, you’ve got to suspect that the idyll is doomed and cheering because, bless them, people keep trying.

But it's only half the story. Downstairs at The Print Center, a selection from Daniel Traub's Lots series finds the nature in the city. Next up: City Gardens

"My Poor Men Who Died So Patiently"

2011-01-16T09:37:00.000-08:00

In a current exhibition at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, video artist Peter Campus dips his curatorial toe into the brave new world of digital media. In the show he’s put together – called alterations – Campus riffs on different ways that artists are using digital media to reflect on its impact on the culture.

Jason Varone, whose dystopic Not with a Whimper, but a Bang (a kind of mural-cum-video-projection) combines a news feed of the End Times variety with assorted animals seemingly dropping from the skies.

Nayda Collazo-Llorens, in her multi-media, two-wall, non-linear piece called Aposiopesis, meditates on the complex systems of thought and communication. Aposiopesis, literally “a full silence,” is a sudden breaking off of a sentence, mid-thought, as though the speaker is unwilling or unable to continue – leaving the conclusion to the listener’s imagination. It’s a great title for an enigmatic piece.

Also enigmatic are Kathleen Graves’s Longing for Certain Things digital prints. With a little internet research, I find the series described as a digital study of “technology and human development” as they played out in the Middle Ages and the present day.

Campus’s own contribution – Inflections: changes in light and colour around Ponquogue Bay – is lovely. His two high-definition multi-screen videos (above) depict modest landscapes from near the artist’s home in upstate New York. The original footage has been processed, though – Campus won’t say how – to yield a final product that suggests a Cezanne landscape unfolding in time.

IMAGINE

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But the piece that spoke most powerfully to me was Beryl Korot’s Florence. In this somber homage to the Victorian reformer and nurse Florence Nightingale, words – selected from Nightingale’s letters – fall slowly down the video screen against a background woven from footage of waterfalls, boiling water, and snowstorms.

To read what Nightingale has to say, you have to sit through the entire unfolding of the video. The text falls slowly, silently – like snow – to form an illegible mound, with words overlapping words. Korot has carefully paced the release of each word and as you read/watch them drift down the screen, you slow your expectations. You read differently, absorbing the words rather than scanning them.

The underlying power of Florence comes from Nightingale’s words, transcribed here (punctuation added):

G-d must have something for me to do for him or he would have let me die some time ago.

WOMEN DREAM dreams which are their life without which they could not live. Those dreams go at last.

Did not G-d speak to you during this retreat?

Did he not ask you anything?

He asked me to surrender my will.

And to whom?

To all that is upon the earth.

But, oh, you GENTLEMEN. We are steeped to our necks in blood. The wounded left lying up to our very door. Occasionally the roof is torn off, the windows blown in, and we are flooded under water for the night.

IMAGINE. All December in the trenches lying down without food, only raw salt pork sprinkled with rum, sugar, and biscuits.

When we came, there was not a sponge nor a rag of linen. Everything is gone to make slings, stump pillows, and shirts.

Oh, my poor men who died so patiently.

As for me, I have no plans.

If I live, I should like to go to some foreign hospital where my name has not been heard, free myself of all responsibility, anxiety, writing, administration, and work as a nurse for a year.

If not for the story I have to tell, I would never enter the world again.

Reading these words, you can readily understand how Korot wanted to see beyond the Ministering Angel cliché that Nightingale’s name all too often evokes. In her cross-centuries collaboration, Korot reshapes Nightingale’s words: selecting and distilling passages from her letters and then incorporating them into this compassionate and sorrowful work of art.

Korot organizes the text in stanzas. Most of the words pile up at the bottom of the screen, but at certain junctures, an all-caps explosion of words punctuates the flow and then disappears. At others, Nightingale’s questions cross the screen on the diagonal. In the last section, the scrolling text appears twice with each word accompanied by its own soft echo. And at the end, that last word – again – fades away altogether and we return to the beginning in an endless loop of grief.

Likewise, Korot uses the audio to signify a shift in tone. In the introspective opening passage, you hear the sound of a distant, rushing waterfall. But to mark the major transition of the piece – the break to Nightingale’s direct address to those anonymous “Gentlemen” – Korot cuts to the sound of falling rain. The rain continues, like the sound of someone weeping, through the description of the conditions under which Nightingale’s patients died and the cri de coeur that concludes the piece.

Near the Egress

2010-11-08T19:03:00.000-08:00

To make Near the Egress, Antonio Martinez went to the circus where he shot 16 rolls of black-and-white film of a single performance, printed each frame as a tintype, and then scanned and sequenced the tintypes to make a stop-motion video.

The result of that old-school-meets-cutting-edge mash-up is hallucinogenic.

Martinez maintains that the video serves as a surrogate childhood memory, now filtered through the mind of an adult.

But you've got to wonder just where that adult mind has been, though. The imperfections of the tintype process - the chemical stains and the light leaks - combine with the staccato rhythm of the stop-action to create a nightmare version of the circus.

No surprise that the clowns are scary. But the elephants? The horses?

Check it out here: Near the Egress Video Link

Stuff Happens

2010-11-04T18:32:00.000-07:00

If the traditional understanding of the artist’s work is the creation of precious objects, what happens to the artist in a commodity society – like the one we’ve got – that’s devoted to nothing so much as the making of objects, precious or otherwise? What’s an artist to do?

Nearly a hundred years ago, Duchamp pointed to a solution to the artist’s dilemma when he unveiled his Readymades. Most of the time, when we talk about his legacy, we speak almost entirely in art-historical terms. We talk about anti-art, Fluxus, and Conceptualism.

All well and good, but maybe we should also talk about the stuff itself – all that stuff we live with, all those mass-produced things, the bottle racks and bicycle wheels, the plastic Jesus and the porcelain Mickey Mouse, the milk cartons and paper cups.

By turning the stuff of everyday life into art, Duchamp revealed to us an entirely new medium for art – the medium of stuff.

Sarah Sze: Milk cartons, water-cooler bottles, soda bottles, paper cups, architect lamps, tools, pills, feathers, teeth, pebbles – all are meticulously laid out on industrial shelving, the gallery floor, a board cantilevered from a stepladder, what looks like a conveyor belt frozen in time. Sze repurposes all the stuff of daily life, the stuff we drown in, into a tipsy construction that veers between obsessive order (carefully laid out grids of objects) and domestic chaos. Home Depot meets Dr. Seuss?

(Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21)

Tchotchke Stacks: Patrick Jackson uses yard sale stuff (bric-a-brac angels, ceramic cats and dogs, Jesus and the Virgin Mary, etc., etc.) to create stacked pieces that resemble 3D chessboards. Jackson’s description of these pieces as “a stand-in for American desires” didn’t persuade me, but these thrift shop constructions are a hoot. (Nicole Klagsbrun, 526 West 26)

Mayumi Terada: The ringer here, Terada doesn’t scavenge. Rather, in a seeming throwback to traditional art-making, she hand-crafts. Like Thomas Demand, she sculpts miniature scenes – sparsely furnished domestic interiors and unpeopled landscapes – and then photographs them. In a sense, though, she’s as much of a scavenger as Jackson, except that she recreates stuff rather than picking it up at the thrift shop. The result? Where Jackson’s work winks at us knowingly, Terada’s draws us into mystery: the scene is abandoned, the inhabitants long-gone, the tone melancholy. In her case, the things that surround us stand in mute witness to our solitary condition. (Robert Miller Gallery, 524 West 26)

After All: At the other end of the "stuff" spectrum is Laura Letinsky, whose aesthetic and intellectual concerns are more 17th-century Dutch vanitas than 20th-century Dada. Her spare, elegant compositions. all angles and weird perspectives, contain little disturbances of the domestic variety. One series features classic nature morte objects - wilted flowers, an orange peel, an octopus - shot in the falling light of dusk. In counterpoint, images from the "Fall" series are blindingly bright, verging on minimalist abstraction with white walls and tabletops occupied (only barely) by a white paper cup, a couple of cherries, a plastic McDonald's sundae cup. (Yancey Richardson, 535 West 22)

Everything Old Is New Again

2010-10-29T18:09:00.000-07:00

A quartet of photographers draw on the origins of the medium – daguerreotypes, photograms, cyanotype, camera obscura, cliché verre – to make thoroughly contemporary work.

Home and the World: Adam Fuss’s latest isn’t exactly subtle but it sure is beautiful. The subject is snakes: photograms of snakes slithering on grids of newspapers, around staffs or, most elegantly, against a white background. (In these, the line created by the snakes resembles classical Arabic calligraphy.) The heart of the show is the trio of daguerreotypes – the largest ever made – displayed in a separate chamber (a chapel?): two images of stripped mattresses face off against one another, one complete with writhing snakes. Between them, a third image of a vagina sits on the floor, like a portal into the earth. Paging Dr. Freud?

(Cheim & Read, 547 West 25)

The Speed of Dark: Like Fuss, Eric William Carroll also returns to the origins of the medium – in his case, blueprinting. But Carroll’s photographs of foliage are a far cry from Anna Atkins’s botanical specimens. Displayed in another darkened, chapel-like chamber, the multiple-panel works are expressionistic. Surrounded by them, I flashed back on childhood memories of lying under the backyard tree, staring through the branches and leaves into the sky beyond.

(Michael Mazzeo Gallery, 526 West 26)

Groundwork / Blue Room: Once again working with the camera obscura, Abelardo Morell is going out into the field with a light-tight tent and a periscope to project the landscape outside onto the ground of the tent and then photographing the resulting image. The pictures partake of the scenery (Big Bend, the Baptistry in Florence, the Tuscan countryside) and the earth itself. Morell is showing cliché verre photographs (literally, glass picture) – essentially hand-drawn negatives. To make these images, Morell pressed ferns and cycads over the surface of the glass plate to make lush pictures that hover on the edge of abstraction.

(Bonni Benrubi Gallery, 41 East 57)

Christopher Bucklow: The men and women depicted in these photographs are silhouetted against grounds of color, their luminous figures looking for all the world like benign beings from another galaxy. Bucklow begins by projecting his subject’s shadow on a sheet of aluminum foil, then traces the outline, and makes thousands of pinholes within the outline. With the foil serving as the lens, Bucklow exposes a sheet of color photographic paper to direct sunlight. An heir to William Blake, Bucklow makes artwork in a mystical vein: otherworldly figures radiate with the light of thousands of suns.

(Danziger Projects, 534 West 24)

Speed Reviews 2: The Fabricators

2010-10-26T17:37:00.000-07:00

Who said that the camera never lies? Herewith, four photographers whose work is all about fiction and fantasy.

The Looking Glass: Starting with photographs of high-end department store windows, Lynn Goldsmith manipulates the scene by adding and subtracting objects. To finish it off, she dresses herself up in full mannequin garb (including the blank stare) and Photoshops herself into the scene. According to the gallery notes, these images occupy some pretty well-trod post-modernist terrain, i.e., “questions of identity and how it is constructed.” Whatever, these Baroque photographs are a hoot although you’ve got to wonder just how long they’ll hold your interest.

(Jenkins Johnson Gallery, 21 West 26)

Untold Stories: Aiming for a Chandleresque atmosphere, Jonathan Smith’s riffs on film noir are hit or miss. He’s got the setting down, the narratives are suitably enigmatic, but he left me wanting. Maybe the sets were too elegant (shouldn’t noir feel like a trip to the wrong side of the tracks?) or maybe the mysteries aren’t shady enough. For me, the most successful were those that took the longest view: the peeping Tom’s view of a woman in her apartment; the neon sign encircled by a stand of trees; the glimpse, from across the tracks, of a woman waiting for the night train.

(Rick Wester Fine Art, 511 West 25)

Generations / Brothers & Sisters: Ruud van Empel channels Henri Rousseau in his images of black children in jungle settings and school photographers in his group portraits. These images are flagrant fabrications – and we’re meant to read them as such. As the gallery notes put it, they’re about “the disruption of apparently straightforward meaning.” But while Van Empel certainly creates convincingly “constructed” portraits, I wasn’t entirely convinced by the gallery’s contention that these photographs capture the children’s “existential discomfort” as they approach the disrupting age of puberty.

(Stefan Stux Gallery, 530 West 25)

Line-Up: There must be something in the air. Julie Blackmon is also Photoshopping kids – although, at least to my eye, to more convincing effect than van Empel. Blackmon’s inspiration is the 17^th-century genre paintings of Jan Steen, but the influence is subtle – you don’t need to know the connection to appreciate the images. Blackmon’s production values are slick – you’re meant to see the art direction – but the kids are unruly little anarchists, whose antics go unnoticed by the clueless adults. My favorite? High Dive, in which the grown-ups linger over their leisurely twilight picnic, while the kids hurl their plastic dolls off the nearby balcony and Barbies spike in the lawn.

(Robert Mann Gallery, 210 Eleventh Avenue)

Speed Reviews 1: Art for People Who Think Too Much

2010-10-24T19:22:00.000-07:00

Back from a New York trip, I offer herewith speed reviews. (No write-up more than 101 words!) Herewith, the first installment:

Minima Moralia: Any Chelsea exhibition featuring Samuel Beckett (yes, that Samuel Beckett) and a title from Theodor Adorno is made to order for the theory crowd. Words take the day: Matias Faldbakken’s “visual abstractions” investigate language “through a process of suppression of letters and sentences” (gallery speak for marking up plastic rubbish bags?). Glenn Ligon paints and neons text, most notably from James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. In Bruce Nauman’s work (drawings, his Good Boy, Bad Boy video), language breaks down and poetry (sometimes) emerges. The Beckett? A video of Not I, wherein a woman’s mouth, in close-up, spews out her life story.

(Marvelli Gallery, 526 West 26)

Stop Motion: Mining the notion of frozen time, Allan McCollum and Keith Edmier invoke the eruption at Pompeii and its excavation. In McCollum’s grid of 16 identical casts of a watchdog that died in Pompeii, each is oriented differently, rotated just a bit in relation to its neighbor to create an illusion of movement. Edmier’s Adonaïs contains basalt (hardened volcanic magma) casts of two human hearts. Unlike the dogs, each heart is unique, “excavated” from the artist and a friend through MRI imaging. Though also stopped in time, they too create the illusion of life as one swells with blood, the other contracts.

(Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 535 West 22)

Next Up: Speed Reviews 2: The Fabricators

Now Never Waits ... But Does It Return?

2010-10-22T19:16:00.000-07:00

Michael Snow’s take on time – on display at the Slought Foundation this season – itself takes some time to unpack.

Enter the gallery and the first thing you see is a video monitor displaying a video of sheep grazing in a field. As you browse through the gallery – much like those wandering sheep – you encounter more monitors, running the same video. They’re all part of a piece called Sheep, and in their wry way, they draw the parallel between the ruminations of gallery-goers and the flock of sheep.

It’s a gentle introduction to an artist whose work can seem deliberately impenetrable – the kind of work that requires a boat load of patience and a willing suspension of skepticism about the bona fides of contemporary artists.

Nearby, Snow’s Wavelength with WVLNT: Wavelength for those who don’t have the Time makes for far more challenging viewing. A “rewrite” of Snow’s earlier landmark film piece called Wavelength, Snow compressed the original 45-minute version, layering three 15-minute clips on top of one another to create a kind of video collage.

From what I gather, the first Wavelength is a single zoom shot that opens with a wide shot of a loft apartment, progresses through the room, and finally rests on a photograph of waves that hangs on the opposite wall. The action, such as it is, involves four events occur – including what may, or may not, be a murder.

As enigmatic as the original is, the Cliff Notes version on display at the Slought is even more so: you peer into the scene, trying to decipher the narrative, and although hints of the original break the surface every now and then, you are defeated in your search for meaning.

An Eternal Present

In Condensation: A Cove Story, Snow “employs time-lapse photography in … [an] act of compression and experiments [with] the viewer’s temporal displacement from the passage of time.” So say the gallery notes.

What that means in effect is that Snow made digital time-lapse photographs of a secluded cove in the Maritimes every 10 seconds. Of the thousands of resulting images, he selected the most interesting sequences to create a moving picture – a condensed chronicle of a single landscape as it is transformed by the unfolding North Atlantic weather. The fog rolls in, shrouding the hills in gray, and then breaks up. Sunlight emerges, and, as the clouds pass over the scene, they cast their shadows across the now-green hills. The fog returns.

Time is indeed compressed and, speeded up as it is, disorienting. But the result is more than an intellectual exercise. The experience of watching Condensation confounds but also enchants: the sweep of cloud shadows over the landscape is breath-taking.

