Karsh I.
I went to Boston expressly to see the career retrospective of the work of Yousuf Karsh at the Museum of Fine Art and discovered upon my arrival that the Boston Public Library was doing a Karsh exhibit as well. Because the work raises several issues, I am discussing my observations in two entries on this blog.
The celebrity photographer.
There are two schools of thought regarding the interpretation of art works. The one holds that the observer should know as much about the artist as is possible and the interests that inform his work. The other simply states that an art work should stand on its own. In this exhibition at the Boston Public Library almost all of the photographs are accompanied by the notes that Karsh made and published with the photographs when they were featured in magazines and in other exhibitions. Thus we might infer that he was encouraging us to follow the first school and to understand him as well as the art works, but in doing so one can not escape the feeling that Karsh is attempting to place himself in the same category of celebrity as his subjects.
Yousuf Karsh was born in Armenia and left that country as a refugee with his parents and siblings, taking up residence in Syria. In his teen years an uncle in Canada sponsored him for immigration and so he went there and became the uncle’s apprentice in his studio photography business. Recognizing that young Karsh had a natural talent for the medium, he secured for him an apprenticeship with John Garo, the Boston photographer. Karsh spent three years in Boston. While there he availed himself of the opportunity to study and read at the Boston Public Library and he visited the MFA to study the history of western art. Late in life he retired to Boston. The photographs in both these exhibitions were gifts made by his wife, Estrelita Karsh, to these two institutions.
From this biographical material it can be understood that the young Karsh, speaking little or no English, learned to use his eyes, to see, when he worked with his uncle, and that with Garo, whose subjects were the socially prominent, he learned to interact with an elite group of socially and politically active persons. From both photographers Karsh learned to organize and run a photography studio. Because he was successful at all of these things it can be understood that he began with a sharp native intelligence, an attribute that might not have been encouraged in his home life as his parents were uneducated peasants.
On his return to Canada Karsh opened a studio in Ottawa and through the encouragement of a friend became involved with an amateur theatrical group, many of the members being local politicians. Eventually he came to the attention of the Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, who used Karsh to photograph important visitors, included in photographs that featured him as well, as a means to promote his tenure of office. It was through this connection, in 1942, that King arranged the sitting with Winston Churchill. That photograph, the definitive image of the World War II leader, thrust Karsh onto the international stage. It is an excellent photographs and it has tremendous presence. From that time forward his subjects were the makers and shapers of the modern world.
Through the notes, the notes and the photographs came to have equal importance: we have not only the presence of the subject but the presence of the photographer as well; Churchill is an important person and, through the anecdote, so is Karsh who made the photograph. While some self promotion is a vital necessity for any artist establishing his career, with Karsh one senses that self promotion had a far greater importance for him than it did for many other artists.
In recognizing the celebrity photographer, the photographer as celebrity, one has to draw a sharp distinction between the work as it is presented and the reputation that the work has achieved through the artist’s manipulation of the press and the public.
In the library exhibition all of the subjects are writers. Almost all of them are men. And all but four of them are wearing coats and ties. That particular form of dress removes these personalities to an earlier historic moment distant from our own. From his involvement with the theatrical group the observer can detect an influence in the dramatic lighting and in the staged mise en scene of many of these photographs. While dramatic lighting is an acceptable stylistic device, in too many of these, the mise en scene lapses into the clichéd. In the corner of what appears to be a library/study, we see a woman, Pearl Buck, sitting at a desk in profile to the camera. Behind her is a window with an open dictionary on a stand between the heavy draperies. Her desk top is cluttered with papers, a pot of pencils, and a desk calendar, suggesting a writer’s desk. In this photograph we are asked to believe that Miss Buck is deeply engaged with the work at hand. But if we step back from the photograph for a moment and study the lighting we have a different understanding.
Despite the opened window at the back with the view of an overcast gray day, which would indicate a diffused ambient lighting, a key light from the right sharply illuminates the face, a second light is at the back of her head, and a third light splays across the books in the bookcase behind her. The artificiality of the setting is augmented by the four light sources here. Thus we can see that this woman is not actually writing but that she is posing in a room that contains an 8 by 10 view camera, lighting equipment, and a photographer and his assistant. All of this intimacy and story telling is contrived.
Why was it contrived? Did Karsh find his subject so conventional as to be utterly boring? (Pearl Buck has the presence here of the president of a small town garden club.) Was it necessary to stage an event in order to salvage her public image as an important writer …or his as an important photographer of famous writers?
I think it can be understood that I consider this a bad photograph. And I was disappointed to find that many of the others were of this same school of thought. Others, Albert Camus, John Osborne, Norman Mailer, J.B. Priestley, are simply common photography studio portraits.
Some of them rise somewhat above that level. The Hemingway depicted is far more sweet, vulnerable, and human than his self projected image ever suggested. And the man, seen against a black ground, is the subject of a photograph that attempts to be nothing more than a photograph. It is a very good one: it has impact, composition, tonal values, texture, and the presence of an intriguing person. Conversely, the Francois Mauriac profile, also against black, a sliver of his head illuminated like a new moon, is a lovely strong image but I don’t know what that concept has to do with his contribution to letters. This could have been anyone with a hooked nose. His portrait of Cousteau, with an equally hooked nose, is a very, very similar photograph. The two photographs seen in the same exhibition diminish one another.
Some of the photographs are wonderful. The George Bernard Shaw portrait is exactly the public image that that man so carefully cultivated…he gave up not an inch of it! The Picasso is Picasso all the way. Both are wonderful photographs. (Did those two ever take a bad photograph?)
But when Karsh is really good, he is brilliant. In a portrait of two women one sits at the right in profile to the camera. Her hands are clasped and rest on a large book on the table before her. Her face conveys an inner peace, her benevolence and her willingness to experience whatever might befall her.
The other woman sits facing the camera but with her head tipped down as if straining to hear what is about to be said. Her right hand hovers above the clasped hands of the other woman. This woman too exudes peace and love but rather than a willingness to experience life her whole thrust is an intense desire to share and to communicate. Thus one is compelled to share and to give, one is compelled to experience and to accept. The dynamic between them is the essence of human interaction.
Against a black ground the two heads, one slightly above the other, are softly illuminated, gentle ovoid spheres. The hands at the left create an energetic but invisible diagonal from lower left to upper right. The bright edge of the book in the bottom left corner insists that it too has value to the composition; it too is a record of the human experience.
The two women could be any two women who have the ability to illustrate this moment. When these two are forgotten, this photograph will still retain its power.
The woman facing the camera is Polly Thompson and her companion, in profile, is Helen Keller.
I say when they are forgotten, because many of these subjects will be forgotten. Shortly after I entered the gallery a young couple, of college age if not college students, strode into the room. She went to the wall to read the introductory comments and he paced off around the room. Soon he shouted to her: “Hey. John F. Kennedy. He’s considered a writer because he wrote one book?” A few minutes later he laughed. “Wow. Winston Churchill. What the hell does he have to do with literature?” And as quickly he said: “This sucks. Let’s go.” She moved away from the comments and looked at a few of the photographs. She smiled. He kissed her and made much fuss over her. Arms wrapped about one another they breezed out to the room.
Oh, yes, considering the state of American education, these men and these few women will someday be forgotten. And I suspect that very few of these photographs and the anecdotes that accompany them will make an uneducated public curious to know who they were. These are rather dull men and women from another era in photographs presented in a style that is equally passé. As a person Yousuf Karsh was known to be charming, intelligent, ambitious, and completely professional in his working methods, but through his work we can see that he understood Art as something that was Deadly Serious. Despite their being portraits these photographs lack a human quality. He made some fine photographs, but I would say that overall these have historic rather than artistic value.
http://www.bpl.org/news/upcomingevents.htm#exhibits
Friday, October 17, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Karsh 100: A Biography in Images. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Karsh II.
At the entry to the Karsh exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts there is an eight by ten view camera on a tripod and on the wall beside it a photograph of Yousef Karsh holding an eight by ten negative to the light. The camera is one that Karsh used and so the museum visitor is given a graphic image of the size of the negatives and the camera lens used to make the many photographs in this career retrospective.
One of the most impressive attributes of the large format camera is its ability to render detail with great clarity. With a sharp focus, correct exposure, slow film with a fine grain, and good studio lighting, the resulting photographs will almost always have a very professional look to them regardless of the expertise of the photographer to capture the Character of his subjects.
