Monday, June 16, 2008

Czanara, Photographs and Drawings at the Wessel + O'Conner Gallery, Brooklyn, New York

The Wessel O’Conner Gallery, one subway stop from Manhattan, is in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, a triangular area formed by the coming together of the Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridges on the waterfront just to the north of Brooklyn Heights and south west of downtown Brooklyn. Formerly a warehousing and manufacturing area, for the last several years it has been going through the process of reclamation by an artists’ community with studios and galleries. I knew this area somewhat perhaps twenty years ago; it was a hard, working class area made harder by the character of its industries, its remoteness, and by the presence and the noise of the bridges.

When I first visited the gallery two years ago the area was being softened by the influx of new purpose and wealth. Now it is almost completely gentrified with remnants of the old neighborhood mainly in the narrow cobblestone streets and abandoned railroad tracks. The vertical supports for the bridges and the roadways some ten stories above the community can be appreciated now for the dramatic structures they are.

While most of the older commercial and industrial buildings remain, with the obligatory contemporary modifications, the neighborhood is being more noticeably altered by the addition of many new apartment buildings reflecting the Bauhaus influence as filtered through commercial real estate interests.

The covered piers that once stood along the waterfront of this section of the East River have been removed by the State and a lovely park at the base of the Manhattan Bridge pier has been created with a magnificent view of lower Manhattan and the full profile of the Brooklyn Bridge. It is an ideal place to take lunch after a visit to this area. There are more than enough purveyors of fine foods throughout the area to satisfy even the most discriminating appetites.

At the Wessel O’Conner the focus is on homoerotic art, almost exclusively in the field of photography. Two years ago I saw an exhibition of the works of Don Whitman, of the Western Photography Guild, who was active in the 1950’s and 60’s. More recently they have shown the works of Howard Roffman, The Boys of Bel Ami. They have shown as well the works of men currently working in this genre. It is a small gallery, probably 25 by 25 feet, and is one of 7 or 8 on the second floor of that building. At this writing they are showing some of the works of Raymond Carrance.

Carrance was a French photographer who was also known for having illustrated a few books as well as an underground illustrated Gay book in the 1950’s. His erotica was published under the name Czanara. His drawings were in the adult cartoon style common to the era. He died in 1998 forgotten and without heirs. His property was sold at an intestate auction and all these artworks were bought by a man who had gone specifically because he had recognized the name.

In this exhibition there are drawings (10 or 12), engravings (4), and photographs (18). The drawings and prints continue in the adult cartoon style, although in the engravings the artist has introduced gratuitous lines and passages around the figures as an acknowledgement that art in the twentieth century has been reinvented and that traditional, representational works are passé. This evident awareness, however, has not helped him produce modern art. There are two nice, very carefully done pencil drawings but they are a very long way from Ingres.

The photographs seem to have been made during the summer, possibly at the seashore or in a lake community. It is assumed that he used these for his drawings. All of them are photographs of young men; none is especially handsome or beautiful, in fact, each of them is rather average. I would suspect they were gay or periodically gay friendly young men who just happened to be around. They might also have been strangers he photographed without their knowledge or permission in the sense of their being found photographs.

When they were discovered amongst the purchased auction material each of these photographs was two color transparencies mounted together. When projected, or as seen here, printed, each appears as a double printed photograph.

In the literature accompanying the exhibition the gallery states that these works represent the artist’s working out various erotic concepts and feelings. Except that some of the subjects are nude and, in a few, in sexually explicit situations, I was rather more inclined to consider all of these as efforts to use photography to create modern art. I have often considered the question: what is the place of the male nude in modern art? I very strongly sensed that this artist was asking the same question.

One photograph in particular used the picture of a man sitting in a chair, in profile, printed over a photograph of what I assume was sunlit wood decking. Without losing the sense of the subject’s tranquility and the representational quality of the medium, it very successfully created a collage, a two dimensional design on the surface of the paper.

In another we see a young man sitting on a pier looking out at the water. Printed over this is a man in a long flat red boat that reaches across the format. While each of these photographs are probably dull when seen alone, by imposing one over the other, the two men in proximity in an isolated setting created an erotic charge, but perhaps not so much in the work as in the mind of the observer.

A portrait of a young man is overprinted with two close-up images of male genitalia. It has the quality of showing what is seen and what the viewer would like to see …it has the quality of a fantasy made visual. The delightful interaction of the rhythms of these combined photographs, however, overcomes any erotic intention.

The best of the works is that of a young man lying on his back on a pier beside the water. He is in the left side of the frame with his head toward the bottom. The view is from above the figure looking down. The pier is seen in perspective which then creates a triangle of water in the upper left. The young man is wearing blue jeans, no shirt, and has his arms spread akimbo overhead. His knees are raised. A duplicate of this slide is placed over this one but upside down putting a figure on the right hand side of the format and the triangle of water in the lower right. When seen from this view the figure almost appears to be leaping or floating, similar to Richard Avedon’s “Jump” series, which at the same time levitates the figure to the left: with the hands and the knees overlapping they appear to be two conjoined persons tumbling through space.

These two figures together create a wonderful composition with a very dynamic, angular rhythm. The negative spaces in weathered wood are wonderful. The cast shadows, very dark in the bright midday light, work simply as interesting black shapes.

As we talked about this photograph, the gallery owner removed it from the wall and held it upside down: either way it worked as an art work. It is interesting that of all these works and of all the hesitant efforts to acknowledge modernity, this was one of the few to really succeed. But it was so successful as a fine art photograph that its style became unimportant. Sometimes things work when you just let go and let them happen.

On several of the works a photographed texture was printed over a nude figure. I have seen this done often by others. I rarely find it very interesting.

While I love deep, rich, saturated color, recently I have become intrigued with the possibilities of very thin color, the kind of color one sees in photographs in the calendars put out by Chinese restaurants. Many of these photographs had that thin color. Perhaps it is because these transparencies are some fifty years old and the colors are fugitive or, I suppose, it was because of the printing of one color over another, as in red flowers over a pale sky blue becoming lips in a thin fuchsia. I am not fond of watercolor but I think there is something that could be done with thin colors. Of course one would have to be very careful not to evoke Helen Frankenthaler.

Works like these are a reminder of all that is currently being done using Photoshop, most of which is all the same and none of it very interesting. While there was little here that excited me, there were some intriguing things that I thought opened up a lot of creative possibilities. Perhaps, on a good day, that is the most we can ask for.

There is as yet no indication that these particular photographs were ever published or even privately printed. For this exhibition each has been printed in a limited edition of 15 eleven by fourteen giclee prints. Many more of the photographs from the auction trove are printed in the monograph, Czanara, Photographs and Drawings, a first publishing effort by Sam Shahid, Antinous Press. It is a handsome art book. There is a deluxe, signed edition in slipcase, which includes an 8 by 10 print. Should this publishing imprint someday become one of the industry stars I would think that having a copy of this first edition of this first effort would have tremendous value. As I have no heirs and as I can already hear the clock ticking away the last days of my life I could foresee my copy of this work being sold far under its value in the intestate auction of my own personal effects. Therefore I passed on it.

http://wesseloconnor.com/about/