SSHTOORRTY plays a similar game with time. Here, you can piece together a narrative – of sorts. A man, carrying a painting, enters an apartment and is greeted by a young woman. He argues with another man (her husband?), and the artist breaks the painting over the man’s head. The artist, followed by the woman, walks to the door and leaves. She turns back into the apartment.

Except that Snow cut the film in half and superimposed the two halves. Often baffling, the film is short enough (as the title suggests) that you can watch it several times and thus piece together a narrative timeline. But for me, what made SSHTOORRTY worth the time was the moment, toward the end of the piece, when the artist and the woman simultaneously enter and leave the apartment. Time folds in on itself. All time is eternally present.

Slyly, slowly, almost by sleight of hand, Snow leaves you contemplating some fairly heavy questions. Why do we remember the past but not the future? What happens to the present? Why does time sometimes fly and sometimes stop? What is time?

Now Never Waits

2010-10-16T15:18:00.000-07:00

For my day job, I’ve started posting on Twitter and, while a number of old friends are appalled to hear me say it, I find the work oddly enjoyable. Tweets are just latter-day headlines, and writing headlines – distilling complex stories into a limited space in language intriguing enough to get people's attention – was a blast, a real writer’s challenge.

And so it is with Twitter.

What I do find troublesome, though, is the way tweeting distorts time. For I have found that systematic Twitter-posting – tweeting as a job – casts everything into the present tense. Recollecting in tranquility? Forget about it. Everything that matters is now, and now never waits.

For me, the anxiety Twitter produces isn’t about the end of civilization or the trivialization of discourse or any of the earnest plaints you hear about our speeded-up, hyper-connected world. Nothing so grand is in play for me. No, it’s that Twitter as a routine part of my work day reminds me, again and again and again, that the present moment – this time now – is already past. It’s a Memento Mori Machine disguised as a social media app.

My dealings with Twitter have, as you can see here, got me thinking too much about the passage of time and also – and bear with me here – about what is so transfixing about photography.

Philadelphia’s current art season gave me even more opportunity to reflect on the nature of time, with the revival of the Lucinda Childs-Philip Glass-Sol Lewitt collaboration, Dance, at the Kimmel Center setting the stage.

Dance and Time

A landmark of Minimalism, Dance is deceptively simple, featuring a seemingly endless deployment of dancers crossing the stage on a grid. (For a sense of the piece, take a look at this video clip.) Like Glass’s score, the choreography is repetitive, with only slight variations on the basic steps, and the effect is mesmerizing. Watching the dancers, listening to the music, you feel suspended in the now – but then Sol LeWitt's contribution to the whole kicks in and the present performance becomes haunted by the past.

Projected on a scrim in front of the stage, the LeWitt film stars the original cast of dancers, recorded as they rehearsed the piece. When Dance premiered in 1979, the audience saw the flesh-and-blood dancers chasing, and being chased by, images of themselves.

But in the 31 years since, a new generation of dancers has taken over on stage, and now what you see has been transformed into an even deeper meditation on time. The dancers on stage act out an eternal present while ghost dancers offer up a performance from a long-ago past.

The Snapshot and Time

Now look at the photograph at the top of this post, and you look at a past present – an enigmatic, long-ago moment offered up to us in the now.

I found this picture in a bin of similarly unremarkable snapshots at Mostly Books, a local used bookstore that sells snapshots at 79 cents a pop. I have no idea who these people were/are or what they meant to one another. I assume, of course, that they're a young family, probably on vacation, and I imagine sometimes that the marriage isn't doing all that well. But who knows who they are or what became of them? And, perhaps most intriguing of all, who can fathom why the person behind the camera chose this moment to release the shutter?

This picture -- and all those others I rummage through in the snapshot bin -- is a haunting. Here, in an ordinary snapshot as in a legendary collaboration of three major 20th-century artists, we look at ghosts.

Next up: Michael Snow at the Slought Foundation

The Wounded Landscape II

2010-07-10T08:54:00.000-07:00

Okinawa haunts me. James Osamu Nakagawa’s Bantu pictures, which seem at first glance to be nothing more than a contemplation of the flat surface, turn out to be spirit pictures.

My first impression was one of formal beauty. The view itself is restricted, revealing little more than the rock face and a glimpse of ocean or sky. Yet the cliff faces are richly textured, the color palette restrained yet somehow lush.

But as I spent time with them, the images began to move. Nakagawa’s technique—he stitches together individual images to create an impossible whole—acts on the viewer's experience and the scene before you becomes vertiginous. Standing on the cliff’s edge, you lose your balance.

All this transpires before you even know that you are looking at places where people died. The photographs depict the "suicide cliffs" where scores of people took their own lives rather than risk capture by the American military in final battle of World War II.

(For more on these photographs, see my last post.)

Spectral Evidence
During the months after I heard Nakagawa speak about these pictures, serendipity introduced me to two other pieces of work—a photographic series by Stephen Chalmers and an essay by David Campany—that enriched my understanding of what I was looking at.

Chalmer’s pictures came to me in the form of the latest issue of Contact Sheet. The series, titled Dump Sites, document those places, now gone back to nature, where serial killers have disposed of their victims’ bodies. Before reading Mary Goodwin's accompanying text, I leafed through the issue and thought I was looking at an odd assortment of landscapes; some seemed like fairly conventional pastoral views while others looked to be documenting those leftover places that hover at the edges of our shared lives—empty woodlands, culverts, drainage ditches, abandoned quarries.

To build this series, Chalmers consulted trial transcripts and police reports to determine the exact location where each body was discovered. Like Nakagawa, he arrived on the scene long after the fact and then drew on technique to construct our experience. Where Nakagawa relies on digital manipulation to create his effects, Chalmers uses selective focus to home in on the precise spot where the victim’s body was discovered.

For both photographers, the experience they create for viewers is indirect, an act not of memory—the event, now long past, is beyond anyone but the perpetrator’s grasp—but rather of commemoration. As Chalmers explains, “As a latecomer who has visited these sites, months or years after the event and the associated media coverage, one is immediately struck by the absence of spectacle, the beauty of the sites, and their silence and stillness.”

In language that might as easily describe the Bantu pictures, he goes on: “The images in Dump Sites offer a spectral, haunted kind of evidence of the sites’ historical uses, and they rely explicitly on a spiritual ‘experience of the place’ to commemorate the destruction of a life…. I hope these images are read as having a ‘psychic weight’ or gravitas. I also hope that these images avoid the derivative pathos of sites of tragedy and clichés of prefabricated sentimentality.”

The Late Photograph
The Campany essay, Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on “Late Photography,” traces a history of the documentary photograph from the early large-format, long-exposure era, through the heroic “decisive moment” interlude, to our current anything-goes moment.

Campany argues, persuasively, that decisive moment photography—the format that many consider the ne plus ultra of documentary image-making—is a historical artifact whose time may well have passed. His thinking is both straightforward and subtle. The straightforward part rests on the observation that, starting in the 1970s, video took over the roll of “being there.” (Video captures account for almost a third of all "news photographs," Campany informs us.)

The subtle bit focuses in on the question of what remains for the still camera to do. What he sees is something that looks an awful lot like what people were doing in the 19th century: think Roger Fenton’s The Valley of the Shadow and Sophie Ristelheuber’s Fait. Or George Barnard’s Ruins in Charleston, South Carolina and Joel Meyerowitz’s Ground Zero work. In both cases, the photographs depict not the event itself, but rather its aftermath.

The subtlety enters in as Campany turns to the differences behind these historical parallels. For, resemblances notwithstanding, Ristelheuber, Meyerowitz, et al. are after different game than were their 19th-century forebears. They photograph in full knowledge of Capa and Cartier-Bresson; what is more, they photograph in the omni-presence of moving pictures.

This one-two punch leaves anyone interested in documentary work with a dilemma: if the value of documentary image-making lies in communicating the decisive moment to as broad an audience as possible, what is a still photographer to do after streaming video has taken the field?

The answer, in Campany’s view, is something he calls “the late photograph.” That is, the still photographer records what remains after the dust has settled, revealing to us the wounded landscape of our collective folly.

The Nature of Mourning
As a writer, I can’t resist pointing out that in most of the cases I've cited here—Nakagawa’s Okinawa, Ristelheuber’s Gulf War battlefields, Chandler’s crime scenes—the photographs rely on language to reveal their full meaning. That Meyerowitz’s Ground Zero images are immediately readable without captions is, I would argue, a happenstance of history; give them fifty years or so and they will be as opaque as pictures of the devastation after the suppression of the Commune of 1870 are to us now. The future will forget most of our obsessions.

That language and image work together is as it should be, I believe. For the power of these photographs as images derives from their ambiguity. They draw us in with their beauty and only then deliver the eulogy. Such is the nature of mourning: the heart-wrenching collaboration of love and loss.

The Wounded Landscape I: Okinawa

2010-06-30T05:45:00.000-07:00

At the Battle of Okinawa a total of 200,000 had died by the end of March of 1945. A significant aspect of the Battle of Okinawa was great loss of civilian life. At more than 100,000 civilians losses far out numbered the military death toll. Some were blown apart by shells, some finding themselves in a hopeless situation were driven to suicide, some died of starvation, some succumbed to malaria, while others fell victim to the retreating Japanese troops. Under the most desperate and unimaginable circumstances, Okinawans directly experienced the absurdity of war and atrocities it inevitably brings about. — From the Peace Memorial Museum, Naha

Sixty five years ago, tesu no ame – the Rain of Steel – came to the Ryuku Islands.

The final battle of the Pacific war, the Battle of Okinawa began on April 1, 1945. Before it ended on June 21, more than 70,000 Japanese died in defense (some estimates put the number at 100,000), and more than 12,000 Allied troops died taking it.
By that late date, Japan had, for all intents, been defeated: its navy had been virtually destroyed, and Okinawa represented the battle on what was, for all intents, home turf. Although the Japanese considered the Okinawans an inferior people, the island had been a colony since the 17th century. Only 350 miles from the southern tip of Japan, Okinawa was all that separated the Allies from the homeland.

The Japanese adopted a desperate plan: prolong the war. Hoping to break American nerve, their soldiers would fight to the death, with the Okinawans by their side. The bloodbath would, it was thought, so horrify – so demoralize – the American troops that Truman would negotiate a peace acceptable to the Japanese, one that would preserve the Imperial order.

The Japanese fought cave by cave. Interpreters begged them to come out — to no avail — and the Americans sealed the caves up or hit them with flame throwers.

Carrying tales of American atrocities, the Japanese soldiers goaded the civilians into suicide. To avoid capture, people threw themselves and their families from the cliffs, called banta, to the ocean hundreds of feet below. The beaches were strewn with corpses. Again, estimates of the casualties range, from 40,000 to 150,000.

What Remains
Sixty some years later, James Osamu Nakagawa began documenting what remains of the bloodbath. In his first foray on the island and nearby Saipan, he sought out the ghostly traces of the long-ago battle – an abandoned tank swamped by the sea, a cliff face pock-marked with bullet holes, a human skull – but also evidence of the lingering American occupation. Aptly named Remains, that series depicts the hard-edged reality of the military presence: an airplane overhead, a security wall surrounding an airfield, the forlorn site where the Enola Gay took off. A moving memorial to the islands, the series is presented in an artist’s book consisting of 40 images with words in both Japanese and English letter-pressed onto the paper in a reference to carved stone war memorials.

But Okinawa was not done with Nakagawa. In 2008, he returned to photograph the site of the island’s long-ago nightmare: the Suicide Cliffs, where Okinawan civilians jumped to their death, and the caves, where Japanese soldiers were incinerated by American flamethrowers.

The Banta series – banta means cliffs in Okinawan – are large-scaled, oriented vertically, much like a classical Japanese hanging scroll. The images are far from traditional but, rather, have been meticulously constructed from multiple digital shots. At first glance, these pictures look like straight-ahead shots but, studying them, you get a touch of vertigo. In stitching together these images of the cliff face, Nakagawa effects subtle shifts in perspective that throw you off balance.

“Standing at its feet for the first time,” Nakagawa writes, “I felt in the cliff’s full visceral weight something so powerful that I was initially unable to take even a single photograph. The shadows seeping from the cliff's surface, the white craters riddling the cliff's coral limestone, and the charred black caves were stark reminders of all that these cliffs had witnessed.”

Returning home with thousands of digital files, Nakagawa stitched together the final images, recreations of the “hyper-real vision of [his] experience standing between fear and beauty on Okinawa’s banta.” Most disconcerting among these photographs are those shots from the cliff’s edge that leave you peering over the precipice down into the breakers below – sharing the last sight of the people who took their own lives rather than face an American occupation.

Last year, Nakagawa transferred his gaze to the fortified caves – gama in Okinawan – that harbored the Japanese soldiers making what was to be their last stand and the terrified civilians they had persuaded to join them. Rather than surrender to the advancing Americans, some of the soldiers committed seppuku, while others – by some counts, around 20,000 – were buried alive in the caves under the enemy fire.

At a conference this spring, Nagakawa showed some of the Gama images – I couldn’t find many of them online – and spoke about the experience of descending into them. He spoke about being swallowed up by the darkness and about encountering the vestiges of those who lived and died in the caves.

Awe has two faces: wonderment and terror. Just so with Nakagawa’s photographs. A first, cursory look delights you. The sumptuous textures and swirling ocean are gorgeous. Look closer, though, and you notice the slashes of red sandstone, like blood that will not fade, and you understand that the places these beautiful images document for us are swamped in grief.

Next time: Nakagawa is memorializing the very particular tragedy that played out on the island of Okinawa from April to June 1945. But his photographs belong to a larger archive of photographs that document the wounded landscapes of virtually every major war fought since the camera came along. More on those next post.

The White City Redux

2010-05-31T12:57:00.000-07:00

In 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago to mark the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival on the continent. Like the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the Columbian celebrated one of the defining American moments. It also brought a lot of tourist dollars to Chicago; some 27 million visitors are estimated to have attended, nearly a quarter of the country’s population at the time.

The prototype for such events was the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in the Crystal Palace in London. Along with the pavilions art and natural history displays, the Great Exhibition showcased the latest technologies and manufactured goods from around the world: a Jacquard loom, telegraphs, an envelope machine, the world’s first voting machine, McCormick’s reaper, plus some less obviously utilitarian devices—a kite-drawn carriage, furniture made of coal, and a set of choppers fitted with a swivel that enabled the user to yawn without losing his teeth.

The Columbian Exposition was cut of much the same cloth. Visitors could see Remington typewriters, Eli Whitney's cotton gin, sewing machines, and the world's largest conveyor belt. The Ferris wheel made its debut there as did a grocery list of iconic American food products: Quaker Oats, Cream of Wheat, Shredded Wheat, Juicy Fruit, and Cracker Jacks.

But the men who designed the fair had other, higher ambitions. Led by Daniel Burnham, whose firm had built many of Chicago’s signature skyscrapers, the group included, among others, Frederick Law Olmstead, Charles McKim, Richard Morris Hunt, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. All proponents of the City Beautiful movement, which proposed urban planning as a remedy to the poverty and blight that characterized so many American cities of the day. The City Beautiful would, its advocates argued, sweep away tenements and the moral turpitude they fostered while elevating American cities to the same cultural level as the great European capitals.

The Columbian Exposition gave them the perfect platform for staging their ideas. Taking advantage of the site’s Lake Michigan setting, Olmstead laid out the exhibition grounds in a series of lagoons and connecting waterways that served as reflecting pools and transportation channels. Standing on the Grand Basin at the heart of the complex was the Court of Honor, which quickly got dubbed “the White City” for the dazzling effect of its assemblage of white-stuccoed Beaux-Arts buildings.

At night, a rapidly growing technology enhanced the effect. Electricity—and electric lighting in particular—was one of the big-news stories at the Exposition, so big that it got its own dedicated building. Exhibits in the Electricity Building featured elevators, fans, sewing machines, burglar alarms, stoves, laundry machines, irons, that telegraph, the first seismograph, and a kinetoscope. Thomas Alva Edison contributed an 82-foot Tower of Light, which used more than 18,000 lightbulbs. And, each night, the buildings and promenade of the Court of Honor were ablaze with outdoor electric lighting.

Imagine yourself, standing at the foot of the Great Basin and seeing, perhaps for the first time in your life, the dazzling nighttime illumination of the facades of a whole suite of grand buildings.

And people were dazzled. Owen Wister wrote of his experience at the fair, “[B]efore 1 had walked for two minutes, a bewilderment at the gloriousness of everything seized me ... until my mind was dazzled to a stand still…. I studied nothing, looked at no detail, but merely got at the total consummate beauty and grandeur of the thing: -which is like a great White Spirit evoked by Chicago out of the blue water upon whose shore it reposes.”