Karsh certainly knew how to use the large format camera. He consistently released the shutter at exactly the right moment; with an eight by ten negative one does not run off 300 shots in fifteen minutes and hope for the best …one makes the photograph when he sees it. But in looking at these photographs, and I saw this exhibit on two separate occasions and twice on both visits, I am not at all convinced the he was a fine art photographer. He certainly was not a master of lighting. And I am not always convinced that he successfully depicted character rather than the subject’s well known public image.
The photograph of Albert Schweitzer with his head slightly lowered and his eyes cast down is a remarkable photograph of the hair on his head, in his moustache, and the lines and pores of his aging face. It is a graphic depiction of The Aged, but I don’t understand it as a portrait of Albert Schweitzer …I have read two of his books and his biography. As it regards Albert Schweitzer this photograph only tells me that he grew old.
In her biography, The Life of Yousef Karsh, Maria Tippett reports that Karsh was unhappy with his trip to Hollywood to photograph the stars because most of them, personalities manufactured through the studio system, never relinquished their manufactured images; Humphrey Bogart was always Humphrey Bogart in front of a camera, as was Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Lorre, and all of the others. Those photographs are included in this retrospective and we can see that Ms. Tippett was correct. Unfortunately the museum does not explain the photographer’s unhappiness with these photographs and so many visitors are likely to think that they are good photographs. They are not. They are run of the mill, the Hollywood mill, and Karsh knew that. It says something about the cultivation of his own celebrity status, however, that he continued to allow these to be publically exhibited.
Overall this all inclusive retrospective shows us that Karsh had access to all of the major personalities of the mid twentieth century from movie stars to statesmen, to scientists and writers, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Regardless of their work, each of them is a recognizable personality. With only a very few persons does he offer us something more than is usually shown.
In particular his photograph of the very young Fidel Castro is quite revealing. His face cropped close to the edges he stares directly at us. He burns with ambition, energy, ideas, and dreams. I have known this face through photographs for fifty years now. I lived in Miami the year he took over the Cuban government. And based on his public image and his coverage in the American press, I have never before sensed what a charismatic and inspiring personality he was…or as he is presented here. Which, I wonder, is the real man?
By contrast, that same winter I worked for over a month on a theatrical production written and directed by Tennessee Williams. I socialized with him on a number of occasions. I hardly recognized him from the photograph here taken only three years before I knew him. Karsh has placed him in a clichéd setting, the disheveled alcoholic author in a frenzy of work, manuscript, cigarette, and scotch and soda close at hand. Here he looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Even in his cups it was my experience that Tennessee Williams always comported himself like the southern gentleman that he was. He was always at a step removed from every situation, he was always the observer. I find the character of the man depicted in this photograph to be untrue.
In some of the earliest works we can see the photographs Karsh made working with an amateur theatrical group in Canada. Each of these photographs is staged but captures a moment of the drama. The influence of stage lighting and set design on his work is apparent. It can be seen that he used that sense of dramatic lighting in most of his portraits. But that does not always work for him. His lighting is often heavy handed. His works are not luminous; the light does not illuminate so much as it “hits” the subject. Often it disrupts the balance of values, as when the key is too high. And the lighting set up is too often merely routine …key, fill, background and always from the same angles in photograph after photograph. There is rarely a sense in his work that the subject and setting called for an individual resolution of the problems encountered, when it does, usually when there was no electrical outlet for his lights, it is available light and it seems it is always from the right.
Later in his career Karsh accepted some commissions to photograph various towns in Canada. I see nothing in these that I have not seen elsewhere. The photographs of his travels with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen are utterly mundane.
But I do see something I would not have expected to find in his photographs made in the factories for Ford of Canada. In both the photographs shown, Gow Crapper installing the back window of a car, and Terry Wasyke and Marris Lehoux in discussion with one holding the nozzle of a spray gun, there is a very high pitch of homoeroticism: Terry and Marris look as if they are about to get to it. Beyond that sudden sexual intrusion into his work, completely lacking in all of his other work including two female nudes, these photographs stand out because they are both so beside the point of the assignment.
As is the photograph in a paper factory in which one of the workers has climbed up onto the center of a huge, about forty by one hundred feet, roll of white paper in order to take his lunch, a la Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. The contrivance here is so obvious and the whole of it is so beside the point, I can’t imagine why it would have been made or why it continues to be shown.
Despite the fact that many of these are nice pictures, and a few of them perhaps great …Churchill, Picasso, Helen Keller, Shaw, Hemingway, and Pablo Casals, most of these are simply common .
As for seeing them, in this installation the MFA has made that almost impossible. Except for one color photograph all of these are black and white, many with black grounds. All have wide white mattes and black museum frames. The lighting is from high overhead and there is a high level of light in the gallery. As a result the glass over the photographs often acts as mirrors and so one sees himself looking at the photographs. I considered at one point making a photograph of this layered experience which would include the photographer, the subject, the photograph and the viewer. While the lighting at the library is not much better, there the photographs are illuminated with small fluorescent lights above each photograph, the library installation is by far the better of the two.
But the final insult in this gallery is a television interview with Karsh that runs over and over again as one moves about the room. In most museums these audio components have ear phones so that the visitors can proceed in silence. Going to the attendant to tell him how annoying I thought that was he stood up straight and stared at me “How do you think I feel: I have to stand here all day and listen to it!” Yes, the economy may have gone south but at least the Bush administration has been successful with their policy of a trickle down abrogation of personal responsibility.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
http://www.mfa.org/master/sub.asp?key=1854&subkey=7143
At the entry to the Karsh exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts there is an eight by ten view camera on a tripod and on the wall beside it a photograph of Yousef Karsh holding an eight by ten negative to the light. The camera is one that Karsh used and so the museum visitor is given a graphic image of the size of the negatives and the camera lens used to make the many photographs in this career retrospective.
One of the most impressive attributes of the large format camera is its ability to render detail with great clarity. With a sharp focus, correct exposure, slow film with a fine grain, and good studio lighting, the resulting photographs will almost always have a very professional look to them regardless of the expertise of the photographer to capture the Character of his subjects.
Karsh certainly knew how to use the large format camera. He consistently released the shutter at exactly the right moment; with an eight by ten negative one does not run off 300 shots in fifteen minutes and hope for the best …one makes the photograph when he sees it. But in looking at these photographs, and I saw this exhibit on two separate occasions and twice on both visits, I am not at all convinced the he was a fine art photographer. He certainly was not a master of lighting. And I am not always convinced that he successfully depicted character rather than the subject’s well known public image.
The photograph of Albert Schweitzer with his head slightly lowered and his eyes cast down is a remarkable photograph of the hair on his head, in his moustache, and the lines and pores of his aging face. It is a graphic depiction of The Aged, but I don’t understand it as a portrait of Albert Schweitzer …I have read two of his books and his biography. As it regards Albert Schweitzer this photograph only tells me that he grew old.
In her biography, The Life of Yousef Karsh, Maria Tippett reports that Karsh was unhappy with his trip to Hollywood to photograph the stars because most of them, personalities manufactured through the studio system, never relinquished their manufactured images; Humphrey Bogart was always Humphrey Bogart in front of a camera, as was Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Lorre, and all of the others. Those photographs are included in this retrospective and we can see that Ms. Tippett was correct. Unfortunately the museum does not explain the photographer’s unhappiness with these photographs and so many visitors are likely to think that they are good photographs. They are not. They are run of the mill, the Hollywood mill, and Karsh knew that. It says something about the cultivation of his own celebrity status, however, that he continued to allow these to be publically exhibited.
Overall this all inclusive retrospective shows us that Karsh had access to all of the major personalities of the mid twentieth century from movie stars to statesmen, to scientists and writers, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Regardless of their work, each of them is a recognizable personality. With only a very few persons does he offer us something more than is usually shown.
In particular his photograph of the very young Fidel Castro is quite revealing. His face cropped close to the edges he stares directly at us. He burns with ambition, energy, ideas, and dreams. I have known this face through photographs for fifty years now. I lived in Miami the year he took over the Cuban government. And based on his public image and his coverage in the American press, I have never before sensed what a charismatic and inspiring personality he was…or as he is presented here. Which, I wonder, is the real man?
By contrast, that same winter I worked for over a month on a theatrical production written and directed by Tennessee Williams. I socialized with him on a number of occasions. I hardly recognized him from the photograph here taken only three years before I knew him. Karsh has placed him in a clichéd setting, the disheveled alcoholic author in a frenzy of work, manuscript, cigarette, and scotch and soda close at hand. Here he looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Even in his cups it was my experience that Tennessee Williams always comported himself like the southern gentleman that he was. He was always at a step removed from every situation, he was always the observer. I find the character of the man depicted in this photograph to be untrue.
In some of the earliest works we can see the photographs Karsh made working with an amateur theatrical group in Canada. Each of these photographs is staged but captures a moment of the drama. The influence of stage lighting and set design on his work is apparent. It can be seen that he used that sense of dramatic lighting in most of his portraits. But that does not always work for him. His lighting is often heavy handed. His works are not luminous; the light does not illuminate so much as it “hits” the subject. Often it disrupts the balance of values, as when the key is too high. And the lighting set up is too often merely routine …key, fill, background and always from the same angles in photograph after photograph. There is rarely a sense in his work that the subject and setting called for an individual resolution of the problems encountered, when it does, usually when there was no electrical outlet for his lights, it is available light and it seems it is always from the right.
Later in his career Karsh accepted some commissions to photograph various towns in Canada. I see nothing in these that I have not seen elsewhere. The photographs of his travels with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen are utterly mundane.
But I do see something I would not have expected to find in his photographs made in the factories for Ford of Canada. In both the photographs shown, Gow Crapper installing the back window of a car, and Terry Wasyke and Marris Lehoux in discussion with one holding the nozzle of a spray gun, there is a very high pitch of homoeroticism: Terry and Marris look as if they are about to get to it. Beyond that sudden sexual intrusion into his work, completely lacking in all of his other work including two female nudes, these photographs stand out because they are both so beside the point of the assignment.
As is the photograph in a paper factory in which one of the workers has climbed up onto the center of a huge, about forty by one hundred feet, roll of white paper in order to take his lunch, a la Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. The contrivance here is so obvious and the whole of it is so beside the point, I can’t imagine why it would have been made or why it continues to be shown.
Despite the fact that many of these are nice pictures, and a few of them perhaps great …Churchill, Picasso, Helen Keller, Shaw, Hemingway, and Pablo Casals, most of these are simply common .
As for seeing them, in this installation the MFA has made that almost impossible. Except for one color photograph all of these are black and white, many with black grounds. All have wide white mattes and black museum frames. The lighting is from high overhead and there is a high level of light in the gallery. As a result the glass over the photographs often acts as mirrors and so one sees himself looking at the photographs. I considered at one point making a photograph of this layered experience which would include the photographer, the subject, the photograph and the viewer. While the lighting at the library is not much better, there the photographs are illuminated with small fluorescent lights above each photograph, the library installation is by far the better of the two.
But the final insult in this gallery is a television interview with Karsh that runs over and over again as one moves about the room. In most museums these audio components have ear phones so that the visitors can proceed in silence. Going to the attendant to tell him how annoying I thought that was he stood up straight and stared at me “How do you think I feel: I have to stand here all day and listen to it!” Yes, the economy may have gone south but at least the Bush administration has been successful with their policy of a trickle down abrogation of personal responsibility.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
http://www.mfa.org/master/sub.asp?key=1854&subkey=7143
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Flashes of Inspiration: The Work of Harold Edgerton //The Edgerton Center at MIT
Serendipity is a wonderful thing.
Laden with maps, a printed guide for a walking tour of the MIT campus, and with directions and brochures for five art galleries, as well as the MIT Museum, I set off on a picture perfect autumn day to study the architecture and art of this highly esteemed institution.
At the museum I discovered a very large exhibition of the work of Harold Edgerton and, at the end of the day, the last item on the printed walking tour directed me to the fourth floor of the main campus building to the Edgerton Center, a hallway with a permanent installation featuring photographs, equipment he had designed, and practical experiments set up to entice university students into this fascinating area of science.
While Harold Edgerton did not invent the strobe, which dates to 1832, he was the first to apply the idea of the strobe to photography, in order to study machinery in a working state, and in the process he invented the electronic flash and high speed photography, some of his exposures being 1/10,000th of a second. Most of us might not know his name but we do know his photography; the bullet stopped in the air after having blasted through an apple, a hummingbird in arrested flight, a man swinging a golf club, a foot on the moment of impact against a football, etc. He contributed significantly to underwater photography, earning the nickname from Jacques Cousteau, “Papa Flash”, he helped develop sonar imagining as well as night photography, which was used in World War II and which earned him a Medal of Freedom.
I can’t say that seeing the various pieces of equipment, most of which are sealed up containers, made much of an impression on me. But the photographs evoked the pleasure of running into old friends: we all know these photographs from Life and National Geographic magazines. These are photographs unlike any others and I was suddenly aware that they do present the effect that is so often claimed for art but rarely achieved and that is a new view of the commonplace in the world around us. They are fascinating because of what we are seeing… for the first time in a particular way. And in looking at them as art works with good composition, excellent black and white values, and with strong visual impact, it came to my awareness that these scientific exercises very successfully achieved the stature of fine art. As if to cap off that statement and that perception, each of them is an excellent print.
Having that feeling of an encounter with old friends in the Museum, in the hallway I realized that the rooms along the hallway were the actual laboratories where Edgerton and his colleagues worked. Looking into those rooms and seeing the work tables, work benches, and shelves lined with mechanical objects both finished and in parts, and his successors still at work, I felt “at the center of” and very much a part of the process. And I believe that is the intention of this hallway installation. Apparently these labs and these work rooms are open to any student wanting to explore an idea or to use the equipment to manifest a concept. With that realization there came to me a rush of exhilaration of the freedom of inquiry and the wholehearted support of others who have gone that way before. This was such a great distinction from what can be so often the sense of an intensely private place of jealously guarded secrets.
This sense of welcome collaboration and the sharing of intellectual experience so evident here greatly enhanced my understanding of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: there is no elitism at MIT: the doors are open to the curious student and the buildings are open to the interested visitor.
As it regards the fine arts and other museums, I was left to wonder why other institutions that are described as dedicated to the human experience very rarely evoke this same spontaneous and joyful sense of communion. My visit to these two galleries has altered my perception as to what contemporary art should be: it should be about the world in which we are participants and not about the private language of an art world that is distant, foreign, and closed to the rest of us.
Using this link you can get a glimpse of the hallway.
http://web.mit.edu/Edgerton/
The link to the MIT Museum exhibition:
http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/edgerton.html
Using this Wikipedia link you can find other examples of Edgerton’s photographs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Edgerton
Unfortunately none of these links include the photograph of Stonehenge silhouetted against the black night sky, its center illuminated by an electronic flash emitted from an airplane passing overhead. I can’t imagine how that was all coordinated. But it is a magnificent photograph. You’ll have to go to Boston to see it. The MIT Visitor’s Center is to the right of the entrance at 77 Massachusetts Avenue.
Laden with maps, a printed guide for a walking tour of the MIT campus, and with directions and brochures for five art galleries, as well as the MIT Museum, I set off on a picture perfect autumn day to study the architecture and art of this highly esteemed institution.
At the museum I discovered a very large exhibition of the work of Harold Edgerton and, at the end of the day, the last item on the printed walking tour directed me to the fourth floor of the main campus building to the Edgerton Center, a hallway with a permanent installation featuring photographs, equipment he had designed, and practical experiments set up to entice university students into this fascinating area of science.
While Harold Edgerton did not invent the strobe, which dates to 1832, he was the first to apply the idea of the strobe to photography, in order to study machinery in a working state, and in the process he invented the electronic flash and high speed photography, some of his exposures being 1/10,000th of a second. Most of us might not know his name but we do know his photography; the bullet stopped in the air after having blasted through an apple, a hummingbird in arrested flight, a man swinging a golf club, a foot on the moment of impact against a football, etc. He contributed significantly to underwater photography, earning the nickname from Jacques Cousteau, “Papa Flash”, he helped develop sonar imagining as well as night photography, which was used in World War II and which earned him a Medal of Freedom.