Not everyone swooned so. Henry Adams may have been overwhelmed—he wrote that the Exposition “defied philosophy”—but his sense of wonder is restrained by his understanding that the spectacle in Chicago represented a decisive moment for the country. “For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893,” he wrote on his return, “the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical.”

A few weeks ago, I stopped in at the Fleisher Art Memorial for a look at its latest Challenge exhibition. Standing before Tetsugo Hyakutake’s image Pathos and Irony: Industrial Still-Life in Japan #3, I saw the White City, reimaged for the 21st century.

There was the same transportingly beautiful image, the same shimmering collection of buildings that seemed to imply something celestial, the same shining city beckoning to us.

Bu what’s so striking about these images is their double meaning. For make no mistake, these structures are every bit as beautiful, every bit as awe-inspiring, as the White City. Hyakutake speaks of “the ironic beauty” and “sublime scale” of the industrial sites he photographs, and you can’t be blamed for suspecting, when first entering the gallery, that you’re glimpsing images of Oz.

Linger before these images and you discover their deeper, more sinister meaning. For here, the White City is the oil refinery, the subway platform, the expressway overpass. Rather than awe, these photographs describe the calamity that our faith in technology, so unquestioningly celebrated at the Columbian and its ilk, has unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

Even back in 1893, not everyone swooned over the sight of the White City. Henry Adams may have been overwhelmed—he wrote that the Exposition “defied philosophy”—but his sense of wonder was restrained by his understanding that the spectacle in Chicago represented a decisive moment for the country, by his sense of the price we would pay for the spectacle. “For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893,” he wrote on his return, “the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical.”

More than a hundred years on, Hyakutake is here to remind us that we are, like Adams, of two minds about the White City and its industrial spawn.

To see a further selection of Tetsugo Hyakutake's work, check out the Gallery 339 website. For a virtual tour of the Columbian Exposition, check out this site.

The World We Lost

2010-05-07T06:23:00.000-07:00

Start at the beginning. Why is it this picture, cryptically titled Romania, 1968, that has followed me around for two decades? It hangs now—in the form of an exhibition poster—on my office wall. I never tire of looking at it. But why?

To answer, I start at what I think is the beginning. I start with Koudelka himself.

Born in small-town Moravia, the son of a tailor, Koudelka got his first introduction to the camera when the local baker showed him some photographs he’d taken. Young Josef was hooked and, at age 14, earned the money to buy his first camera. Later, he attended the Technical University of Prague and, in the 1960s, worked a day job as an aeronautical engineer while launching himself in the art world. He staged his first exhibition in 1961 and began documenting Prague’s then-vibrant theater scene.

Today, when caution has taken the stage, Koudelka’s forty-year-old theater pictures are still bracing; they rethink the stale genre of theater stills. High-key and high-contrast, the photographs are expressionistic rather than documentary. To make them, Koudelka joined the actors on stage, immersing himself—and by extension, you, his viewer—in the drama. Study them and you will have little idea of who the actors are or what the stage scene looks like but you will get a sense of the play, its mood and emotions—maybe even the point of it all.

Taken in the context of Cold War Czechoslovakia, the whole enterprise—the dissident plays, the experimental productions, the rule-breaking photographer—looks like a brave, if minor, provocation of the hidebound powers-that-be. In other words, it looked as though tragedy was on its way into town.

And indeed it was.

Bliss was it then to be alive

Although only 13 at the time, I remember hearing news of the Prague Spring. The papers and the TV news were full of stories about the liberalization taking place in Czechoslovakia and the loosening of the Soviet grip on one of its client states. The spring itself was a long one, lasting from January to August 1968. On the ground, where the artists and the students and the everyday citizens lived, it was one of those enchanted times when the whole earth wears the beauty of promise. And even for a kid in Plainfield, New Jersey, a kid nowhere near old enough to understand what was at stake, the Prague Spring made for thrilling reading and even provided a tonic against our own grim news of war, assassination, and riot.

Behind the scenes, where the big men live, the spring was as much a product of party in-fighting as an expression of the popular will. In January of that year, the leading actor of the piece, Alexander Dubček, took control of the Party after a power struggle with his hard-line predecessor Antonín Novotný. By all accounts a devoted communist, Dubček nonetheless saw need for reform, for what he dubbed “socialism with a human face.” And for eight months, that’s what the Czechoslovak people got.

Dubček’s Action Program increased freedoms of the press, speech and movement and promised economic and electoral reform. The people responded: the press printed pieces critical of the USSR, the Social Democrats started forming their own party, and political clubs, unsanctioned and unaffiliated, cropped up.

Even Gypsies got into the act, challenging—in print—the policy of assimilation.

The Soviets, alas, were less enthusiastic, and on August 21, 1968, the Prague Spring shut down as thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of Warsaw Pact troops entered the city. In Old Town Square and Wenceslas Square, crowds confronted the troops, and at the National Museum, tanks fired on the buildings. And through it all, Josef Koudelka was out on the streets, on the rooftops, in the line of fire—one shot is even taken from the tank gunner’s point of view—immersing himself in the drama. In 2008, the fortieth anniversary of the invasion, these photographs were collected in a new book, Invasion 68 Prague, and accompanying exhibition at two New York galleries. Gathered together, these pictures made for painful viewing, documenting as they do the doomed resistance of Prague’s citizenry. The crowds that seem to engulf the tanks and the one-to-one appeals to individual soldiers, the young men waving the Czechoslovak flag and the young woman openly weeping, the fires blazing and the dust settling, the emptied streets marking the end of the struggle—all trace the whole sad tale.

The world being what it is, even those who don’t know the story can guess how it ends. The reformers were arrested and flown to Moscow, where after “frank talks,” they renounced their reforms. Six days later, Dubček returned home and the retrenchment began. The good citizens returned to their private lives. The students took their exams and, if they were lucky, no one in charge knew they had been out there on the streets. The artists, scientists and intellectuals scattered to Paris, London, New York. Josef Koudelka, whose images from the invasion had been smuggled out and published under the credit line “P.P.” (Prague Photographer), joined the exodus in 1970.

As for Dubček, he was expelled from the Party and wound up in internal exile, working as a clerk in the forestry service.

History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake
At some point in my research, it dawns on me that my picture—the man and the horse—was taken in 1968, the Prague Spring year, the Soviet invasion year, the year it all fell apart. I dig a little deeper and learn that Koudelka returned from Romania—from photographing this picture—on August 19, 1968, just two days before the tanks rolled across the border.

I try to imagine what it might have felt like: to live in a country that’s survived years of censorship and one-party rule, where fear dominates and you have to watch what you say, where life is tamped down. It turns out not to be so very hard, as I think back on the recent history of my own country, to imagine such a state of affairs. Nor to imagine the longing that you might wake up from the nightmare of history. Nor, with a nod to the 2004 election, to see the hope for something better snatched away.

I try to imagine too what it must have felt like to be with the Gypsies: to travel among a wandering people with no discernible taste for nationalism and the complications of modernity, to be outside all the big-stage political machinations, to live on such direct terms with the world.

I start reading up on Gypsies. But before I can even make it to Wikipedia, let alone the library, I come up against the word itself: gypsy. A conjurer’s trick of a word, a slur with an undertone of envy, it calls up so many, often competing associations: beggars and thieves, liars, fortune tellers, horse traders, Bizet’s Carmen, tambourines and Gypsy music, The Virgin and the Gypsy, caravans and the freedom of the open road.

The research leads me to the statistics and observations of scholars and journalists, but even there, the word seems to cast a peculiar spell. At least one point of consensus emerges: the linguistic and genetic evidence is beyond dispute that the Roma—Roma being the preferred term to describe the Gypsies—trace their origins to India.

But it’s anyone’s guess why they left or exactly how they dispersed. Or how many of them there actually are. The population estimates I find range from 12,000 to 300,000 in the same country (in this case, the Czech Republic).

Scholars believe the Roma arrived in Europe in the 11th century. Since Koudelka’s Gypsies lived in Czechoslovakia and Romania, I focus my research on those regions, but I learn that, whatever land they traveled to and however warm their initial welcome may have been—in the Middle Ages, they were granted the privileged status of pilgrims—they soon came to be reviled. As outsiders with their own strange language and customs, they made for perfect scapegoats.

I had never known that, from the 13th century until well into the 19th, Gypsies were chattel in Romania. And, although not enslaved in the Czech lands, hangings were routine there, with the executions strategically conducted along the border where the hanged bodies could serve as a warning to any wandering Gypsy considering entry.

During World War II, between 200,000 and 500,000 Gypsies were exterminated in the Nazi camps. In 1941, with help from its German allies, Romania transformed the occupied province of Transnistria into a killing ground for “undesirables.” Virtually the entire Roma population of the Sudetenland died in the camps. The Romany word for the Holocaust, Porajmos, translates literally as “the devouring.”

Under Communist rule, things improved, but only marginally. At first, many were attracted to the Party’s egalitarian ideals but then ran up against the official line that their nomadic life was inimical to the socialist order. Banned from traveling, the Roma were forcibly relocated into permanent residences with new neighbors who had always hated them and saw no reason to stop, socialist order be damned.

Such was the state of affairs when Koudelka asked for time off from his job to work on his photographic project.

He lives as one dreams of living, in a caravan
Today, Koudelka describes the Prague invasion as “the maximum” of his life. “In ten days,” he told the photographer Frank Horvat, “everything that could happen in my life did happen. I was at my own maximum, in a situation at its maximum.”

The work made his name in the West and, ironically, became his ticket out. Magnum, the legendary photo agency founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and friends, handled the pictures, and it was Magnum that secured him the visa that got him out of Czechoslovakia and Magnum that served as his home base in the years that followed.

But while the invasion pictures may have made Koudelka’s reputation, it is with the Gypsy pictures that he found his full voice—as though, in the lives of these perpetual outsiders, he saw something of his own untethered future and, more to the point, something of our own plight. Since leaving Czechoslovakia, Koudelka has been a gypsy himself, living out of a sleeping bag and rucksack. For years, he had no fixed address, relying on the Magnum office to do business. Today in his 70s, he keeps two Spartan places, one in Paris and one in Prague, but still owns no car, no television, no cellphone.

For nearly 40 years, Koudelka has lived a sort of double exile: the literal one that drove him from his homeland and a second estrangement from the very world he fled to—from the whole superstructure of modern life, the getting and spending, the endless chatter of cheap gossip disguised as news, the selling without end, all the shabby stuff we spend our days acquiring. “To express the existential situation of modern man,” writes Czeslaw Milosz, “one must live in exile of some sort.”

That double experience—the engaged citizen’s and the stateless wanderer’s—find respective expression in the Prague pictures and in the Gypsies. Whatever the relative merits of these two bodies of work, they are bound together in the essential dialogue. Without the Prague work, the Gypsy photographs flirt with simple nostalgia, beautiful pictures from a century before. Without the Gypsies, the Soviet tanks are mere reportage, more bad news from the frontlines of history. Together, they speak eloquently about what is at stake and what has always been at stake: how are we to live.

Critics often describe Koudelka’s vision as dark, focusing on the desolation of the lives he depicts. I’m not so sure. Certainly they are stern pictures, tough-minded in their honest appraisal of the scene. But what a gift that honesty is, how generous and humane. They take in all of it—the humble, the brave, the elegant, the gleeful, the sorrowful, the tragic. The commonplace of four loaves of bread laid out on a rustic table, the scene sanctified by the pictures of the Madonna and the Sacred Heart of Jesus hanging on the rough-plastered wall above. A young man baring his chest to a Soviet soldier, defying him to shoot. The Old World grace of a man, finger resting on his left cheek, as he contemplates who-knows-what. The playfulness of three scrawny boys flexing their arms in a classic Strong Man pose. The heartbreak of a family of mourners gathered around the body of a dead woman laid out in her coffin, the scene illuminated by a light at once harsh and caressing. The fear of a man in handcuffs, on his way to prison, and ostracized from his fellow villagers who cluster, gaping, in the distant background. An old man, a dead ringer for Samuel Beckett, standing defeated before a burned-out Prague apartment building.

And my picture: a man and a horse talking to one another. The man, squatting before the animal, gestures for all the world like some Left Bank intellectual explicating a subtlety of his impenetrable theory. The horse, a magnificent dapple gray, is attentive, nodding patiently, lovingly to his glib companion.

The image—all of the images for that matter—borrows much from the early theater work. It’s not just that the pair could be on stage, characters in some fairy-tale version of a Beckett play. And it’s not just the sense of drama, the heightened moment. It’s also—and this is what makes the picture distinctively Koudelka’s—that the world depicted here is one where action and word, soul and deed rhyme.

You don’t have to romanticize a way of life that’s passing to feel the loss. I’m no Josef Koudelka, ready to throw off the blandishments of modern life for a bedroll and the open road. But I do see in this picture of a man and his attentive horse, a world not yet out of tune with itself. I see a conversation, a coming together, and a promise of connection to one another—a connection to life itself. Unmediated, perilous, and innocent.

I see a picture of a world we have lost and the world as we dream it could be.

A Modest Manifesto

2010-04-01T12:14:00.000-07:00

What to make of Miroslav Tichy?

Born in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, Tichy had the bad luck to be attending art school just as the Communists took over and threw out the life models. They were replaced with overalls-clad workers brandishing hammers and marching into the heroic Soviet future.

Tichy, whose taste ran more toward Matisse than Socialist Realism, dropped out. But dropping out wasn’t an option in post-war Czechoslovakia, and Tichy landed in jail and in psychiatric wards as a subversive. To be honest, though, he might have suffered the same fate anywhere he lived for Tichy is that rarest of birds: a true eccentric.

Released and back home in Kyjov, he took up photography and became a fixture there – the town crazy who wandered the streets wearing a much-mended overcoat and wielding a series of homemade cameras. Looking at the man and his cardboard-and-duct-tape contraptions, his fellow citizens couldn’t believe that the cameras were functional and thus revealed themselves openly for Tichy’s lens. Madness was the perfect disguise.

At the rate of 100 frames a day, Tichy recorded the quotidian life of Kyjov – all those inconse-quential moments that, unremarked and unremembered, make up the stuff of life. A sampling of his output is on display at the International Center of Photography and, from the evidence of the photographs, Tichy spent most of his days ogling women. Women passing by on the street, flashing legs and ass and ankles, gossiping with one another, sunning at the swimming pool, necking with their boyfriends – all photographed surreptitiously by the town crackpot working with DIY cardboard cameras made with cardboard, duct tape, beer bottlecaps, Plexiglas, and whatever else came to hand.

In keeping with the cameras – a representative sample of which are displayed in two vitrines – the prints are also a mess: tattered, creased, and stained, they look like Ansel Adams’s worst nightmare. Each and every photograph is blurred – technically a consequence of his imperfect lenses (polished with toothpaste and ash). You suspect, though, that he wouldn’t have bothered to focus if he’d been carrying a Leica.

Still, they're clearly cherished objects: Tichy has mounted many of his prints in carefully hand-drawn paper frames and, for a handful, has even drawn directly on the photographic surface, tracing a graceful arc along the female figure.

The overall effect is just a little bit creepy – a dirty old man wandering the streets, stalking young women, capturing their image, and then retreating into his hovel to make bad prints for which he then lovingly drew his charming paper frames.

Just as you’re about to conclude that this guy is essentially a Czech Henry Darger, you watch the video about Tichy and the people who found and championed him. Called “Tarzan Revisited,” it makes the case that Tichy was far more knowing, far more sophisticated in his aesthetic choices than you might want to think.

The evidence isn’t cut-and dried. A classic hoarder, Tichy seems never to have thrown anything away – the old paintings are there, encrusted in dust that can’t be washed away, the prints have been squirreled away in cubbyholes and strewn on the floor, dirty plates and glasses litter the kitchen. In one sequence, he merrily explains that he’s had to construct a cage to protect his food from the mice. The rats are another matter.

But Tichy is, after all, a product of the Academy of the Fine Arts, a one-time aspirant to a fine arts career – and a crafty old fox. As he observes, “Photography is something concrete, a perception, what you see with your eyes. And it happens so fast that you may not see anything at all! To photograph is to paint with light! The flaws are part of it. That's what makes the poetry.

“And for that you need a bad camera,” he adds wryly, “If you want to be famous, you have to be worse at something than everyone else in the world!”

One of his art world champions, Harald Szeemann, shuffles through a pile of prints and aptly compares them to Gerhard Richter. I thought, too, of the Starn Twins, who burst on the scene back in the 1980s by thumbing their collective nose at the photo establishment – printing on RC paper, tearing and scratching their prints, Scotch-taping them together, breaking every rule in the Photo I rule book.