I can’t say that seeing the various pieces of equipment, most of which are sealed up containers, made much of an impression on me. But the photographs evoked the pleasure of running into old friends: we all know these photographs from Life and National Geographic magazines. These are photographs unlike any others and I was suddenly aware that they do present the effect that is so often claimed for art but rarely achieved and that is a new view of the commonplace in the world around us. They are fascinating because of what we are seeing… for the first time in a particular way. And in looking at them as art works with good composition, excellent black and white values, and with strong visual impact, it came to my awareness that these scientific exercises very successfully achieved the stature of fine art. As if to cap off that statement and that perception, each of them is an excellent print.
Having that feeling of an encounter with old friends in the Museum, in the hallway I realized that the rooms along the hallway were the actual laboratories where Edgerton and his colleagues worked. Looking into those rooms and seeing the work tables, work benches, and shelves lined with mechanical objects both finished and in parts, and his successors still at work, I felt “at the center of” and very much a part of the process. And I believe that is the intention of this hallway installation. Apparently these labs and these work rooms are open to any student wanting to explore an idea or to use the equipment to manifest a concept. With that realization there came to me a rush of exhilaration of the freedom of inquiry and the wholehearted support of others who have gone that way before. This was such a great distinction from what can be so often the sense of an intensely private place of jealously guarded secrets.
This sense of welcome collaboration and the sharing of intellectual experience so evident here greatly enhanced my understanding of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: there is no elitism at MIT: the doors are open to the curious student and the buildings are open to the interested visitor.
As it regards the fine arts and other museums, I was left to wonder why other institutions that are described as dedicated to the human experience very rarely evoke this same spontaneous and joyful sense of communion. My visit to these two galleries has altered my perception as to what contemporary art should be: it should be about the world in which we are participants and not about the private language of an art world that is distant, foreign, and closed to the rest of us.
Using this link you can get a glimpse of the hallway.
http://web.mit.edu/Edgerton/
The link to the MIT Museum exhibition:
http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/edgerton.html
Using this Wikipedia link you can find other examples of Edgerton’s photographs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Edgerton
Unfortunately none of these links include the photograph of Stonehenge silhouetted against the black night sky, its center illuminated by an electronic flash emitted from an airplane passing overhead. I can’t imagine how that was all coordinated. But it is a magnificent photograph. You’ll have to go to Boston to see it. The MIT Visitor’s Center is to the right of the entrance at 77 Massachusetts Avenue.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Home Delivery. Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. MOMA, NYC
Prior to attending Peter Christensen’s noon talk at the Museum of Modern Art regarding this exhibition, I spent about an hour on the 6th floor looking at the works presented. Following his talk he asked if there were comments or questions and while I had notes, actually subjects that I had jotted down, my mind had not yet formed the material into a sustainable dialogue and so I did not bring them up.
These were my notes:
The current commercial success of modular homes in America…factory made log home kits…post and beam timber kits…teepees…yurts…bamboo.
From the review of the exhibition in The New York Review of Books, I had understood that this was a thorough presentation of the history of prefabricated housing. After spending an hour with the material and an hour at the talk, I found that I disagreed with that appraisal. Following the talk I spent another hour in the gallery and about fifteen minutes with the five projects on the adjacent lot. My opinion remained unchanged.
Taking the nomadic culture of early human communities into consideration, modular housing is one of the oldest of human artifacts. To confine an overview of the subject to the past 180 years and focus exclusively on the West, denies the full range of that history and very likely omits some concepts and practices that might be useful to modern architects who have that area as an interest. There is also a noticeable omission in this exhibition of the state sponsored building that has been erected by the Soviet Union, China, (where vast cities have been built for enormous populations), as well as in India and Latin America. Many of those projects were erected using modular units.
Considering all of these omissions it became clear that the work presented has a reference to low or middle income housing in the industrialized west, but that the projects presented are for the most part merely school or studio projects by architectural students or name designers, or the results of competitions sponsored by the manufacturers of various materials; i.e., plywood, plastic, metal. As a result most of these projects, and especially those on the exterior lot, are only fanciful musings made of inhospitable materials exploring engineering concepts and without having as their base a philosophy of what constitutes a home, a human habitation: it is more nearly a show about some of the work of prominent or up and coming young architects than it is about housing.
The reference to Frank Lloyd Wright illustrates my observation. Displayed are some architectural drawings made by the Wright studio for houses made of poured concrete. There are as well drawings for the Jacobs House. But no mention is made that the Jacobs House was the prototype of the Usonia House, housing designed for working class families, of which almost two hundred were built, or of Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, which was one of Wright’s early masterpieces in molded reinforced concrete and currently being considered by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Broad Acres, Wright’s designed community, is not mentioned nor are the houses Wright designed using cement blocks. (Nor are cement blocks mentioned.) Probably more than any other architect of the twentieth Century Wright explored the idea of prefabrication and affordable domestic architecture on the most extended scale. That his inclusion here is merely token is very obvious.
By contrast a building designed by Ray and Charles Eames using catalogue available, factory made pieces is presented as a unique exercise, although it might have been pointed out as well that the Seattle Public Library, designed by Rem Koolhaus, follows that same practice and that despite the predominance of the standardization in its parts it is the most modern of modern buildings.
The error of almost all of these structures is that they follow too closely the Corbusian dictum that a house is a factory for living, rather than the Wrightian concept that a house is a home, a place of beauty that is a refuge from the world outside. In too many of these models there is a too hardness of surface. It was delightful to see several models of buildings designed by Jean Prouvet. I saw his Tropical House fully erected at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2005. It is a very nice design, one I would think that is very well suited for a tropical climate. But I was very put off by its metal surfaces. Its hardness was too hard. I could not imagine living comfortably in that space. Nor did I sense in his other buildings that they would make good living spaces. They are attractive exteriors of modern buildings but they are empty on the inside. I sensed a lack of what Wright called organic architecture: their form did not arise from the center, from their function.
When I first saw the Tropical House, and seeing it here again, I was aware of how much nicer I thought it would be had it been made in bamboo. Bamboo is a wonderful, warm, and somehow human material and it is one of the most sustainable of building materials. It has great strength: in Colombia, many years ago, I observed that many of the high rise buildings under construction were built using a scaffolding of bamboo. There is no mention here of bamboo although there are architects whose work can be seen on You Tube who are working with it to build prefabricated housing.
This awareness brought to my mind the realization that while the Buckminster Fuller Wichita House, made of sheet metal, had been planned but never built, (although growing up near Wichita in the 1950’s I believe I remember having seen some buildings similar to that one), there is a very similar factory made product, The Air Stream Mobile Home, which has had a great popularity over the years. It even has its own fan club. I thought it odd that that or any of the other mobile homes that have been used as the building blocks of communities all over the country were omitted. Was it because they were not designed by Name Architects? (I have recently come across a word I like very, very much: Starchitect. Very apt here.)
Of the designs in this exhibition that were realized none of them appears to have been embraced by the public, none of them was as commercially successful as is the modular homes being fabricated now for exurbia. Considering these recent modular homes with their variations of stylistic references, Tudor, Georgian, Cape, it made me wonder if those in the exhibition were not successful because the designs lacked a syntax that communicated successfully with the working class house buying public. When a man decides to buy or to build himself a house, he generally considers that he is “putting a roof over his head”. Showing him a structure that lacks a visible roof is not likely to illicit his admiration. Add to that the omission of other visible syntactical clues, entryway treatments, windows, chimneys, etc. and we should be able to understand the marketing problems.
I believe Frank Lloyd Wright understood this. In his prairie houses his roofs have a low pitch, low but there is a visible roof however slight it might be. In Fallingwater there is no roof. But his client was an educated man for whom something in a different syntax might have been attempted. (In addition, the man’s son was one of Wright’s students: he could interpret the building for his father!) Knowing that Mr. Kaufman was educated and wealthy, and that the homes built more recently by other architects for other wealthy clients are in the modern sensibility, sans roof, it can be understood that there has been an evolution within the syntax of home building: a house with a roof is a working class house, a house without a roof is for the upper crust. Marketing then becomes a success or a failure because each of the buyers knows his place. (And refuses to budge from it.)
The model in this exhibition that most successfully addresses the issue of syntax is the New Orleans House. It is a literal reference to the houses already in that city. But this particular example has a whole set of other problems. I have painted many murals and I have produced decorative paint finishes on any number of walls. Almost everyone I have ever known has wanted to “decorate” his personal space. Seeing this house with its snap together jigsaw puzzle pieces, I saw surfaces with insurmountable problems for the decorative finish. In the end, despite its stylistic charm, I saw only an inhospitable engineering concept presented for public consideration.
Of the five houses on the empty lot not one of them seemed to me to have been designed as a residence. Each of them was simply a working out of engineering concepts. Not one of them had a sense of flow or of place. All of them were impersonal. In the Cellophane House I could only imagine how horrified FLW might have been once he had stepped inside it. It lacked charm and character and failed to direct the attention and movement. The only positive I found in any of these was the System3 entry, a modular unit made of wood. Stepping into that warm, embracing environment in which the material muted the exterior sound, giving it the acoustical pleasure of a concert hall, I understood that there is a syntax in building material as well, and that none of these designers had taken that into consideration.
It is always interesting how quality shows, how the superior entry will make its presence known. Of all of the beautifully made models on display here, none of them seem so human and so logical and so right as the model of a design by Paul Rudolph. I can imagine an entire exhibition being built around this work…his work in fact. I hope the time will soon be right for that to happen.
The exhibition on the sixth floor incorporated drawings, photographs, films, models, and building parts, unfortunately in a fairly standard, run of the mill multi media installation. I think uninspired sums it up. On the other hand, viewed strictly as an exhibition of beautifully made architectural models this is an excellent exhibition, if you like architectural models. I do. That the works are better as models made of wood than the stone, metal, or plastic of the finished buildings should alert some clever young architect to a valuable insight. The warm glow of the wooden model of the Safdie project built in Israel, in cement, was a breathtaking variation.
The looming presence of the grossly ugly and decrepit Lustron House at the rear of the installation should have set bells to ringing for the exhibition designers. Not even museum lighting could have salvaged this. (As far as I could tell, there was no lighting at all on this cold and corroded metal box.) Rule one: there can be too much of a bad thing.
Just inside the exhibition gallery the room was bisected by a wall of 2 by 4 studding showing us a modern construction technique. But that technique is used in stick built houses, not in prefabricated housing. In addition this was not construction grade lumber but dimensional lumber in a first grade quality material. Construction material in modern housing, from forests grown for the trade, is a scandal of inferiority. But of course such a common material would be inappropriate in the august Museum of Modern Art. Apparently on west 53rd Street, wrong is better than representational, in keeping, I suppose, with the abstract nature of so much of the artwork there.
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=5476
These were my notes:
The current commercial success of modular homes in America…factory made log home kits…post and beam timber kits…teepees…yurts…bamboo.
From the review of the exhibition in The New York Review of Books, I had understood that this was a thorough presentation of the history of prefabricated housing. After spending an hour with the material and an hour at the talk, I found that I disagreed with that appraisal. Following the talk I spent another hour in the gallery and about fifteen minutes with the five projects on the adjacent lot. My opinion remained unchanged.
Taking the nomadic culture of early human communities into consideration, modular housing is one of the oldest of human artifacts. To confine an overview of the subject to the past 180 years and focus exclusively on the West, denies the full range of that history and very likely omits some concepts and practices that might be useful to modern architects who have that area as an interest. There is also a noticeable omission in this exhibition of the state sponsored building that has been erected by the Soviet Union, China, (where vast cities have been built for enormous populations), as well as in India and Latin America. Many of those projects were erected using modular units.
Considering all of these omissions it became clear that the work presented has a reference to low or middle income housing in the industrialized west, but that the projects presented are for the most part merely school or studio projects by architectural students or name designers, or the results of competitions sponsored by the manufacturers of various materials; i.e., plywood, plastic, metal. As a result most of these projects, and especially those on the exterior lot, are only fanciful musings made of inhospitable materials exploring engineering concepts and without having as their base a philosophy of what constitutes a home, a human habitation: it is more nearly a show about some of the work of prominent or up and coming young architects than it is about housing.
The reference to Frank Lloyd Wright illustrates my observation. Displayed are some architectural drawings made by the Wright studio for houses made of poured concrete. There are as well drawings for the Jacobs House. But no mention is made that the Jacobs House was the prototype of the Usonia House, housing designed for working class families, of which almost two hundred were built, or of Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, which was one of Wright’s early masterpieces in molded reinforced concrete and currently being considered by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Broad Acres, Wright’s designed community, is not mentioned nor are the houses Wright designed using cement blocks. (Nor are cement blocks mentioned.) Probably more than any other architect of the twentieth Century Wright explored the idea of prefabrication and affordable domestic architecture on the most extended scale. That his inclusion here is merely token is very obvious.
By contrast a building designed by Ray and Charles Eames using catalogue available, factory made pieces is presented as a unique exercise, although it might have been pointed out as well that the Seattle Public Library, designed by Rem Koolhaus, follows that same practice and that despite the predominance of the standardization in its parts it is the most modern of modern buildings.
The error of almost all of these structures is that they follow too closely the Corbusian dictum that a house is a factory for living, rather than the Wrightian concept that a house is a home, a place of beauty that is a refuge from the world outside. In too many of these models there is a too hardness of surface. It was delightful to see several models of buildings designed by Jean Prouvet. I saw his Tropical House fully erected at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2005. It is a very nice design, one I would think that is very well suited for a tropical climate. But I was very put off by its metal surfaces. Its hardness was too hard. I could not imagine living comfortably in that space. Nor did I sense in his other buildings that they would make good living spaces. They are attractive exteriors of modern buildings but they are empty on the inside. I sensed a lack of what Wright called organic architecture: their form did not arise from the center, from their function.
When I first saw the Tropical House, and seeing it here again, I was aware of how much nicer I thought it would be had it been made in bamboo. Bamboo is a wonderful, warm, and somehow human material and it is one of the most sustainable of building materials. It has great strength: in Colombia, many years ago, I observed that many of the high rise buildings under construction were built using a scaffolding of bamboo. There is no mention here of bamboo although there are architects whose work can be seen on You Tube who are working with it to build prefabricated housing.
This awareness brought to my mind the realization that while the Buckminster Fuller Wichita House, made of sheet metal, had been planned but never built, (although growing up near Wichita in the 1950’s I believe I remember having seen some buildings similar to that one), there is a very similar factory made product, The Air Stream Mobile Home, which has had a great popularity over the years. It even has its own fan club. I thought it odd that that or any of the other mobile homes that have been used as the building blocks of communities all over the country were omitted. Was it because they were not designed by Name Architects? (I have recently come across a word I like very, very much: Starchitect. Very apt here.)
Of the designs in this exhibition that were realized none of them appears to have been embraced by the public, none of them was as commercially successful as is the modular homes being fabricated now for exurbia. Considering these recent modular homes with their variations of stylistic references, Tudor, Georgian, Cape, it made me wonder if those in the exhibition were not successful because the designs lacked a syntax that communicated successfully with the working class house buying public. When a man decides to buy or to build himself a house, he generally considers that he is “putting a roof over his head”. Showing him a structure that lacks a visible roof is not likely to illicit his admiration. Add to that the omission of other visible syntactical clues, entryway treatments, windows, chimneys, etc. and we should be able to understand the marketing problems.
I believe Frank Lloyd Wright understood this. In his prairie houses his roofs have a low pitch, low but there is a visible roof however slight it might be. In Fallingwater there is no roof. But his client was an educated man for whom something in a different syntax might have been attempted. (In addition, the man’s son was one of Wright’s students: he could interpret the building for his father!) Knowing that Mr. Kaufman was educated and wealthy, and that the homes built more recently by other architects for other wealthy clients are in the modern sensibility, sans roof, it can be understood that there has been an evolution within the syntax of home building: a house with a roof is a working class house, a house without a roof is for the upper crust. Marketing then becomes a success or a failure because each of the buyers knows his place. (And refuses to budge from it.)
The model in this exhibition that most successfully addresses the issue of syntax is the New Orleans House. It is a literal reference to the houses already in that city. But this particular example has a whole set of other problems. I have painted many murals and I have produced decorative paint finishes on any number of walls. Almost everyone I have ever known has wanted to “decorate” his personal space. Seeing this house with its snap together jigsaw puzzle pieces, I saw surfaces with insurmountable problems for the decorative finish. In the end, despite its stylistic charm, I saw only an inhospitable engineering concept presented for public consideration.