In an art world dominated by $12 million dollar sharks, Tichy’s casual indifference to the world’s blandishments is more than a little refreshing. Like some thoroughly secular St. Jerome – an anchorite with a sybaritic imagination – maybe the dirty old man living in his cave has something to teach us. That is to say, what may be most compelling about Tichy is the life itself. The wreckage notwithstanding, you wouldn’t be wrong to wonder whether he may just be the last sane man left standing.

I don’t mean to romanticize the squalor or, in fact, the choices Tichy has made. I’m an accommodator, someone who’s tried to walk a careful line between the world’s demands and my own desires. That is to say, I have serious issues with the notion of going it entirely alone. Tichy's feral existence transpires largely outside the human concourse. He's turned his back on the rest of us and, although I do admire something about him -- his persistence, his dedication to his own vision -- I'm troubled by the singularity of his life, by his isolation and loneliness.

The Tarzan movie I’d like to see is the one where the wild man chooses civilization over the jungle, where he sees the modest nobility behind all the unheroic compromises we make for one another.

The Charnel House and the Peep Show

2010-03-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

At left is Uncovering, no. 1, from an in-progress series by the Canadian artist Frank Rodick. Called Revisitations, the new series roams freely across time and cultures for images from the charnel house of our collective history.

The source for this particular image comes from an old labor movement pamphlet on World War I and depicts the carcass of a horse that, in dying on the battlefield, has become ensnared in barbed wire. The triptych itself is small and mounted inside a box. Lift the lid and the scene unveils itself for you.

Some time back, Rodick sent me a jpeg and asked for my response. So, one afternoon, I sat down with the image and a strong internet connection. For a number of reasons – my admiration for Rodick’s work, my fascination with animals, my own magpie way of thinking – I wanted to give this piece a concentrated reading. And, then, I wanted to see what you could do with just a single image.

The answer seems to have been: quite a bit – especially when dealing with this particular artist. The internet, it turns out, played a major role in shaping my thinking. That mess of an archive enabled me to dig into ideas that might otherwise have remained half-buried. Those ideas are best understood as associations – impulses even. That is to say, in relating Uncovering to the works I have in what follows, I don’t mean to suggest linear influences. I have no way of knowing whether the connections I see are intentional on Rodick’s part. Nor, to be quite frank, do I care. Rather, what interests me is the way images flow through our collective experience and the way good ones – really powerful ones – never really disappear.

What follows is an expanded version of what I wrote that afternoon.

The Peep Show
The stereoscope was invented in 1838 and popularized in this country during the 1880s by Oliver Wendell Holmes. “Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing,” he wrote, “taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it.”

The stereoscope creates the illusion of depth, immersing you in the scene, and it remained popular until another immersive art form – the moving picture – arrived in town. By the 1950s, the stereoscope reemerged, but now as the ViewMaster, a children’s toy.

But that desire to immerse ourselves in the work of art remains strong – as strong, perhaps, as the desire among artists to submerge us.

The most notorious example in 20th century art is Duchamp’s enigmatic masterpiece Etant donnés 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage [Given: 1. The waterfall, 2: The illuminating gas]. Jasper Johns called it the strangest work of art in any museum. For its time, it was a rule-changer, and even today, when anything goes – at least in theory – Etant donnés has an uncanny power to shock.

For one thing, Duchamp doesn’t let you get away with anything: you are complicit in this work of art as in very few others that come to mind. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, which houses the piece, has hidden it away in its own private gallery. Turn the corner into that room and you face a Spanish wooden door with ironwork fittings. It might be something from one of Poe’s gothic castles. On examination, you discover two peepholes. Peer through them and you encounter a naked woman in the grass. Behind her rises a hilly landscape where a waterfall, animated by a flickering light source, seems to pour into a nearby lake.

The setting could be read as a little Eden – the grassy meadow, the distant waterfall, the brilliant sunlit sky. Plus, we know that the model for Etant donnés was Duchamp’s lover, Maria Martins.

But if this is Eden, it’s Eden after the fall. Martins seems more used here than alluring. Her body might be mutilated: from our viewing angle, she is effectively faceless; her pubic hair has been shaved. Were it not for the fact that she holds a gas lamp in her outstretched hand, you might take her for a corpse. What you’re looking at seems more like a nightmare – a crime scene – than a love nest.

Duchamp was born in 1887 at the dawn of the moving picture era. In France, the Lumiere Brothers introduced their Cinematographe in 1895; in the U.S., Thomas Edison unveiled his Vitascope in 1896. But the invention of cinema was less a dawning than a culmination of a centuries-long fascination with optics. The camera obscura (first built c. 1000 but Aristotle had laid out the theory around 330 BC), the magic lantern (c. 1420), the peep show (1437), the cyclorama (1787), the kaleidoscope (1816), the zoetrope (1860) – all way stops in the history of looking.

To say that visual artists are interested in the seen world is beyond obvious. But art-making has always included another, fabulist strain. Think Bosch. Check out Bomarzo. And the emergence of all these mechanisms for seeing did more than disrupt the aura of the work of art. These various devices enabled people – artists and showmen alike – to go after something more, to follow what is perhaps a deeper need: the urge to create a second reality, to immerse viewers in another world.

The story that early audiences panicked at footage of a locomotive heading toward them, while apocryphal, nonetheless points to the immersive quality of film. You sit in a darkened theater and enter someone else’s dream world. The peep show and the stereograph create a similarly intimate experience: it’s just you and the image.

So it is with Uncovering. Like Duchamp’s use of the peep show, the format Rodick has chosen forces you into an intimate relationship with what is revealed because you discover it on your own. No respectful distance separates you from the image before you, no fellow gallery-goers distract you with their chatter, no competing artworks call to you from the opposite wall.

The Charnel House
Like the Duchamp, too, Uncovering speaks of unspeakable things. Both have the whiff of death about them, and each, in its own particular way, brings to mind a deposition or an entombment.

The status of Maria Martins is ambiguous, of course: is she dead or merely post-coital? Whatever your interpretation, she is nothing but a body – flesh incarnate? At the first, literal level, Christianity, like Etant donnés, is about nothing but sex and death: the Bible spins the tale of a man (born of a virgin) who dies a gruesome death. Only for Duchamp – and for Rodick – the narrative doesn’t end in the triumph of life over death, of light over darkness, but rather in something far more troubling and far more sinister.

Representing yet another carcass, Uncovering draws on this same tradition in Western art. On a purely formal level, it borrows the triptych format that was so typical of representations of the death of the Christ. (Is it coincidental that the triptych format is much favored by Francis Bacon – one of Rodick’s favorite modern painters?)

Even more to the point, it shares some of the same sad elegance of those images. The horse has fallen back into the barbed wire, and the arc described by its neck is as graceful as van der Weyden’s or Caravaggio’s rendering of Christ’s lifeless body. Both are nothing more than a sack of bones and flesh, but how tenderly they have been portrayed.

These swooning figures draw us in – is death ever so beautiful? – only to break our hearts. That something so compelling, so vital is nothing but a carcass – dead meat – is almost unbearable.

All the fancy art-historical references aside, Uncovering is, all on its own, a tragic report back from the war zone – and a particularly horrific one at that.

We have a taste, certainly, for images of war: Robert Capa, David Douglas Duncan, Doug McCullin, Larry Burrows, – all brought back searing pictures that gave us a sense of battle. And if we weren’t reading the picture press, we could always turn on the evening news for the film footage.

During the Civil War and World War I, the folks back home saw less of the action – the technologies weren’t yet in place – but they could purchase stereographs of life on the frontlines. The technical limitations restricted the subject matter to fairly static scenes of the trenches and the gruesome aftermath. But even a century on, those images of the corpse-strewn battlefield have lost none of their tragic power.

Consider then, the people who bought these mementoes. When you think about the physical experience of looking at a stereograph, at the intimacy of the viewing – you can’t shift your gaze away – you’re stunned that there was ever a market for these things.

Seen on their own, without the aid of the stereo viewer, they remind me of altar paintings – not triptychs this time but the small-scaled double paneled paintings of the Northern Renaissance that served as objects of private devotion. And perhaps that is precisely the function these grisly images served.

Miserere mei, Deus
Industrial models of killing made their first appearance in the American Civil War and reached a fever pitch in World War I. Both saw once unimaginable casualty counts (700,000 and 16 million, respectively). In light of all this human carnage, I have to ask myself why I am so moved by an image of a horse.

The obvious, and not altogether wrong, answer is sheer sentimentality. Having urbanized and mechanized most of the animal kingdom out of our lives, we’ve lost touch not only with them but with something essential in ourselves. So we fetishize the poor creatures, projecting on them our dream of what we’ve lost. They are, we believe, innocent and, as innocents, somehow more deserving of our compassion.

But innocence has nothing to do with the matter. At Gettysburg, at the Somme, Anzio, Normandy, Khe Sanh, Falluja, the righteous no less than the wicked were slaughtered – like Rodick’s horse – on the battlefield.

To me, Uncovering acts as a devotional object – like a Northern Renaissance diptych or one of those Civil War stereographs. Like those latter images, like Etant donnés, this piece implicates you, giving you no choice but to look, to see the carnage, to enter into the charnel house. The three vignettes create a sense of movement across the picture plane, and the peep-show format draws you into a deep physical space. You become both participant and voyeur – scanning the ruins of the battlefield and yet peering into another world, another reality.

Either way, it’s not a pretty picture.

_______________________________________

You can see Uncovering, no. 1, at Labyrinth of Desire, a mid-career retrospective of Frank Rodick's work curated by Katherine Ware. The exhibition opens March 13 and runs through April 24 at Colton & Farb Gallery in Houston.

Finite Infinity

2010-02-10T06:33:00.001-08:00

Writing in Norwood, Virginia, I’m surrounded by silence.

Well, not exactly. The crows kick up a ruckus every now and then, and wintering-over wrens cheep at the window. The train passes a couple of times a day, and the heat kicks on and off. Maisie, the dog, pads around on the front porch; I can hear her nails clicking on the wood. Sometimes a ladybug buzzes past.

But mostly what I hear is quiet.

That quiet got me thinking about some photographs I saw last season at Gallery 339 in Philadelphia and specifically how the press of things – the noise and the clatter, the world’s cant – drowns out whole pockets of life.

The photographs were by Rita Bernstein and they were part of Personal Views, an exhibition of portraits by seven Philadelphia photographers.

Made by hand-applying emulsion on Japanese rice paper, Bernstein’s photographs are small and exquisite images of mostly young women (only two of those on view at 339 included a young man), mostly in interior spaces, mostly bedrooms.

I suspect these pictures are easy to underestimate – rather the way that people always thought Emily Dickinson was just a spinster poet when in fact she’s one of the most muscular writers the country ever produced.

And at first glance, Bernstein’s pictures might seem to be simply precious objects – all femininity and nostalgia. Take a longer look, though, and you’ll find something delicate, yes, but also tough-minded and rough around the edges.

Their literal edges are literally rough. The paper is imperfect as well, marbled with cracks. With their deckled edges and wrinkled surfaces, the images seem to have been ripped from their source – or flayed like animal hides.

The Soul Exposed
Study the imagery itself and you begin to think that the people pictured may have been flayed as well – only psychologically. Bernstein seems to skin her subjects, stripping away identity and personality and leaving only the soul exposed. I’ve come to think of these pictures as psychic skins, the pelts of individual souls.

In Bernstein’s world, the soul’s natural habitat is a closed room. It is only there, in this interior landscape, that the psyche can reveal itself to itself. Each room serves as a visible manifestation of the spirit it houses – as though all these young women were projecting their inner state outward. The room becomes the picture of the soul.

In some cases – Awaiting Matthew and Last Light [top image at left] – the young women are alone, as though locked inside their own mind with no way out. In others, they are afflicted, haunted by a double – a second self as in Virginia and Ann [bottom image at left] or a ghost self as in Renovations.

This reading works, too, for those that don’t fit the basic figure-in-a-room pattern. In Charmaine [opening image], runic graffiti seems to emanate from the central figure as though seeping, unbidden, out of her psyche. In Garden, a young woman, caught between an engulfing darkness and a threatening light, holds herself close.

That Polar Privacy
We live in a time of great sound and fury, noise and flash, endless blog posts and people yelling at one another. Step outside of that bubble – spend a week in Norwood, Virginia – and the preoccupations of the moment evaporate.

Small wonder then that, in this isolated country retreat in the still mid-winter of the year, I come back to these pictures and, in turn, to Dickinson:

THERE is a solitude of space,
A solitude of sea,
A solitude of death,
but these Society shall be,
Compared with that profounder site,
That polar privacy,
A Soul admitted to Itself:
Finite Infinity.

Five Rooms: 4 + 5

2010-01-24T07:04:00.000-08:00

All Odysseus had to do was to slay an ox. Orpheus only needed to slip past Cerberus, the ultimate in junkyard dogs. And Dante? He had Virgil to sweet talk their way into hell.

Getting into the Black Acid Co-op installation this summer, you ran a similar gauntlet: the Deitch Gallery Girls, demanding not a blood offering, but the modern equivalent: a signed release. The transaction put you on notice: abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Stepping into the first rooms was like entering Dante’s first circle – alarming enough but, as it happened, only hinting at the misery to come. A kind of Limbo, this antechamber reminded me of an old-school student apartment the day after graduation. The province of an indifferent landlord, the place had fake wood paneling and stained wall-to-wall carpets. But it was the litter – torn newspapers (in Chinese, no less) strewn across the floor, faded photographs suggestive of better days, a terrarium on its last legs – that gave off the scent of life abandoned.

The Deitch release billed Black Acid Co-op as “a counter-culture enclave embedded in the metropolis. In this incarnation, the artists shift the focus from the production of illegal drugs to sites of sub-cultural groups and how they are situated in the larger urban environment.”

A collaborative endeavor of Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, the Deitch installation (covering 14 rooms on three floors) was the reincarnation of an earlier piece, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun (with Alexandre Singh), that debuted in Marfa, Texas. A second variation, Hello Meth Lab with a View, appeared in Miami in 2008.

Not having seen either of the earlier pieces, I’ll take it on faith that they focused more on drugs than did the New York installation did, and I’d certainly grant that Black Acid Co-op served as a kind of tripped-out gallery of countercultural dysfunction.

But if you believed the press release, you might have expected a sociological study when, in fact, you were treated to a 21st-century take on the inferno.

Once past the antechamber, you walked through a series of burned-out rooms – past a melted toilet, through a scorched mobile-trailer kitchenette/dinette, through a blasted-out refrigerator – into the heart of the installation: a functioning meth lab, complete with glass beakers and plastic tubes, aluminum ducts, and emptied-out Sudafed packets. Progressing from burned-out trailer to drug lab, you traveled back through time: from the tragic end of the story to its not-so-innocent beginnings, from the wreckage to the source.

The entire installation implied a similar narrative – a descent from hope to desolation. On the second floor, you stepped back into the earlier blissed-out dream of an alternative life: the all-natural, geodesic-domed hippie commune. Although not without its dark shadings (i.e., some fairly creepy specimen jars), the upstairs scene evoked a far more optimistic historical moment when quite a few apparently intelligent people believed in alchemy. Drop out and escape the depredations of modern life. Turn on and peace and love will rule the planet.

What transpires downstairs gives the lie to all that – not simply in the burned-out meth lab but in the other rooms as well. Next to the lab is what many observers have described as a take on Ted Kaczyinski’s lair: a library of books, their spines obsessively hand-lettered with titles like Society Never Advances, and a workstation with video screens where the paranoid recluse can monitor activity in the gallery rooms.

Through a hole ripped in the library wall, you enter what seems to be an uptown gallery showing an exhibition of black-and-white photographs. You might think you’ve stumbled on a red-carpeted refuge of civilization, but then you study the images and think again. The people populating them are fashionable and decidedly wealthy, but the world they inhabit is a decadent one, very Eyes Wide Shut. No one, not even the elites, can escape the wreckage.

Beyond that, through another hole ripped through the wall, a once-grand space – a cosmic ballroom? – is emptied out. It reminded me of the Sainte-Chapelle's azure vaulted Lower Chapel, painted to resemble the star-studded heavens, but here the azure is peeling off the walls, the red carpet is ripped and soiled, and the stars are nowhere in sight. Abandon hope, indeed.

A Kind of Joy
There’s more – more rooms and more associations. I haven’t described the Chinese herbal-emporium-cum-sex-shop in the basement or the wigged-out wig room. I haven’t talked about the imagery that recurs through the rooms – the coyote, the horse, the unicorn, those Sudafed packets. I haven’t mentioned other artists who are creating similar trompe l’oeil environments, people like Gregor Schneider and Christoph Buchel. And I haven’t invoked Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion’s account of the Haight that, like Black Acid Co-op, paints a world of lost souls.