Of the five houses on the empty lot not one of them seemed to me to have been designed as a residence. Each of them was simply a working out of engineering concepts. Not one of them had a sense of flow or of place. All of them were impersonal. In the Cellophane House I could only imagine how horrified FLW might have been once he had stepped inside it. It lacked charm and character and failed to direct the attention and movement. The only positive I found in any of these was the System3 entry, a modular unit made of wood. Stepping into that warm, embracing environment in which the material muted the exterior sound, giving it the acoustical pleasure of a concert hall, I understood that there is a syntax in building material as well, and that none of these designers had taken that into consideration.
It is always interesting how quality shows, how the superior entry will make its presence known. Of all of the beautifully made models on display here, none of them seem so human and so logical and so right as the model of a design by Paul Rudolph. I can imagine an entire exhibition being built around this work…his work in fact. I hope the time will soon be right for that to happen.
The exhibition on the sixth floor incorporated drawings, photographs, films, models, and building parts, unfortunately in a fairly standard, run of the mill multi media installation. I think uninspired sums it up. On the other hand, viewed strictly as an exhibition of beautifully made architectural models this is an excellent exhibition, if you like architectural models. I do. That the works are better as models made of wood than the stone, metal, or plastic of the finished buildings should alert some clever young architect to a valuable insight. The warm glow of the wooden model of the Safdie project built in Israel, in cement, was a breathtaking variation.
The looming presence of the grossly ugly and decrepit Lustron House at the rear of the installation should have set bells to ringing for the exhibition designers. Not even museum lighting could have salvaged this. (As far as I could tell, there was no lighting at all on this cold and corroded metal box.) Rule one: there can be too much of a bad thing.
Just inside the exhibition gallery the room was bisected by a wall of 2 by 4 studding showing us a modern construction technique. But that technique is used in stick built houses, not in prefabricated housing. In addition this was not construction grade lumber but dimensional lumber in a first grade quality material. Construction material in modern housing, from forests grown for the trade, is a scandal of inferiority. But of course such a common material would be inappropriate in the august Museum of Modern Art. Apparently on west 53rd Street, wrong is better than representational, in keeping, I suppose, with the abstract nature of so much of the artwork there.
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=5476
Friday, July 25, 2008
Framing a Century: Master Photographers 1840 -1940/ at the Metropolitan Museum NYC
In 2005 The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the Gilman Collection of over 1350 photographs and photographic albums, a collection remarkable for its depth of examples in the history of early photography put together from 1974 to 1998 by Richard Gilman of the Gilman Paper Company. In some cases, such as in the works of Fox Talbot, these photographs are one of a kind. Others duplicated works already owned by the museum and so the two collections were studied closely and where possible, owing to limits made by other bequests, etc, some of the works were placed for auction in 2006. The Sotheby’s Catalogue for that auction carries this full story as well as reproductions of the prints that were offered to the public.
Two years ago when I was making efforts to understand why photography is an art form I was fortunate to buy a copy of that catalogue from a local bookseller. Seeing that the museum had mounted this present exhibit incorporating some of those works, I was very determined to see it.
While we have come to expect that each painter will paint in a style uniquely his own, with his own palette and brush work, that each will have his distinctive penmanship, and, especially in modern art, create his own signature image or images, it is always a revelation to me that a number of men and women limited to using a simple machine can make such distinctively different images and suggest such individual responses to the life in front of that machine.
This exhibition has abundant examples to illustrate my wonder. Perhaps most specifically in this exhibition I can compare the works of Atget, Marville, and Baldus, each of whom worked in Paris at approximately the same time but who made images that are so very different that they hardly seem to have been made in the same city or in the same historic era.
This exhibit shows a very marked contrast of the technical limits of early photography and the visual appeal of the works produced. Giving my attention to this art form these past several years I have come to define photography as being a luminous experience on a fragile ground. Not only are the results exhibited here wonders of technical innovation but almost without exception each is a visual experience well within my definition.
The oldest works in this exhibit, and perhaps in photography itself, are those made by William Fox Talbot. One photograph is dated 1840. Many of these very early works are so fragile and light sensitive that only facsimiles can be shown. Some are what we now refer to as photograms, objects placed over treated paper. Concerned with the fugitive quality of his prints, Fox Talbot experimented endlessly to create a system through which the prints could be made more permanent, hoping to find a way in which they could be made with inks. In one example, the seeds of a dandelion were placed on a sheet of copper treated with the light sensitive chemicals. Whatever the results of that method were, that it could or could not produce multiple prints, this is the only known print of that effort.
Because most of the works in this exhibit are large format contact prints, many of them have the quality of seeming to be very fine engravings, especially the Marville “Imperial Louvre Library”, a photograph he made to illustrate the ability of the medium to convey detail with great specificity and the value of photography to the study of architecture. And there is enough here to define the difference between the pictorialists and the purists. But with pictures as excellent as these that old argument is indeed moot. What is more readily apparent is that using the large format and working from a tripod, each of these compositions is carefully framed, the photographer has waited until the light is “just right”, and there is a sense in all of them of time as an eternal present.
Many of these early works were made from paper or glass negatives and it is brought home to us in this exhibit that some of the very earliest glass negatives were very large: there being no electricity and no light bulbs, there were as well no enlargers. The works of Carleton Watkins and Julia Margaret Cameron are 18 by 24 inches. Because she made portraits so large a negative could no doubt be worked with somewhat easily in a studio, but in Watkins case, his results are phenomenal. Watkins was an early champion of Yosemite; he was an inspiration for Ansel Adams’ work. He packed not only his camera and these very large sheets of glass for his trips up into the wilderness areas, but his portable darkroom as well…the negatives having to be developed while the plates were still wet. Doing some further research I have learned that he traveled with a team of twelve mules!
As most of us are aware that 19th Century houses have rippled glass windows, that glass of that time had other imperfections, having to do with the difference between rolled and sheet glass, I also began to wonder where the photographers were able to find “museum” quality glass to make these distortion free images.
Watkins’ views of the mountains he loved are radiant. Unlike the very similar work of Adams, who often seems overly involved in the technical aspects of the making of the photograph, Watkins used his mastery of the technology to make photographs that are a joyous sharing of the visions that met his eyes.
In the exhibition, the big change of tempo comes with the work of Henri Cartier Bresson. Bresson was the first, in this exhibit, to use the 35 mm camera, a Lieca. His photographs by contrast are extremely animated and lively. His images were captured moments within a movement. And from this and seeing how close he came to missing or not getting what he saw, we can deduce that he was a man of quick intelligence, quick decision, and quick action….and that he had a complete and innate understanding of the possibilities of his medium. And it is remarkable that his small images, compared to the 18 by 24 of the others, have so much more energy within their smaller format.
The work of Walker Evans has that eternal, monumental character of the larger format works although in the sense of the classical as opposed to the academic. His photograph of the Bedford A and P rigidly adheres to the Greek dictates of classical balance. While he might have worked at times with a 35mm camera I am more inclined to think the photographs here were made with an 8 by 10 view camera.
One of the insights I’ve had regarding photography is that the paper on which the photograph appears is often of very great importance to the photographer. In the earliest of these works I could not discern that the paper had any particular quality that had been chosen specifically for these prints. This reminded me that at that time there were no corner camera shops or wholesale art supply stores with ready supplies of printing papers and other materials. Pressing as close to the glass as I was able to do in the museum, I believe I could see that the paper was rather bland, similar to Bristol vellum, that it had been mounted to another paper backing, whether by the photographer or collector I do not know, and that it had then been matted and framed with the edge of the photograph visible inside the matte. In the later works, specifically Walker Evans’ and Bresson’s, the paper is noticeably a better quality paper but still rather anonymous and without distinctive character…but they are clearly not Kodak or HP Printing Papers.
While this exhibit has a wonderful range of interesting pictorial works, as a survey of one hundred years of photography, in the end it raised more question than it attempted to answer.
It would have been very informative to have been told or to have been shown what the cameras were like that each of these photographers used…the cameras, the lenses, the lens sizes, and the mechanical options available to them…i.e. f-stops, bellows, etc. In almost all of these photographs there is a very noticeable lack of convergence in the parallel lines; is that because of the placement of the camera or the bellows, lenses, etc.?
I was also curious to know how, if there were no enlargers and no electric light bulbs, how these prints had been made. I assume each was a contact print but I do not know what source was used to transmit light through the negative to make the print.
It would have been very interesting, if there were no light meters or range finders, to know how the exposures and the focus had been determined. The Carleton Watkins photographs have such distinct areas of different tonal values one might almost think he had invented Adams’ Zone System. In the notes to the Cameron portraits it was stated that she made very long exposures, sometimes of many minutes duration. It would have been very interesting to know how she came to make that decision.
The Museum has scheduled two gallery talks regarding this exhibition and there are films about two of the photographers that will be shown, but I would have preferred having all of that information made available to the visitor’s within the exhibition. For the general public to understand why photography is a fine art, museums need to do more to make the process understandable to the museum going public: just to look at old pretty pictures should not be the sole reason to invite visitors to museum exhibitions. Photography is first a craft and without an understanding of that craft there can be only a poor understanding of the art.
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/framing/century_images.asp
Two years ago when I was making efforts to understand why photography is an art form I was fortunate to buy a copy of that catalogue from a local bookseller. Seeing that the museum had mounted this present exhibit incorporating some of those works, I was very determined to see it.
While we have come to expect that each painter will paint in a style uniquely his own, with his own palette and brush work, that each will have his distinctive penmanship, and, especially in modern art, create his own signature image or images, it is always a revelation to me that a number of men and women limited to using a simple machine can make such distinctively different images and suggest such individual responses to the life in front of that machine.
This exhibition has abundant examples to illustrate my wonder. Perhaps most specifically in this exhibition I can compare the works of Atget, Marville, and Baldus, each of whom worked in Paris at approximately the same time but who made images that are so very different that they hardly seem to have been made in the same city or in the same historic era.
This exhibit shows a very marked contrast of the technical limits of early photography and the visual appeal of the works produced. Giving my attention to this art form these past several years I have come to define photography as being a luminous experience on a fragile ground. Not only are the results exhibited here wonders of technical innovation but almost without exception each is a visual experience well within my definition.
The oldest works in this exhibit, and perhaps in photography itself, are those made by William Fox Talbot. One photograph is dated 1840. Many of these very early works are so fragile and light sensitive that only facsimiles can be shown. Some are what we now refer to as photograms, objects placed over treated paper. Concerned with the fugitive quality of his prints, Fox Talbot experimented endlessly to create a system through which the prints could be made more permanent, hoping to find a way in which they could be made with inks. In one example, the seeds of a dandelion were placed on a sheet of copper treated with the light sensitive chemicals. Whatever the results of that method were, that it could or could not produce multiple prints, this is the only known print of that effort.
Because most of the works in this exhibit are large format contact prints, many of them have the quality of seeming to be very fine engravings, especially the Marville “Imperial Louvre Library”, a photograph he made to illustrate the ability of the medium to convey detail with great specificity and the value of photography to the study of architecture. And there is enough here to define the difference between the pictorialists and the purists. But with pictures as excellent as these that old argument is indeed moot. What is more readily apparent is that using the large format and working from a tripod, each of these compositions is carefully framed, the photographer has waited until the light is “just right”, and there is a sense in all of them of time as an eternal present.
Many of these early works were made from paper or glass negatives and it is brought home to us in this exhibit that some of the very earliest glass negatives were very large: there being no electricity and no light bulbs, there were as well no enlargers. The works of Carleton Watkins and Julia Margaret Cameron are 18 by 24 inches. Because she made portraits so large a negative could no doubt be worked with somewhat easily in a studio, but in Watkins case, his results are phenomenal. Watkins was an early champion of Yosemite; he was an inspiration for Ansel Adams’ work. He packed not only his camera and these very large sheets of glass for his trips up into the wilderness areas, but his portable darkroom as well…the negatives having to be developed while the plates were still wet. Doing some further research I have learned that he traveled with a team of twelve mules!
As most of us are aware that 19th Century houses have rippled glass windows, that glass of that time had other imperfections, having to do with the difference between rolled and sheet glass, I also began to wonder where the photographers were able to find “museum” quality glass to make these distortion free images.
Watkins’ views of the mountains he loved are radiant. Unlike the very similar work of Adams, who often seems overly involved in the technical aspects of the making of the photograph, Watkins used his mastery of the technology to make photographs that are a joyous sharing of the visions that met his eyes.
In the exhibition, the big change of tempo comes with the work of Henri Cartier Bresson. Bresson was the first, in this exhibit, to use the 35 mm camera, a Lieca. His photographs by contrast are extremely animated and lively. His images were captured moments within a movement. And from this and seeing how close he came to missing or not getting what he saw, we can deduce that he was a man of quick intelligence, quick decision, and quick action….and that he had a complete and innate understanding of the possibilities of his medium. And it is remarkable that his small images, compared to the 18 by 24 of the others, have so much more energy within their smaller format.
The work of Walker Evans has that eternal, monumental character of the larger format works although in the sense of the classical as opposed to the academic. His photograph of the Bedford A and P rigidly adheres to the Greek dictates of classical balance. While he might have worked at times with a 35mm camera I am more inclined to think the photographs here were made with an 8 by 10 view camera.
One of the insights I’ve had regarding photography is that the paper on which the photograph appears is often of very great importance to the photographer. In the earliest of these works I could not discern that the paper had any particular quality that had been chosen specifically for these prints. This reminded me that at that time there were no corner camera shops or wholesale art supply stores with ready supplies of printing papers and other materials. Pressing as close to the glass as I was able to do in the museum, I believe I could see that the paper was rather bland, similar to Bristol vellum, that it had been mounted to another paper backing, whether by the photographer or collector I do not know, and that it had then been matted and framed with the edge of the photograph visible inside the matte. In the later works, specifically Walker Evans’ and Bresson’s, the paper is noticeably a better quality paper but still rather anonymous and without distinctive character…but they are clearly not Kodak or HP Printing Papers.
While this exhibit has a wonderful range of interesting pictorial works, as a survey of one hundred years of photography, in the end it raised more question than it attempted to answer.
It would have been very informative to have been told or to have been shown what the cameras were like that each of these photographers used…the cameras, the lenses, the lens sizes, and the mechanical options available to them…i.e. f-stops, bellows, etc. In almost all of these photographs there is a very noticeable lack of convergence in the parallel lines; is that because of the placement of the camera or the bellows, lenses, etc.?
I was also curious to know how, if there were no enlargers and no electric light bulbs, how these prints had been made. I assume each was a contact print but I do not know what source was used to transmit light through the negative to make the print.
It would have been very interesting, if there were no light meters or range finders, to know how the exposures and the focus had been determined. The Carleton Watkins photographs have such distinct areas of different tonal values one might almost think he had invented Adams’ Zone System. In the notes to the Cameron portraits it was stated that she made very long exposures, sometimes of many minutes duration. It would have been very interesting to know how she came to make that decision.
The Museum has scheduled two gallery talks regarding this exhibition and there are films about two of the photographers that will be shown, but I would have preferred having all of that information made available to the visitor’s within the exhibition. For the general public to understand why photography is a fine art, museums need to do more to make the process understandable to the museum going public: just to look at old pretty pictures should not be the sole reason to invite visitors to museum exhibitions. Photography is first a craft and without an understanding of that craft there can be only a poor understanding of the art.
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/framing/century_images.asp
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to Read Chinese Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
The larger American museums are so eager to be all inclusive that many of their collections appear so obligatory and so minor as to seem hardly worth the time needed to create galleries for them or to visit them. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art this appears to be especially true in The Chinese Collection. Compared to the Chicago Art Institute with it magnificent collection of Tang Dynasty tomb figures and Chinese ceramics, or the Minneapolis Art Institute’s Asian ceramics, or the Portland Museum’s Han Dynasty tomb figures and stellar Asian Ceramics, the Metropolitan shows us merely a sampler.
Furthermore, not all of those samples are shown to their best advantage: the Asian Ceramics are displayed in virtines on two sides of the mezzanine of the Great Hall, on only three or four shelves, up against the wall and but one thin aisle distant from the tables and chairs that have been crowded into that space for a makeshift lunchroom. They continue on the other two sides of the mezzanine in passageways from other collections to other collections. The great open space of this floor is filled with the hubbub from the visitor’s entry on the main floor. This seems to me a rather disrespectful and indifferent presentation.
There are likely any number of reasons for this, the lack of space being one of them, but another conclusion that can be made is that the management of the Met has little interest in the Asian Arts and would like visitors to share their indifference.