Instead, I want to invite you into another suite of rooms created at a different New York gallery. The year was 2002 – I believe it was at Christmastime – and I dragged my mother and sister to the Ace Gallery, on Hudson Street, to see David Hammons’s Concerto in Black and Blue. Mom was 82 then and game (she still is) but, I think, a little perplexed by the experience.

Once again, the sleek gallery girls guarded the entryway, but this time they weren’t asking you to sign away your life. They were handing you a tiny (thumb-size) LED flashlight that cast a pinpoint of blue light when you pressed on it.

The door they guarded opened into a city block of gallery rooms – Ace was originally the longshoremen’s hiring hall – with 20 foot ceilings. Inside, though, you couldn’t see a thing – except maybe some pricks of blue light cast by fellow gallery-goers.

The title riffs on Fats Waller’s Black and Blue – What did I do to be so black and blue? the singer asks – and much of the commentary about the piece focuses on issues of race. Hammons, an African-American artist with a Duchampean flair, addresses blackness in his work but always from an oblique angle: he’s sold snowballs on the street, used garden spades and basketball hoops, and recast the American flag in black, red, and green. At the RISD museum this fall, I finally got to see one of his Rock Heads, a series of portrait sculptures made of stones on which he glued hair swept up from Harlem barbershops.

What’s fascinating – and just plain wonderful – about Hammons, though, is that he’s about far more than race. Concerto in Black and Blue was all about blackness: you were plunged into an entirely black world – not a light anywhere except those blue pinpricks floating off in distant space. So, this piece was about black experience but in the same way that, say, Freeman and Lowe’s is about white experience. Emerging from very specific contexts, both speak to a larger vision as well.

In Hammons’s case – or at least in the case of the Concerto – that vision is elegant, magical, ephemeral, and a far cry from a paranoid landscape populated by blasted-out meth labs and failed utopian communes.

Glenn Ligon put it this way: “Concerto and Black and Blue forced us to acknowledge that to live in the world is to live without guarantees, to face the unknown, to grope around in the dark. The darkness of the gallery was the darkness of the world, and yet, Hammons made us embrace it, find meaning, or even a kind of joy in it. As I stood in the center of one of those empty rooms, I thought “‘Oh, this is what it means to be alive.’”

P.S. In writing this piece, I came upon this wonderful quotation from Hammons: “The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize not to understand, and it never has any fun.”

Five Rooms: 3

2009-11-13T05:15:00.001-08:00

In 1908, Oscar Hammerstein (Oscar II’s grandfather) opened a grand opera house on North Broad Street in Philadelphia. A bravura performance, the Philadelphia Opera House filled an entire city block, had the largest stage in the city, and out-seated the cross-town competition, the Academy of Music by some 1,000 seats. Grand it may have been, but disastrously unprofitable. Despite selling out its first two seasons, the place nearly bankrupted Hammerstein. In 1910, he sold it to his arch-rival, the Metropolitan Opera Company, and thus began the building’s slow decline.

The Met (the name change came with the change in ownership) hung on as an opera house for another decade or so, but the Great Depression more or less killed the place. The last operas produced there, a double billing of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, were performed in 1934.

From then on, the Met’s fate reads like a Hollywood weepie where the last reel finds the once-fabulous star used-up and drunk in a dive somewhere on the very wrong side of the tracks. From 1934 on, the grand old lady saw use as a movie theater, ballroom, basketball court, and wrestling and boxing ring.

In 1954, the Reverend Thea Jones bought the Met for the Philadelphia Evangelistic Center. Again, despite SRO crowds, Jones didn’t have the funds to maintain the building. Plaster began raining down on the congregants and the balcony seats had to be sealed off with tarps. In 1988, Jones and his church moved on, and for the next six years, the Met stood empty and silently disintegrated.

In 1995, another church group, the Holy Ghost Headquarters Revival Center, came to the rescue when the Reverend Mark Hatcher received a vision to restore the Met and help revitalize the neighborhood. A year later, he bought the building and raised funds to stabilize the rapidly decaying structure. Plans for a full restoration have been made but the timeline is anyone’s guess.

The sanctuary, confined to the orchestra seats, has been painted a pristine white, and congregants gather at what the center’s website describes as “an end-time Kingdom building” to profess their faith in the immaculate conception, a sin-less life, the Crucifixion, burial and Resurrection, Holy Communion, and Water Baptism.

Meanwhile, the tarps remain and the balconies, hidden from sight, crumble into dust.

The Philadelphia Sublime
Ever since moving to Philadelphia in the late 1980s, I’ve been hearing about the Met and wanting to get inside.

In May 2009, I got the chance when the Hidden City Festival opened the upper reaches of the theater to public view. The building was one of nine sites showcased during the month-long festival, which commissioned artists to create performances and installations in forgotten historical and architectural landmarks around the city.

You enter not from the grand boulevard of Broad Street but rather from the diminutive side street. The lobby, too, is on a modest scale, but presents a scrubbed-clean face, providing a glimpse into the white-washed sanctuary, just beyond the concession stand.

The first hint of what awaits you comes as you ascend the stairway up to the balcony seats. The stairwell soars but, for all its height, constricts. Part of the claustrophobic effect comes, no doubt, from the sad condition of the place. The walls are shedding paint and the ceiling dripping plaster. The lighting is dim.

But more is at work than mere decay. Even back in its glory days, that narrow chamber must have seemed too small to accommodate all those crowds, and the long slog up to the balcony must have been wearying.

But then, at the top of the long flight of stairs, you would have entered into a magnificent, glittering space—or, today, into a magnificent ruin.

Before you is an enormous room that seems to be melting away before your eyes. The muted lighting gives the place a golden cast, and the blue tarps that protect the orchestra seats seem almost like shrouds. Plaster has fallen away from the lathing, from the housing of the box seats, from the ceiling medallions. Here and there, the ghosts of the murals that decorated the walls peer out at you, and the arches that define the proscenium are decaying away to skeletons.

The whole physical experience – following that cramped staircase into the vast chamber – reminded me of my visit, nearly 30 years ago, to Carlsbad Caverns. There, you make your way along a narrow passageway into what they modestly call the Big Room (at more than 350,000 square feet, the size of six football fields) – and gasp.

It was, I suppose, my first experience of the sublime – that peculiar confusion of terror and beauty we experience before the ineffable. To me, Carlsbad seemed the best proof of the Old Testament God, the one who thought nothing of unleashing a deluge on the world or demanding a blood sacrifice from Abraham. The hard lesson of the sublime is one of our cosmic insignificance. Spend too much time at Carlsbad, and you’d obey a divine order to kill your son too.

On the sublimity scale, the Met doesn’t attain Carlsbad status but it’s as close as you’ll find in Philadelphia. A place in its death throes, the Met offers only the prospect of its demise. Contemplating the wreckage, you’re hard-pressed to imagine how the engineers and conservators can possibly resurrect the place.

The Temple Rots
Returning to the ground floor, I studied a display of photographs that documented the lives of the faithful. The Holy Ghost Headquarters Church practices full-immersion baptism and some of the most moving pictures showed Reverend Hatcher plunging initiates into the baptismal pool.

I peered again into the pristine sanctuary and saw it as a kind of refuge, a psychic space as much as a physical one. An immaculate place where the faithful gathered each Sunday to worship, welcoming the new congregants, taking Holy Communion, striving for a pure, sin-less life.

Above them all the while, the upper reaches of their temple rots.

Final Installment: Black Acid Coop and Concerto in Black and Blue

Five Rooms: 1 + 2

2009-10-14T10:50:00.000-07:00

With fall upon us, I’ve been thinking back to the pleasures of summer. For me, those have come to include a day trip to New York in the languorous and steamy month of August.

Two summers ago, that meant a pilgrimage to MoMA and PS1 for the Olafur Eliasson survey. Art world sophisticates don’t seem altogether sure what to make of Eliasson as though worried that, if they like him too much, they’ll be accused of giving into sentimentality or succumbing to the siren call of beauty.

But in the Eliasson extravaganza that was New York in the summer of 2008 — the year of the waterfalls in the East River — it was quite literally Beauty that blew me away.

We went first to the MoMA and were charmed by much of what was on show there. My husband was taken with Ventilator, the suspended electric fan that described looping arcs above our heads in the Atrium; I loved the wall of live reindeer moss; and we both got vertigo from Space Reversal, the enclosed platform rigged up with mirrors that reflected ad infinitum.

To be honest, the waterfalls, while impressive, were a bit less than I’d hoped for: I liked the cascade off the Brooklyn Bridge the best, but overall the project seemed more like a triumph of engineering and sheer determination than “the remnants of a primordial Eden” that Roberta Smith described in her Times review.

But then we went to Queens.

At first, we were a little disappointed by the PS1 half of the survey. Take your time, the circular, ceiling-mounted, rotating mirror installation, was closed for repairs, and Reverse waterfall was fun, but not spectacular — again, as much an engineering feat as anything. We were about to go on our way — still admiring Eliasson but perhaps not loving him — when we realized that we’d missed one of the basement rooms.

We retraced our steps back downstairs and there found another installation, one that Eliasson had titled, with supreme self-confidence, Beauty.

First created in 1993, Beauty is an artificial rainbow made from a Fresnel lamp, water, nozzles, hose, wood, and a pump. The ceiling-mounted nozzles emit a fine spray of water that undulates down to a black rubber floor. The rainbow, which appears as a shimmering curtain at the far end of the gallery space, is created by refracting light off the water droplets. You can walk through the mist/wall — through the rainbow itself — and as Eliasson points out, what you see changes according to where you stand. From one view, you see the rainbow; from the other, you are blinded by the light from that Fresnel lamp.

But wherever you stand, Beauty delivers as promised.

Still, Eliasson’s explicit interests here — the subjectivity of vision and thus of experience — doesn’t altogether jibe with my take on the piece. His description seems a little too modest to me, as though he were missing his own point.

What Lies Beneath
Thinking about the piece one day, I realized that it put me in mind of the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome and what lies beneath. As at PS1, the experience there is one of descent: you enter the modern church — an 18th-century restoration of a Medieval sanctuary — but make your way downstairs, to a fourth-century church and then, even deeper in, to a second-century Roman temple.

You start in the light of day and the blare of modern-day Rome. Enter the church and you’re one step removed from the din but still in the realm of the sun. (The interior of the basilica is dominated by the spectacular gold Tree of Life mosaic in the half-dome behind the high altar.)

Descend into the lower sanctuary and the light falls away. There, you wander through the subterranean remains of the original church with its ghostly images of the Virgin and Child and a crowd of Byzantine believers waiting for the Last Judgment.

Even deeper in, you hear the sound of running water – an abandoned spring? – and then you enter the ancient site and find yourself inside the temple of Mithras. To call the space a temple is to suggest that you have entered into something as splendid as the sanctuary above. In fact, the Mithraic temple is a cave, dank and just a little sinister.

No one knows much about the god Mithras or his worship. Mithraism revealed its secrets only to initiates, handing down no written scripture and thus leaving generations of frustrated scholars at a loss about the exact nature of the cult. The best evidence anyone has comes from places like this temple room. Similar cave-rooms — they’re called mithraea — are found throughout the Roman Empire (from England all the way to Palestine), and they all feature depictions of Mithras, accompanied by a dog, a snake, a raven, and a scorpion, in the act of slaying a bull.

Theories abound about the meaning of the iconography. One holds that Mithraism is an adaptation of an Iranian cult. Another that, like Christianity, it involved the worship of a cosmic, monotheistic deity and the promise of rebirth. All seem to agree that the figures describe a cosmological system that maps out a journey of the soul from life through death and, through the agency of the god, back again.

Whatever your stand on the idea of resurrection – and on that count, I’m very much a non-believer – the experience of what the Greeks called katabasis (literally, going down) has a long lineage. In Classical mythology, you could hardly be a hero without descending into the Underworld on some errand or another and returning to tell the tale: Orpheus brings back Eurydice, Odysseus consults with Tiresias, Herakles rescues Theseus, and so on. Nor has it escaped scholars that Christ, too, was dead and entombed, only to rise back to life.

The Sublime Comes to Queens
Fast forward a couple of millennia and there we are, standing in a darkened, underground cavern and contemplating the sublime – in Queens of all places.

And while I don’t for a minute think that Olafur Eliasson is spreading the Word, I would argue that he’s invoking some powerful and ancient motifs. Using the elements themselves – water, light, earth – Beauty turns us into participants in the kind of experience that mystery religions, like Mithraism, addressed.

We do so, of course, in the thoroughly modern, thoroughly domesticated setting of the art museum.

But still we partake of the mystery. We come face to face with the two sides of awe: the delicate beauty of that rainbow and the terrible beauty of that blinding light.

Next up: Room 3, The Metropolitan Opera House in Philadelphia

Nancy Hellebrand & the Spiritual Discipline of Digital Photography

2009-08-22T06:30:00.001-07:00

Nancy Hellebrand’s photography began with an outward gaze. It was the 1960s, a raucous decade, and she was, like so many others in that long-ago era, passionate about social justice. Her work was documentary then: “Using a 35mm camera with black-and-white film,” she writes, “I photographed street people and the have-nots of wherever I lived and traveled.”

As her work evolved, her gaze narrowed, shifting from the world outside to consider what lies within. In the 1970s, while living in London, she persuaded her subjects to let her into their homes and came back from her visits with disarming portraits that are at once intimate and a little standoffish. In the 1980s, she got closer to her subjects, focusing in on the details of individual bodies (the armpit, the nape of the neck, that spot where the foot and ankle converge). Later in that same decade, flirting with abstraction, she transformed casually scrawled notes and grocery lists into stark images that might have been made by a Chinese calligrapher working with a Pilot pen. By the 1990s, she came up with a series of digital prints of tissue paper saturated with a variety of organic substances.

Driven to see into the heart of things, she had moved over the decades from social observation to something more intimate and, at the same time, abstract. At the same time, Hellebrand began another exploration, one that began with an interest in spirituality, meditation, and tai chi and eventually led her to Sufism.

Her latest work—color pictures, photographed and printed digitally, of trees, clouds, and water—speaks directly to that journey, delving into realms seemingly beyond the reach of the naturalistic strictures of conventional photography. As she puts it, “I want to photograph that which is purely energetic, which is beyond all that we see. Perhaps it can’t actually be photographed, but the process of trying to do so is rich and deep. Best of all, my photography and my spiritual practice become one in my desire to ‘see.’… Traveling from the physical to the non-physical is now my mode from shooting the photograph to final print. I am only interested in abstracting. Describing is not my domain anymore.”

The Purist Years
Through most of her career, though, Hellebrand has been devoted to “straight photography,” remaining a strict constructionist even as her deepening spiritual life challenged the medium’s traditional just-the-facts-ma’am ethic. For more than 20 years, as her work dug its way deeper into abstraction, she hewed to the party line: no cropping and no fancy darkroom tricks.

During that time, Hellebrand’s aesthetic was austere—as though true intimacy could be achieved only through restraint and formality. The content may be all over the place—a plain-faced woman, sweater slightly askew, standing proudly at the center of her modest London flat; the palm of a hand stretched taut; words, printed backwards and thus rendered indecipherable; a crumpled-up Kleenex—but the sensibility is singular. There’s a gravity in the presentation of all this work that serves as a connecting thread that stitches one series to the next and assures you that, yes, indeed, all this work springs from the same source.

The early work is black-and-white, certainly not an unusual aesthetic decision for a straight photographer, but, with Hellebrand, you get the sense that there’s more to it than simple acquiescence to the conventions of the medium. The soul of these pictures is black-and-white: they are stark and uncompromising. To imagine the intrusion of color into the scene—were those drapes green? That pantsuit mauve? The ink red?—simply won’t do. The power of these images—their beauty—lies in their asceticism.

Then, too, in much of this early work, Hellebrand seems always to be paring down the composition to its bare bones. From the first, documentary work to the handwriting pictures, you catch her employing, with some frequency, a frontal compositional strategy that places her subject square in the center of the image—as if in a formal presentation, an official state portrait or a traditional wedding portrait.

Elsewhere, she favors an off-center view that can verge on the ungainly. Breaking just about every rule in the Photo I composition book, some of these early pictures can look almost accidental, as though Hellebrand had stumbled on to something so compelling she didn’t have the time to “compose” either herself or the image. Achingly awkward, these pictures echo those moments when something anonymous, seemingly inconsequential—a hand, a neck, a letter—moves from the periphery of your vision to centerstage. Think of those times, sitting on the crosstown bus or standing on line at Home Depot, when you become fixated on some odd detail of the complete stranger before you—when the shape of his ear or the downy hair on her neck transfixes you—and you’ll get the idea.

For all their severity, all of Hellebrand’s early photographs are about the intimacy of seeing: the hand, the face, the word “neg” thrust front and center. The sometimes awkward quality of both the discomfitingly confrontational images and the seemingly caught-on-the-fly ones leads the viewer into a deeper consideration of what is depicted. Throwing you a little off balance, they draw you in as if daring you to see.

Discovering color
Now, after decades of microscopy, Hellebrand has flung open the doors and ventured outside, turning her sights on the natural world. Her work since the late 1990s has been absorbed by scenes from nature although, with her characteristic intensity, she’s focused not on the scenery but rather on the details. Her field of vision is consumed by the tree’s branches, not the tree entire, by the breaking wave, not the larger seascape.

And as ever, she makes you work for the payoff: the same rigor that distinguished all her earlier work is present in these open-air images, as is the same meditative quality. But even as she holds true to her fundamental aesthetic—one dedicated to introspection, silence, austerity—she cuts loose in these new pictures.

For Hellebrand has discovered color, and that discovery has transformed her photography. The impact of a simple shift from the monochromatic to the full spectrum leaves you reeling: it’s like walking out of a darkened house into a brilliant summer’s day. Where the intensity of the earlier imagery could feel claustrophobic at times, the opening-out of the current work suggests a looseness and generosity that invites you to enter in.

Color made its first public appearance in Hellebrand’s work with her Wind and Branches series (1997). Like the handwriting images, these photographs bring you uncomfortably close to the subject. With twigs and branches blocking your path all the way, you have to blaze a trail through this landscape. As you hack your way through the brush, you’re forced to look at the trees and foliage right in front of you. But even as you scrutinize them, the branches tremble in the passing wind and you lose clear sight of them as they blur and shimmer out of focus. Confronting you with the physical world all around you, Hellebrand is pushing you to see beyond the merely corporeal.

Likewise, her next series, titled simply Waves, reads less as descriptive landscape and more as a springboard for spiritual contemplation. With their blurred motion, subdued palette, and minimalist compositions, these images speak simultaneously about the ocean’s tangible physical presence and the impalpable energy that animates it.

But Hellebrand’s most recent work, also color, strikes a different note from virtually everything that has come before—even the pictures of trees and waves that led up to it. In these images of clouds and streams, the gravity—the austerity—has lifted, leaving behind images that are, in the former set, luminous, untethered, light as air and, in the latter, specular and playful. This time around, Hellebrand, enraptured by light and color, slips a little hedonism into the proceedings.

Like Mark Rothko in one of his more upbeat moods, she saturates her pictures with heightened colors, at times pushing them to the edge of dissonance. The color combinations are sometimes startling: electric yellow clouds against a cyan-colored sky; brassy coral against slate green; purplish gray against a field of color that shifts from butterscotch to the palest blue; a muted blue smudge on a faint rose. Like Rothko, too, Hellebrand has her somber moments, with inky blue or black clouds floating across the picture plane in several of the cloud pictures.

Some images even take a Turneresque turn: in one, the churning clouds suggest a vortex, with darkening thunderheads swooping down on low-lying clouds still stained delicate gold and pink. That kind of dynamism gets even more play in the Streams series. Here, the colors tend to be more muted—blues and grays with undertones of reds, greens, yellows—but they dance across and around the picture plane in a near frenzy of motion.

Digital metaphysics
Loosely speaking, I suppose, you’d have to categorize these pictures as landscapes. Another chronicler of the skies, John Constable, staked out similar turf when he climbed up Hampstead Heath for his marathon production of cloud studies in 1821. Those pictures, too, are hard to classify: are they finished paintings? Or merely preparatory sketches for one of the large-scale landscapes? Something in the subject itself seems to force the question: what are these people doing, making pictures of clouds—of ephemera?

Constable’s cloud studies, Romantic though they may have been in spirit, are relentlessly descriptive: on the back of each of these sketches, he carefully noted the time of day and the prevailing weather conditions when each was painted. Hellebrand makes no such effort to describe, to illustrate but, rather, flirts outrageously with abstraction. Uprooted from the particulars of time and place, her rushing streams are thoroughly anonymous; her feathery clouds could be anywhere in the world where rain falls and clouds form. It’s not accuracy Hellebrand is after but, as she puts it, “depth via transformation.”

It’s not simply the indeterminate location that sets these photographs loose from their moorings. The very technique Hellebrand employs in constructing them serves to destabilize these images: the aggressive pixilation undermines the substantiality of an already insubstantial subject. Her latter-day pointillism compromises the quiddity of the subjects—their “thingness”—until the physical world itself seems about to dissolve. From a distance, each photograph resolves into a readily understandable image, but as you come nearer, it begins to disintegrate: the clouds stop looking like clouds exactly and more like a brilliant array of dots. The illusion that the photograph has any subject at all begins to fall away.

But the fun doesn’t end there because, once you’ve passed the point where the image has broken down into a collection of dots, something altogether more metaphysical kicks in: you begin to notice that the pixels themselves suggest something fundamentally physical—as though they were describing the subject at the atomic level.

On the one hand, the digitization breaks down the integrity of the image—or, rather, the illusion of the integrity of the image. All those pixels underscore the notion that the subject under consideration isn’t really there—it’s just a trick of the digital printer. But the very means of dissolution—the dots of color—point at a deeper reality: these clouds break down, but they break down into something elementary, with the pixels representing that which underlies the physical world.

The Photographic Meditation
Any consideration of Hellebrand’s work must acknowledge the centrality of spirituality to her life and work. Seen from that perspective, the narrowing of focus over the course of her career might be better described as a deepening. She writes, “It is no longer the ‘thing itself’ which inspires me to photograph, but that aspect of experience which is beneath vision, physical touch, or descriptive language.”

In turning her attention to the skies, Hellebrand has joined a long line of artists—most of them painters—who set out to free picture-making from the tyranny of base matter. Rothko and Turner come to mind, of course, as do the early 19th-century German Romanticist Caspar David Freidrich and American Luminists like Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Hugh Lane.

The camera, however, is not a paintbrush. It’s one thing for a painter to banish the material world from his canvas. But if you think about it, a photographer who is no longer engaged by “the thing itself,” who adopts an air of insouciance toward what is before the lens might find herself in a professional quandary. Conventional photography is, at core, a very clever application of physics: physical particles of light reflect off physical surfaces, make their way—via the agency of a lens—to a physical sheet of chemically sensitized film, and there leave their physical mark. In the darkroom, the entire process gets repeated to create the final image—itself a physical object.

In this veritable orgy of materiality, how to photograph that which is beneath vision, beyond touch—that which is immaterial?

Hellebrand’s output, at least since the 1980s, has represented a sustained effort to devise answers to that question—answers that bend, perhaps inevitably, toward abstraction. Her work proposes a kind of transcendental seeing and intimates that, yes, you can see into the essence of things. As a photographer, she has no choice but to record the concrete, but for Hellebrand the object before her lens points to what lies beyond the limits of experience. And the rigor—the relentless quality of so much of her earlier work—has enabled her to wrest something transcendent from the merely concrete.

The extreme close-ups shove your nose right into the cracks and crevices of another’s body—the parts you don’t look at, the parts you normally don’t bother to see. The handwriting images move in even closer on their subject, cutting the words loose to float across the picture plane like so many Zen koans. If possible, the tissue paper series is even more unreadable, with the paper forming hills and valleys in an anonymous, affectless landscape.

But the literal-mindedness of the analog process left her at the mercy of “the thing itself,” of that latent image trapped by the laws of physics onto the film’s surface. With the black-and-white work, her strategy was one of extreme focus, of exacting definition. She zoomed in so closely on her subjects that the smallest detail became monumental, achieving abstraction through microscopic description. The results, while full of integrity, could be a tad intimidating: as though you were being asked to participate in a particularly arduous spiritual discipline—a marathon walking meditation or a vow of silence.

Going digital has freed Hellebrand up to do whatever she wants to with “reality.” As she puts it, “I can take liberties with digitally captured information that were never possible, or even desirable, with conventional film and prints. I can use content as raw material rather than as stated fact.”

Of course, from your first glimpse of her digital pictures, you understand perfectly that they’re not intended as literal images of specific clouds or illustrations of particular streams. But rather than narrowing down her field of vision—as she did in, say, the handwriting series—Hellebrand has opened up and let the sunlight come pouring in. In a curious paradox, she leads you to the same place—of abstraction, transcendence, silence—but now her tone is far more seductive, less severe.

Come to think of it, though, it’s not that Hellebrand has abandoned austerity but rather that she’s embraced her inner voluptuary. In pulling off the rather neat trick of reconciling the ascetic and the sensualist, she’s created a group of photographs that promise an intimate encounter with the transcendent. For the earthbound among us, that can be a rather daunting prospect—like enlisting for a lifetime hitch in the hermitage.

The thing is, the vision she presents in these latest pictures is so ravishingly beautiful—so full of life and sheer pleasure—that you’re almost tempted to sign up.

A Ruthless Voyeurism

2009-05-09T13:24:00.001-07:00

Looking over Frank Rodick’s new series, Faithless Grottoes, I’ve had momentary flashes on Vermeer. A more improbable pairing is hard to imagine, but the work sent me back to Edward Snow on Vermeer. A poet by trade, Snow finds depths—and dark corners—in Vermeer that’s a far cry from Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth. Snow pays a lot of attention to the space in the paintings. In his consideration of Head of a Young Girl, he describes the black space of the painting as “ruthless”—a word that would aptly describe virtually all of the claustrophobic spaces Rodick’s people inhabit.

And here’s Snow describing the figure of the old madam in The Procuress: “The black in which Vermeer has shrouded her negates any sense of bodily presence and reduces her to nothing more than pure face, a hovering, voyeuristic regard.” Tweak that sentence here and there, and you have an entirely convincing description of what’s going on in the Faithless Grottoes images.

Then look at the reflection in the window of Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. The ghost image bears an eerie resemblance to one of the heads in Rodick’s Decrement (All flesh / 62 chambers).

Granted, Vermeer’s shrouded, hovering faces live on the outskirts of the imagery—the paintings, with their serene young women at the heart, are exquisitely poised. You have to attend closely to Vermeer to discern the shadows—whereas the Faithless Grottoes photographs have room for nothing but shrouded, hovering figures. Still Snow’s deep reading of the paintings got me thinking—about the space both these artists have created; about where we, the viewers, stand in relation to the scene; about looking, mirrors, reflection (its literal meaning is bending back), voyeurism.

In the Faithless Grottoes pictures, I find myself, again and again, looking—peering—into the scene. But not in a casual way. I feel locked into this exchange, held in place the way that the audience in a darkened movie theater is somehow the victim of the images flickering on the screen. In The Vagrant Coordinates of a Solitary Mind, the woman’s image repeats three times like frames in a filmstrip.

As ambiguous as one of Antonioni’s women (or, indeed, one of Vermeer’s solitaries), she is inscrutable. Like so many beautiful women, she carries within her the knowledge of being watched. But she is nonetheless mute, locked in her own inner world, oblivious to us and to the camera that captures her. And so we become spies, reviewing the surveillance tape for clues to her secrets. We are squarely in the image—but yet not at all.

In the first frame, her beauty seduces us: she’s offering herself up in that first frame, a glamorous sunbather on the Riviera, remote and beautiful. But she softens, both in her expression and in her flesh. In the central frame, the glam girl has melted away, her perfect mask dissolved a little now, until in our last glimpse of her, she has broken up into nothingness, consumed by the encroaching blackness, her face dissolving and her left arm writhing in the agony of death.

Of course, you can also read this image not as a meditation on mortality but rather as a stripping away of the mask. The glamorous, self-possessed persona of the first panel passes through the transitional state depicted in the central image and in the final frame reveals the underlying torment—or emptiness. As in so many of the Faithless Grottoes pictures, the repetitions blast away the notion of a fixed person: it’s all persona, all mask.

Decrement (all flesh / 63 chambers) follows a similar logic. A portrait of a human soul in different manifestations—hunger, insanity, yearning, despair, ferocity, innocence—it uses the rhetorical device of repetition to destablizes everything. As in Vagrant Coordinates, the stuttering of the image certainly serves as evidence of the dissolution of the self—we seem to be witness to a soul very much on the outs with itself—but also does the far more treacherous work of undermining the very idea of a fixed self and of the possibility of our knowing.

Where is she? The center image at the far left, and perhaps the middle image at the bottom, suggest a room to me, perhaps the frame of a door. For some reason, that little nugget makes a big difference to me. Maybe, it’s simply that her being in a room, with a door, means that she’s not allegorical or symbolic. She’s real flesh and that means her suffering and her malevolence take place in real space and real time.

Snow sees the subject in Head of a Young Girl as both turning toward us and turning away: she has turned to look at the painter and then, in the same moment, she begins to turn away from him. For me, the Decrement panels suggest a similar movement. At times, Rodick's woman is appealing to us, looking on us as potential saviors or as prey, depending on which image you home in on. At other times, she is turned away, as though on the other side of an unbridgeable divide, alone in her own, doomed world.

For all her aggression (both the kind that would attack us and the kind that would attach herself to us), she is apart. And unlike Vermeer’s Young Girl, this woman is not captured in an evanescent moment (although in the detail at left, she bears more than a passing resemblance to the reflection in Open Window). Rather, she is trapped in endless suffering, fixed like an ant somehow caught still living in amber and we have “collected” her.

Like virtually all of Vermeer’s work, Faithless Grottoes toys with the question of voyeurism and the ethics of looking. In most of Vermeer, of course, we are pure voyeurs, watchers whose presence goes unacknowledged by the subjects. Head of a Young Girl is the exception, as Snow so eloquently explains. Here, we are seen seeing.

The pair at the beginning of this post—the Young Girl and the Decrement woman—both implicate us. They appeal directly to us and, with that direct gaze, raise the stakes. The question now is not simply what does it mean that we look, that we consume them, but what does it mean that, having had our fill, we look away, that we abandon them to their fate.

The Human Gaze: Part 8

2009-05-02T08:43:00.001-07:00

The image of a wild animal becomes the starting-point of a daydream: a point from which the day-dreamer departs with his back turned.
--John Berger, “Why We Look at Animals”

8: Animals Are Us

Last year, my husband and I went to a production of Animal Farm at the Mum Puppettheatre (may it rest in peace) in Philadelphia. I confess: I cried when Boxer died.

Wherever animals may be in our real lives—consigned to the idle lives of pets, or to the margins as zoo animals, or to the horrors of the slaughterhouse and the factory farm—they live in our imagination.

Too powerful to be merely a holdover from childhood, with its accompaniment of animals stuffed, cartooned and/or illustrated, the feelings run deep. Berger is right to link “the reduction of the animal” with our own reduction “to isolated productive and consuming units.” With industrialized capitalism, the world did indeed turn upside down, shaking us loose from our birthplace, our hometown, our connection to the land, our livestock, our father-to-son livelihoods, all but our immediate family—in short, our birthright. We are all exiles now.

What Berger overlooks or undervalues, I’m not sure which, is that, though we are exiles, we are exiles with memory.

And some of us, it would seem, have a better memory than others. I think here of Josef Koudelka and Romania 1968, the straight-out-of-a-fable picture of a Gypsy and his horse in conversation. Or just about all of the work of Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti.

Peopled by creatures with interior lives, cares and woes, joys and sorrows all their own, Sammallahti’s photographs of animals show us the way they live when left to their own devices. He photographs the way you imagine Aesop or LaFontaine would have, and each little picture—they’re all fairly small in scale—reads like a fable or an allegory. Being fully autonomous, the animals in these pictures speak to us, and we in turn respond, seeing something of our own lives in theirs.

It’s twilight and, half-submerged in a still pond, a frog—a distinguished professor? an old-time Chicago ward boss?—takes our measure. In the kingdom of the dogs, a Huskie, alert and regal, sits enthroned on a tractor seat and surveys the two supplicant canines at his feet while a third slinks away, muttering revolution. Under a Nepalese tree, a philosopher monkey sits on a rock, contemplating samsara, while in a Moroccan courtyard, the assembly of animals—sheep, goats, cows, donkeys—congregates for a great, if raucous, deliberation. And in a realist’s version of the lamb lying down with the lion, an Indian dog sleeps on the back of a sacred Brahman cow.

Small-scale and unprepossessing, Sammallahti’s pictures seem, at first glance, as humble as the animals they depict. They remind me of magic-realist fiction—a very hard genre to pull off. Too many practitioners of the form fail to ground the magic in the ordinary, leaving the reader struggling with that suspension-of-disbelief thing. But Sammallahti is the most down-to-earth of fabulists, and his animal characters go about their everyday business just as you and I would.

Not all symbolists set out to charm is the way Sammallahti does, trying to build a bridge from our world to the animals’. For many artists, animals are called on to make a point, often, it seems a political one. Certainly George Orwell falls into this camp.

As does Paula Luttringer. Kidnapped and held in one of Argentina’s secret detention centers back in the mid-1970s, Luttringer first began addressing that experience through a series called El Matadero (The Slaughterhouse). Serving as our Virgil, Luttringer plunges us into the world of the slaughterhouse. But in no way does she intend these pictures, with their lifeless carcasses and sulphurous aura, as an indictment of current industry practices but rather as an evocation of a larger brutality.

The Human Gaze: Part 7

2009-05-02T08:28:00.000-07:00

The central conceit of the zoo, and in fact the central conceit of the whole culture, is that all of these “others” have been placed here for us, that they do not have any existence independent of us, that the fish in the oceans are waiting there for us to catch them, that the trees in the forest stand ready for us to cut them down, that the animals in the zoo are there for us to be entertained by them.
--Derrick Jensen, Thought to Exist in the Wild

7: The Poor Creature's Cage

When I was in my 20s, I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Being a bit of a nutter, I used to walk to work, three miles away in midtown. One of my great pleasures each morning was walking through Central Park and visiting the California sea lions in the zoo there. I avoided the other animals—their squalor was just too depressing—but the sea lions! The sea lions seemed free to me.

In retrospect, I see that my notion that the sea lions were free tells you more about my own condition than theirs. After all, in their natural habitat, they chase after fish in the open sea. On land, these most social of creatures live packed together, calling out to one another incessantly, while in the ocean, they form floating “rafts.” They surf the breakers and sometimes jump, like porpoises, out of the water. The experts believe that latter behavior is designed to speed up their swimming—they’ve clocked in at 25 miles an hour and can dive up to 600 feet—but I wonder whether they might also leap for the joy of it. Whatever the case, sea lions take up room, and while Central Park may give them a generous swath of real estate by Manhattan standards, the concrete pool they inhabit is puny by their own.

If you’re thinking about zoos and photography and New York, you think Garry Winogrand. For Winogrand, the zoo was the perfect hunting ground to aim his sights not at the caged animals, but straight at the human ones. Perhaps the most carnivorous photographer ever to stalk the streets, Winogrand couldn’t care less about the plight of the rhinos or the apes. No, with his anarchic spirit, he uses them—uses their very animality—to lay bare our own. He was America’s great court jester, thumbing his nose at us all.

Drawing on the same trope is Robert Doisneau’s The Higher Animals. The people here, joshing and pointing at the poor monkey, hardly make a good showing. As for the monkey, is it too sacrilegious to say that, with all his spiritual serenity and rising-above-it-all, he reminds me of the Dalai Lama? Judging from the title, we can safely assume that Doisneau is making that old argument that humans should be careful to claim too much in the way of superiority over their fellow creatures. But put aside that stale, old chestnut and what you have is a heartbreaking picture of a simian on display.

When I first stumbled on this image years ago, I thought immediately of Vladimir Nabokov’s explanation for the “initial shiver of inspiration” for Lolita: it was, he wrote, “prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” The story seems apocryphal—no one has been able to track down either drawing or article—but a few years back, a Nabokov fan unearthed a photograph taken by a chimpanzee named Cookie. The picture—which ran in the December 5, 1949, issue of Life magazine just across from a letter sent in by the master himself (clearing up a point of lepidoptery)—is as heartbreaking as Nabokov’s description: the bars of the cage overwhelm the picture and the people staring in at the “poor creature” fade away, mere afterthoughts.

The Human Gaze: Part 9

2009-05-02T08:11:00.000-07:00

Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another…. “Philosophy is really homesickness,” says Novalis: “it is the urge to be at home everywhere.”
--Georg Lukacs

9. The End

At more than one moment in the writing of this piece, I wondered what in mercy’s name was I up to. Animals in photographs? Why not desks? Or coffee cups? Or white blouses?

To make matters worse, I realized one day that, here I was writing about animals, about how we see them and what our seeing reveals about us, and I was struggling to connect up with this elemental world—and what were the tools I was turning to? Those most human of devices—writing and classifying. I needed to pin down my specimens after all.

Nina Katchadourian is on point here. Intrigued by the halfway status of the diorama animals, part real and part artificial, she saw parallels between them and pets. Both had one (figurative) foot in nature and the other (ditto) in the world of culture. But her classic-natural-history-diorama-with-a-twist proved too much for the museum curators and they banished the offending Chloe. Wanting to have their cake and eat it, they did include Katchadourian’s vitrine, now empty, in the exhibition. Talk about a halfway status!

Berger is certainly right that industrialization and capitalism—the whole greedy maw of modernity—ushered in a new age. The farmer scratching his pig’s head is a marginal figure now. Saying this, I mean no disrespect to Verlyn Klingenborg and, in fact, hope for more of his kind. But I’m not holding my breath. Confronted with a hog, most of us now wouldn’t have a clue how to behave: we wouldn’t know how to handle the immediate situation—how to scratch its head, if you will—and we wouldn’t know how to kill it and dress its meat.

It seems to me that most of us live now, at best, under a kind of house arrest: we can look out the windows provided by the panoply of gadgets we’ve devised (televisions, cameras, computers) and see the great wide world out there but we can’t just walk out the front door and wander.
.
Still, I think Berger’s not altogether right. I believe that something remains, and it’s that something that has prodded me along in writing this essay, this attempt to understand and perhaps even to reconcile.

I wrote sections of this piece at an artists’ retreat in Virginia. In the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, the animal world is more noisily present than in Center City Philadelphia. Every morning, I awakened to the clatter of birds—mockingbirds, cardinals, catbirds. The bluebirds were hatching when I was there and you’d see their sudden flash of lapis flitting above the meadow. On evening walks, we passed by cows grazing—the center leases out pastureland to one of the local farmers—and on the path from the studios to the residence, is a paddock for two horses: a chestnut and a particularly sociable bay.

One night, as I was passing their paddock on my return to the residence, I heard a rustling in the darkness, the deliberate clopping of hooves. The bay approached, coming up to the fence that separated his turf from mine. We eyed each other. I stroked its muzzle. It snorted a gentle snort. And then the chestnut stirred across the field. My horse turned away from me and made its way back into the darkness.

The Human Gaze: Part 6

2009-05-02T07:59:00.000-07:00

Perhaps, these insects are little machines in a deep sleep, but looking at their rigidly armored bodies, their staring eyes and their mute performances, one cannot help at times wondering if there is anyone inside.
--Vincent Dethier, “Microscopic Brains”

6: The Laughing Rat
The day I came back to work after my father died, Natalia, a colleague’s white Shepard, came into my office and laid its head on my lap. That gesture was as touching and as welcomed—as purely comforting—as any condolence note I had received.

Whatever the experts may say, we amateurs know that animals have moods and emotions. Anyone who has so much as spent a weekend in the company of a dog or a cat knows that much. Animals play sometimes and sometimes they mope. They mourn the death of their companions, and they empathize with your grief.

But behavioral science, the orthodoxy for decades in the academy, argues that behavior springs from external rather than internal sources—that is, physical stimuli, not mental states. In this paradigm, the inner life is essentially irrelevant, a grace note rather than the establishing chord. And if its practitioners believed such about the human psyche, well, they saw the animal mind as altogether mute.

The behaviorists did, however, introduce the rigor of scientific method to the study of behavior and, according to Charles Siebert, therein laid the groundwork for their own downfall. Living, as it seems we are, in a second Age of Discovery, we’ve seen the geneticists and molecular and evolutionary biologists, with their research into the biological basis of behavior, transforming the field of behavioral psychology, grounding it in a fuller understanding of the biology behind the behavior.

Writing in a New York Times article, “The Animal Self,” Siebert described studies—all rigorously scientific—that discern the presence of personality in animals: “All sorts of research has been done in recent years revealing various aspects of animal complexity,” he writes, “African gray parrots that can not only count but can also grasp the concept of zero; self-recognition, empathy and the cultural transference of tool use in both chimps and dolphins; individual face-recognition among sheep; courtship songs in mice; laughter in rats.”

The idea that a dolphin or even a sheep might have a personality may not come as such a surprise. But insects? Seibert cites studies that found “behavioral variation” in fruit flies, water striders (we called them skates when I was a kid), and spiders. So we have one particularly belligerent fly that attacks all its fellow drosophila, therein staking claim to a whole banana but striking out with the babes. And water striders whose responses to the arrival of a predator cover a familiar range of reactions—from total obliviousness, to cautious retreat, to run-for-your-life panic. And an individual female spider so aggressive it can’t distinguish between a potential mate and a potential meal.

For artists plumbing the depths of animal personality, video seems to be the medium of choice. Catherine Chalmers, who has chosen the insect world as her great subject, shot her Safari video from a roach-eye point of view. In the opening shot, the star of the piece, an American cockroach, emerges from the misty waters into the dangerous jungle set that Chalmers created in her Manhattan studio (you do have to feel for her neighbors). There, it encounters all manner of adventures, meeting along the way a California king snake, battling rhinoceros beetles, red-spotted newts, and finally—and fatally—a pygmy chameleon. I have to confess to a particular affection for this work: back when I was a kid growing up in suburban New Jersey, I loved to lie face down in the grass, eyeball to eyeball with the bugs. To me, and maybe to the ants as well, it looked like a jungle in there.

Along these same lines, Nina Katchadourian’s video Gift records the battle of wills between artist and spider. It’s an outgrowth of her Mended Spiderweb series, in which Katchadourian searched out broken webs and repaired them with red sewing thread. The animals were less than thrilled. “My repairs were always rejected by the spiders and discarded,” she writes, “usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned.”

For her Gift piece, she spelled out the word “GIFT” in little thread letters and then inserted them into the web. But one particular spider was, in the artist’s word, “a real control freak,” who immediately ripped out each letter. In an uncanny echo of E.B. White’s classic animal tale of Charlotte, the spelling spider, Katchadourian’s critter removed each letter in order: G – I – F - T.

The Human Gaze: Part 5

2009-05-02T06:02:00.000-07:00

All animals appear like fish seen through the plate glass of an aquarium.
--John Berger, “Why We Look at Animals”

5: A Fine Specimen

When I was a kid—up until sometime in high school, when I transferred my affections to books and albums—I collected shells, birds’ nests, mushroom-spore prints, dog figurines, rocks, Time magazine covers. Mine was an innocent enough impulse—one not uncommon, I imagine, among children, for whom all the world is new. Little did I, or my suffering parents, know that what I was actually engaged in was one of the defining activities of Western culture.

Which is not to say that Europeans invented the behavior. Rather, the collecting impulse runs deep. Many animals—some 70 species—are known to hoard although, being more practical-minded than we, most of them are stockpiling food. Our species, too, seems to be hard-wired for hoarding: researchers at the University of Iowa have recently identified the right mesial of the prefrontal cortex as the neurological source for the behavior.

Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Augustus amassed “statues and pictures [and] … objects which were curious by reason of their age and rarity, like the huge remains of monstrous beasts which had been discovered on the Island of Capri, called giants’ bones or heroes’ weapons.” Among the Chinese elite, a tradition of collecting emerged in the 10th century or so, but here with a focus on cultural artifacts like ancient bronzes, pottery, texts, and paintings.

In the West, it was the Age of Exploration that kicked off a frenzy of collecting, as though the encounter with so much that was unfamiliar overstimulated the right mesial of an entire culture. Whatever the cause, the resulting rage for hodgepodge collecting found expression in the wunderkammern, wonder-rooms, the intellectual great-grandfather of the modern-day museum. These cabinets of curiosities were encyclopedic, housing scientific specimens, cultural artifacts, and artwork under one conceptual roof.

History is only inevitable in hindsight. Nonetheless, it hardly seems coincidental that, confronted with all this stuff—this brand-new, sometimes alarming information about the world—people like Linnaeus began sorting, creating taxonomies, classifying specimens. They needed to make sense of it all.
The modern museum, the direct descendant of all that collecting and classifying, has provided rich fodder for many artists in the last decades: Mark Dion, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Rosamund Purcell, Coco Fusco, who am I forgetting?

My favorite tale from this realm comes from Nina Katchadourian, who was invited in 1994 to make a site-specific piece for the San Diego Museum of Natural History. Katchadourian, who contemplates our face-off with the animal world, was fascinated by the animal dioramas there. She explains: “They seemed so full of paradoxes: the animals were shown ‘in the natural habitat,’ but the viewer always came unnaturally close to them; they were made of their real skins, but at the same time, they seemed dead and artificial.”

Katchadourian wondered whether people ever had their pets taxidermied--in other words, whether there were domestic versions of these dioramas. What better subject for such treatment than the pampered house pet--an animal that already stuck in limbo, with one step in the natural world and the other in the litter box?

Katchadourian tracked down Chloe, a stuffed Papillion lap dog, and arranged to borrow the object from its devoted owner. She researched Chloe's natural habitat and created a diorama with Chloe perched on her peach-colored towel spread over her special pillow, complete with explanatory signage.

The museum balked, refusing the piece on the grounds that it would offend people and upset small children.

“I pointed out that Chloe was genetically very much like the Coyote who lived in a nearby diorama, and that the Coyote didn't seem to upset or confuse anyone too much, but to no avail. The piece was booted out of the show.”

The camera has been every bit as instrumental as the museum in our ongoing effort to pin it all down. Indeed, the photographic archive is brimming with examples of this same need to catalogue, some benign, others not so: Alphonse Bertillon and the mug shot, Eadweard Muybridge and the motion studies, Edward Curtis and the North American Indians, Karl Blossfeldt and the Wundergarten der Natur, August Sander and “Man in the Twentieth Century,” Berenice Abbot and New York City.

Although far less self-assured than in its 19th-century heyday, classifying photographers still labor under the impulse to corral the world and its inhabitants. The best-known contemporary example—the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher—focused on the industrial landscape, but animals get their day as well. Back in 1990, James Balog hit the bookstores with Survivors; an elegant coffee table book of endangered animals posed against a white seamless—like a Richard Avedon production only with animals and without the attitude.

In this genre, monkeys—no surprise here—seem to hold particular fascination. A few years ago, Jill Greenberg inflicted a series of monkey “portraits” on the world, and the world, for reasons far beyond my ken, lapped them up. Ostensibly an effort to capture the range of simian emotion, these souped-up versions of monkeys—Greenberg is a whiz with Photoshop—look like something that came out of Disney by way of the Bachrach Studios, more cartoon than portrait. An unseemly taint clings to them: they remind me of those sad video clips of JonBenet Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen dolled up like a 21-year-old sexpot. It’s as though Greenberg thinks the poor apes need a makeover, so they’ll be more palatable to us.

Photography seems in no short supply of simians—notwithstanding the fact that some 25 percent of the world’s primate species are endangered. Mark Kessell’s Unmet Friends series, although including birds, lizards, and fish, skews heavily toward apes and monkeys. Like Greenberg’s, this work takes animal emotion as its organizing principle but, unlike hers, doesn’t condescend to its subject or its audience.

Both photographers, though, share an encyclopedic urge—to “convey the startling range of emotions and personalities,” as the release for Greenberg’s show put it. Even more striking, both propose linkages between the human and animal: for Greenberg, pandering to the crowd, that means showing “how they’re just like us.” Cue the music.

Kessell, with more on his mind, suggests something more subtle: while he has certainly captured facial expressions, he doesn’t ascribe particular meanings to them. What his animals are in fact feeling remains a mystery.

The Human Gaze: Part 4

2009-05-02T05:46:00.000-07:00

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
--Genesis 1:26

4. Working Like a Dog

Even the industrialized countries still have working animals—and I don’t mean William Wegman’s Weimeraners. I’d put money down that, if you don’t count lab animals, most of the workers out there are dogs. Canine job opportunities abound—there are guide dogs, therapy dogs, search and rescue dogs, police dogs, guard dogs, herding dogs—and Fido can always run away to join the circus and be a performing dog if all else fails.

But horses get most of the press. In this country, of course, the horse is iconic, and much of the work on the subject is pure nostalgia—with wistful names to suit. So we have Claude Cambon with A Year on the Ranch: Seasons of Solitude, Adam Jahiel with The Last Cowboy, and the granddaddy of them all, William Albert Allard’s Vanishing Breed. But the bias isn’t limited to Americans: consider Yann Arthus-Berthrand and his cottage industry in photographing farm animals, pets, and now horses.

As proficient as all these photographers may be—and as beautiful as many of their images—the genre suffers from, not to put it kindly, irrelevance. The real truth is that the American cowboy and his horse rode off into the sunset decades ago: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people employed in “support activities for animal production”—the category in which cowboys fall—is 10,440 as of May 2007.

Even more rare are the Arabbers, street vendors who used to sell produce from horse-drawn wagons in cities up and down the East Coast. (The name is thought to derive from “street arabs,” 19th-century British slang for street urchins.) Back in the late 1980s, Robin Schwartz documented something of this world, focusing her camera largely on the neighborhood boys who mucked out the stables in exchange for the chance to ride the horses down the mean streets of Baltimore, the only city where the arabbers still ply their trade. Today, only a handful remain even there, and the latest news from that quarter doesn’t bode well for their survival.

The most pertinent example of images of working animals that I know comes from a benighted part of the world where poverty reigns and animals have yet to be entirely supplanted by machinery. Pieter Hugo’s Hyena and Other Men series depicts young Hausa men in the company of their hyenas, monkeys, and pythons. In a throwback to Europe’s dancing bear acts, with a touch of canny cross-marketing thrown in, these itinerant performers stage spectacles with their animals: acting out mock attacks, the men ascribe their power to fight off the fearsome beasts to their herbal medicines—which just happen to be for sale after the show.

Echoing Pollan, Hugo describes the relationship between the men and their animals as “paradoxical ... sometimes doting and affectionate, sometimes brutal and cruel.” Such nuances are beyond the grasp of many Westerners, though. The animal rights community, as Hugo explains, is aghast. But since it’s all on the up and up—the Hausa have permits to keep the animals—intervention won’t be happening any time soon. But Hugo demurs a little: “When I asked Nigerians, ‘How do you feel about the way they treat animals,’ the question confused people. Their responses always involved issues of economic survival…. Europeans invariably only ask about the welfare of the animals but this question misses the point. Instead, perhaps, we could ask why these performers need to catch wild animals to make a living.”

The Westerners also overlook the possibility of affection between the Hausa and their animals. On this particular point, though, the evidence of the photos is ambiguous. The men, performers all, strike poses: proud and elegant, they present themselves as strongmen, warriors. You don’t see any cuddling here, but when a hyena jumps up on a man, as Mainasara does with his handler Abdullahi Mohammed, and the man lets it, trust—and perhaps something like affection—must enter into the relationship somewhere.

The Human Gaze: Part 3

2009-04-17T13:53:00.000-07:00

[The keeping of pets] is part of that universal but personal withdrawal into the private small family unit, decorated or furnished with mementoes from the outside world, which is such a distinguishing feature of consumer societies.
John Berger, “Why We Look at Animals”

3. Pets

Bud,* the melancholic-seeming tabby we rescued from a near-certain death at the animal shelter, lay next to my table as I wrote this. To be more accurate, I should say that he sprawled, spread eagle, trying to catch whatever cooling breeze he could from the overhead fan.

Or so I imagine. In truth, I can have no idea what’s going on in Bud’s head.

It was a steamy day in August so I’ll stand by my explanation. But fundamental to our relationship is the fact that neither of us can ever really know what the other is thinking. Of course, I know when he’s hungry and when he wants to be petted. I know when he wants out and when he’s got a mouse in his sights.

But no matter how important a presence he is in our household and no matter how much I love him, Bud will always be a stranger to me. Believing that as I do, I am ever at a loss for words when people refer to him as one of my “children.” I do understand that this assignment of kinship isn’t meant literally, but I also suspect that this particular choice of words reveals the fundamental weirdness of our relationship to our pets.

Photographs of people’s pets generally devolve into photographs of people with their pets—more or less what Berger has in mind. Later in the passage quoted above, he writes, “The pet completes him [the pet owner], offering response to aspects of his character which would otherwise remain unconfirmed.”

Surely, this description encompasses much of the photography one sees of people and their pets. In Suki Dhanda’s Year of the Dog series, a cross section of Londoners and their dogs sat for mostly formal environmental portraits. Many of the shots suggest precisely the kind of transference Berger describes: the dog serves as an identifier of its owner, almost—and I don’t mean to be harsh here—as a kind of accessory. Certainly their pit bulls go a long way toward pumping up the three young men in “Mark, Bulent, Daniel, Lady and Casper,” while the Afghan in “Anita, Raphael, Isabella, Alfie and Amadeus” functions as a mark of elegance, or perhaps as a reminder of lost tranquility, for the young mother at the mercy of her two toddlers.

Ratcheting it up a notch, Jennifer Karady staged “narrative portraits” that set out to dramatize the relations between her human subjects and their animals. In Karady’s world, people turn to pets for “human” companionship: one particularly creepy set-up, “Wedding Night, Val and Rex, Germantown, NY,” depicts the naked Val gazing dreamily out the bedroom window while the presumably post-coital Rex dozes off on the bed nearby. “In Memoriam: Angela and Her First Love Angel” depicts Angela (mercifully clothed) holding what I have to assume is the taxidermied remains of the late Golden Retriever Angel. Around her in the room are a rabbit, a cat and another dog, presumably an inadequate replacement for the dearly departed.

Robin Schwartz, who seems virtually incapable of taking a photograph without an animal in there somewhere, started out with pictures of primates and dogs, most of them living as pets. You get an occasional glimpse of a person but, for the most part, the human presence is implicit only in the environments: a Hamadryas Baboon riding a Big Wheels tricycle or a Greyhound lounging in the back seat of a convertible roadster. Of late, Schwartz has been staging photographs that feature her daughter, Amelia, and a veritable menagerie of animals. For Schwartz, these pictures depict “real-world journeys” generated by fantasy, and for her viewer, the line between what’s real and what’s staged can be difficult to discern. So many of the pictures feature “normal” animals—dogs, cats, goats, horses—that you get lulled into accepting these as straight documents. Then the elephants trundle into view and the deer circle around, and you realize that you’re in some hybrid territory. Or as Schwartz puts it, “the line of who is a person and who is an animal overlaps, is blurred.”

While the photographs may all be sweet and harmless, albeit sometimes weird, there is, as Berger suggests, a tragedy here too. Or at least a palpable loss. Back in the day, people didn’t keep animals just for the companionship. Animals, like people, had to earn their keep: so dogs worked as herders and hunters, and horses signed on for transportation and agricultural duty. The latest theory about the domestication of cats argues that they entered the human sphere with the rise of agriculture. In an early example of entente cordiale, the cats found benefit in hanging around the grain stores, where rats and mice abounded, and the farmers tolerated these least tractable of animals as an efficient form of pest control.

In this view, pets are an invention and specifically an invention that came with the rise of industrial and capitalist culture. As Berger informs us, until sometime in the 18th century, the word itself, pet, denoted a lamb raised by hand.

Modernization put the beasts out of business, one by one: with the mass migration to cities, people no longer needed dogs to herd livestock or cats to safeguard the harvest, while the train, the automobile, and the tractor took over from the horse.

* That's not Bud dressed up in old boys' clothes and sitting in the rocking chair. It's Tramp, Jennie and Edgar Krueger's cat, and the picture was taken by Alex Krueger in Watertown, Wisconsin, around 1905. Bud would never allow such an indignity to be visited on him--even if I were so inclined.

The Human Gaze: Part 2

2009-03-15T11:24:00.000-07:00

For modern animal agriculture, the less the consumer knows about what’s happening before the meat hits the plate, the better.
-- Peter Cheeke, Contemporary Issues in Animal Agriculture

2: The (Industrial) Food Chain

Don’t get me wrong. I eat meat—and with pleasure. I tell you this straight out because the subject is animals and I don’t want you to mistake me for a vegan fundamentalist. I am not a PETA person. But I have—thank you, Michael Pollen—begun buying my meat from a local farm that pastures its livestock. So at least I know the pork I eat came from a once-happy pig.

The plight of the cows abused in that Humane Society video clip—and it is, by anyone’s definition, abuse—can be traced back, through a not-so-circuitous route, to the 17th-century philosopher Rene Descartes. The man who brought us cogito ergo sum also bequeathed us the mechanistic view of the world—and of animal behavior—that has shaped so much of how we live now.

Descartes understood animals as automata whose behavior was a response to stimuli, not the result of consciousness. Human beings, by contrast, were possessed of a mind (consciousness, self-awareness), through which they could reason and act. The Cartesian legacy includes the mind-body problem—in a nutshell, the question of the relation between the mind and the body, spirit and matter—and, not coincidentally, feedlots and factory farms.

“It is more probable,” Descartes wrote, “that worms and flies and caterpillars move mechanically than that they all have immortal souls.”

An argument can be made that the video clips of those California cows represent the exception in the industrial approach to animal agriculture. It is, precisely, abuse—a violation of what is deemed proper, a mis-use. In this line of reasoning, the problem is not the general treatment of feed cattle but this particular instance of mistreatment, not the entire feedlot system but this singular feedlot.

Turn then to the Dutch photographer Jan Van IJken’s Dierbeer… (Precious Animals…) series. Van IJken covers the gamut of the industrialized world’s relations with animals: the dog show, the hunt, the veterinary surgery, the rescue home, the animal lab, the circus, and the breeding factory all make an appearance. Perhaps because he’s Dutch or perhaps just because he’s bewildered, Van IJken strikes a determinedly mild tone throughout. No “meat is murder” rhetoric for him.

But as you leaf through his book, you can see his puzzlement right there on the page—particularly, I might add, if you don’t speak Dutch, in which case the puzzlement is dizzying indeed. The first spreads look as though a mild-mannered Garry Winogrand (if such a person were possible) had done a tour of Dutch animal shows—the cat show, the cattle judging, the dog show. Next comes the requisite selection of oddballs: the woman who founded Swieneparredies (literally Swine Paradise), where pigs enjoy free run of the household, poses with an enormous ten-year-old hog. At a koeknuffelen (cow-cuddling session), three contented, formerly stressed-out Amsterdam cops curl up with an assortment of Holsteins, all of whom maintain their composure admirably. And in a formal garden, a man and his goose dance together, with arms and wings outstretched respectively.

But then the darker chapters appear. You find yourself in the breeding “farms,” with a ringside seat for the castration of two-day-old piglets, the clipping of chicks’ beaks, the cutting off of a piglet’s tail, and the artificial insemination of a bull. As the text notes, this last may well be the most opzienbarende, resounding, image in the book: the first thing you notice is a bull, staring straight at you. Contained in a narrow pen barely its own size, the beast looks none too happy, and when you examine the rest of the scene, you understand why. What’s going on here is, I gather, a common practice in cattle breeding: bull-on-bull sex. Rather than having its way with an artificial cow (not convincing enough) or a real one (too liable to injury), the stud bull mounts another bull, its sperm collected in “een nepschede,” a humbug sleeve.

While that particular image might leave you feeling a tad queasy, the others speak of something far worse. For instance, when you realize that the chicks’ beaks are clipped so the birds won’t peck at each other when they’re crammed together in total confinement, you might begin to rethink that Chicken McNugget order. Likewise, the piglets’ tails are cut—without anaesthesia—to prevent them from biting one another’s tails—like the intra-chick pecking, a habit acquired in the close quarters of the factory farm.

Van IJken’s tone is even-handed: all the pictures, of the pampering and its opposite, are straightforward photojournalist shots. It’s precisely in that back-and-forth, in the counterpoint of cosseted dogs and ill-treated pigs, that he makes his point—the same point that Michael Pollan was driving at when he wrote the following: “There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig—an animal easily as intelligent as a dog—that becomes the Christmas ham.”

The Human Gaze

2009-03-01T07:42:00.000-08:00

Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

1. The Food Chain

As flesh eaters, we can’t afford to be squeamish.
-- Frederick Sommer

My grandparents, living in North Plainfield, New Jersey—hardly exotic climes—kept horses in the barn out back and hens in the chicken coop. For my father, who could recall watching his mother kill chickens for the evening meal, the expression “running around like a chicken with its head cut off” was more than cliché, carrying with it the vivid memory of the twitchy death throes of decapitated White Leghorns. Dad never had any question about where dinner came from.

Nor, it would seem, does Alessandra Sanguinetti—at least judging from the evidence of her On the Sixth Day series, shot at a number of small farms in Argentina. Sanguinetti offers up a decidedly unsentimental view of the life and death of the animals destined for your dinner plate.

Few of us are as clear-sighted anymore as Sanguinetti and my dad. Of course, we know the source of the chicken nuggets and the coq au vin. But our knowledge is largely abstract. We’ve never seen the blood flow. Or for that matter seen the scratching dance of hens in the barnyard or heard their mild-mannered clucking or the incessant—and incessantly annoying—crowing of the rooster.

The farms where Sanguinetti worked are family-run or tenant farms and the agriculture small-scale and intimate. Squint your eyes and you might even mistake these pictures for pastoral views.

Except that Sanguinetti’s is no Arcadian refuge. Death is ever-present, routine. Of the 60 images reproduced in the series monograph, some 20 depict blood, guts, and the business of slaughter. Sanguinetti doesn’t shy away from showing us what slaughtered animals look like: we see a newly killed pig lying in a pastoral field and then two others strung up for butchering; a rabbit, skinned, hanging in the shadows of the barn. Nor does she spare us from the act of the kill: in one shot, a farmer aims his gun squarely at a grazing cow; another shows a farm wife draining out the blood of the chicken whose neck she’s just slit. One particularly unnerving image shows a farmer washing up his bloodied hands while his dog looks greedily on.

The human animal is not the only predator, though: dogs corner a hog and gnaw on a calf’s head; cats spring at sheep’s entrails and prowl around the farmers’ dinner spread. Even the chickens seem to be going after someone’s remains.

While blood-soaked, Sanguinetti’s vision incorporates more than death and its aftermath. She shoots at the animals’ eye level, with the result that we get a sense of their daily routine, if you will—of the forced sociability of farm life. In one shot, a flock of ducks scrambles for food while a cow stares out at the viewer and a turkey looks on from the wings. In another, a chicken waits for its chance at the corn cob being devoured by a hog. A baby chick, perched on a truck bed, surveys a barnyard full of chickens, four or five turkeys, and two dogs.

By and large, these pictures are the ones that we conjure when we say the word farm. Although a little muddier, a little messier and a whole lot bloodier, these scenes are close relatives of the ones we encountered in the picturebooks of childhood.

Sanguinetti’s is the long-past world John Berger evokes in his essay “Why We Look at Animals.” “A peasant becomes fond of his pig,” Berger writes, “and is glad to salt away its pork.” Explicating how far we have traveled from that world, the passage continues, “What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but.”

More recently, Verlyn Klinkenborg published a gemlike piece in The New York Times about the two pigs he and his wife are raising for slaughter. “I talk to the pigs whenever I’m in their pen,” he writes, explaining his reasons for doing so: first, he loves them and, second, “taming them means it will be that much easier … to kill them swiftly, immediately.”

In gentling tones, Klinkenborg cautions against moral outrage. Admitting to qualms about “the whole thing,” he points out that, “compared with the bargain most Americans make when they buy pork at the supermarket, this is beauty itself.”

Browse on over to YouTube, search for “Abused Cows at California Slaughterhouse,” and you’ll get a picture of just how bad a bargain that is.

Plastic Toys & the Meaning of Life

2009-02-11T05:26:00.001-08:00

Working plein air, Susan Arthur-Whitson stages adventures for her collection of plastic toys--as well as the occasional piece of candy. Her miniature worlds--tiny horses galloping through a lawn, a quintet of Peeps peering up through a field of thyme--seem, at first, simple fantasies channeled from childhood. No more, no less. They are indeed delightful images, giving viewers the kind of pure pleasure generally associated with picturebooks. That said, it's striking how evocative these scenes are.

Arthur-Whitson describes her animals as avatars. In Hindu theology, an avatar is an incarnation of a deity, a god come to the world in animal form for a special purpose. In highly simplified terms, the avatar is a god descended to the earth to raise us up. Seen with that idea in mind, many of these images become curiously profound: the rabbit who chases the fox; the horse, standing high up on a ridge, who peers down at us below; the family of elephants making its way through the deep jungle; another fox, alone in the wood. Somehow, Arthur-Whitson manages to make these creatures--plastic figurines!--resonate with meaning.

And so the rabbit chasing the fox turns the tables on the powerful, the horse beckons to us from above, the elephants invoke the power of kinship in a strange forest, and the jaunty fox reminds us of what it is to be on one's own in the wide world.