Having given some time and study to China these past few years I have been absolutely perplexed that calligraphy is considered the highest Chinese art form. I do know that for the Chinese calligraphy is understood to be not just the making of ideograms, but any drawing done by hand. While I can appreciate the drawing, I do not understand why a sheet of characters has the high esteem it enjoys. Seeing this exhibition listed, “Anatomy of a Masterpiece”, I was hoping that it would enlighten me.
I would think that the western and the eastern art lovers look at these works from a completely different perspective. I know, in fact, that while we look at these objects in museum settings wherein we glide by without stopping too long in order to get through the gallery and on to the next, for the Chinese, and especially in the earlier periods, these objects were contemplated in the silence and privacy of the home: the Philadelphia Museum has a beautiful reconstructed Scholars Study that creates the perfect imagine for us of that environment. And rather than seeing them spread in a vitrine they were studied and enjoyed on a desk top or in a special installation, such as Frank Lloyd Wright made for himself at Taliesin. But aside from the how they are viewed, I am more interested in the way, in the sense of the cultural way, they are viewed: how does the Chinese scholar begin to read these works?
There are thirty six works shown in this exhibition and there are photographic blow ups of details from almost all of them bringing our attention to particular passages. There is ample discussion about the details and subject matter within the works, but from the anecdotal and western rather than the eastern point of view.
There is some explanation as to how these were made and how the tools and materials were manipulated to achieve various effects. But despite the fine scholarship of the interpretation this seemed to have a focus on the trees but not the forest. Most disappointing for me was that there was no interpretation of why the Chinese have maintained their high regard for these works for over a thousand years.
Some of these works are spectacular. “Shining White Light” is a magnificent example of form, the horse, used as expressive form. “Leaves and Finches” is pure visual delight. And in a long scroll, “16 Lohans”, there is a marvel of vegetation surrounding the activities of very thinly drawn persons. I especially like it that the Chinese calligraphers generally isolate the subject on the ground and dispense with a suggested or minutely depicted surround. But most impressive is the display of a profound mastery of draftsmanship: it seems incredible that a person with a pen or a brush can sit before a sheet of blank paper or silk and freely draw out something so expressive of his profound interest…especially when that drawing sometimes continues along a route that is ultimately 30 feet long! There is no sense in these works that the artist periodically stepped back to assess the progress of his work: this drawing appears to flow in one continuous movement from his pen.
While I admire what we would consider the drawing, as it regards the sheets of ideograms the works have little if any power to move me, even though some Asians have attempted to broaden my understanding. But show me a Sung dynasty bowl with a rabbit fur glaze and I can go into a rapture.
Many of the works in this exhibition display wonderful charm, wit, and an ebullient good humor. The sense of using what is seen to make two dimensional designs is inspiring.
I was hoping that this exhibition would be a seminal moment in that it would give me an even greater understanding and appreciation of this culture. It did not. While I might have a better understanding of certain passages, I continue to not understand calligraphy and the mind that esteems it. I continue to feel that I stand outside a tradition I will never understand.
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={9870D849-9235-4458-BC8C-E9C74CB7D18A}
Furthermore, not all of those samples are shown to their best advantage: the Asian Ceramics are displayed in virtines on two sides of the mezzanine of the Great Hall, on only three or four shelves, up against the wall and but one thin aisle distant from the tables and chairs that have been crowded into that space for a makeshift lunchroom. They continue on the other two sides of the mezzanine in passageways from other collections to other collections. The great open space of this floor is filled with the hubbub from the visitor’s entry on the main floor. This seems to me a rather disrespectful and indifferent presentation.
There are likely any number of reasons for this, the lack of space being one of them, but another conclusion that can be made is that the management of the Met has little interest in the Asian Arts and would like visitors to share their indifference.
Having given some time and study to China these past few years I have been absolutely perplexed that calligraphy is considered the highest Chinese art form. I do know that for the Chinese calligraphy is understood to be not just the making of ideograms, but any drawing done by hand. While I can appreciate the drawing, I do not understand why a sheet of characters has the high esteem it enjoys. Seeing this exhibition listed, “Anatomy of a Masterpiece”, I was hoping that it would enlighten me.
I would think that the western and the eastern art lovers look at these works from a completely different perspective. I know, in fact, that while we look at these objects in museum settings wherein we glide by without stopping too long in order to get through the gallery and on to the next, for the Chinese, and especially in the earlier periods, these objects were contemplated in the silence and privacy of the home: the Philadelphia Museum has a beautiful reconstructed Scholars Study that creates the perfect imagine for us of that environment. And rather than seeing them spread in a vitrine they were studied and enjoyed on a desk top or in a special installation, such as Frank Lloyd Wright made for himself at Taliesin. But aside from the how they are viewed, I am more interested in the way, in the sense of the cultural way, they are viewed: how does the Chinese scholar begin to read these works?
There are thirty six works shown in this exhibition and there are photographic blow ups of details from almost all of them bringing our attention to particular passages. There is ample discussion about the details and subject matter within the works, but from the anecdotal and western rather than the eastern point of view.
There is some explanation as to how these were made and how the tools and materials were manipulated to achieve various effects. But despite the fine scholarship of the interpretation this seemed to have a focus on the trees but not the forest. Most disappointing for me was that there was no interpretation of why the Chinese have maintained their high regard for these works for over a thousand years.
Some of these works are spectacular. “Shining White Light” is a magnificent example of form, the horse, used as expressive form. “Leaves and Finches” is pure visual delight. And in a long scroll, “16 Lohans”, there is a marvel of vegetation surrounding the activities of very thinly drawn persons. I especially like it that the Chinese calligraphers generally isolate the subject on the ground and dispense with a suggested or minutely depicted surround. But most impressive is the display of a profound mastery of draftsmanship: it seems incredible that a person with a pen or a brush can sit before a sheet of blank paper or silk and freely draw out something so expressive of his profound interest…especially when that drawing sometimes continues along a route that is ultimately 30 feet long! There is no sense in these works that the artist periodically stepped back to assess the progress of his work: this drawing appears to flow in one continuous movement from his pen.
While I admire what we would consider the drawing, as it regards the sheets of ideograms the works have little if any power to move me, even though some Asians have attempted to broaden my understanding. But show me a Sung dynasty bowl with a rabbit fur glaze and I can go into a rapture.
Many of the works in this exhibition display wonderful charm, wit, and an ebullient good humor. The sense of using what is seen to make two dimensional designs is inspiring.
I was hoping that this exhibition would be a seminal moment in that it would give me an even greater understanding and appreciation of this culture. It did not. While I might have a better understanding of certain passages, I continue to not understand calligraphy and the mind that esteems it. I continue to feel that I stand outside a tradition I will never understand.
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={9870D849-9235-4458-BC8C-E9C74CB7D18A}
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Louise Bourgeois at The Guggenheim Museum, New York City
The Guggenheim was designed so that the works on view would be seen beginning from the top. One takes the elevator up and then walks down. Frank Lloyd Wright is a master of directing the foot traffic and this long ramp is especially assertive. For this exhibit, however, the chronology begins at the bottom: one is expected to climb to the top. In a sense I suspect this is symbolic: these are works that require one to slog his way through the career. As a creature of habit I rode up and walked down. I then walked back up and back down. In the end it really did not matter which way was chosen: there is little sense of development over the many long years of this career, there is a sameness of achievement overall.
While I recognize the artist’s name as one among the Twentieth Century American artists with name recognition there is no image in my mind that connotes her work. And while I have seen her work in other museums, especially over the last several years, I cannot remember exactly which of her works I have seen: she has created neither a signature image nor have the works she has created created a lingering iconic image in my memory.
While giving these works my attention two things became apparent to me: finish and celebrity.
Near the top there is a series of works, “Cells”, from the 1990’s, which have been made from discarded doors of various descriptions found, I assume, on the streets of New York. In the 1960’s it was common to see doors like these fronting construction sites in the city. Tableaux have been created inside these cells and there are windows or small openings through which we can look inside. There we see various items that look, to be perfectly honest, as if they were things that had also been found on the street or purchased at flea markets. Although the interpretation rhapsodized about the intensity of the emotional experience within these cells, as a viewer I felt that they never rose above the reality of being a collection of found objects. Perhaps I am too successfully a Buddhist and accept life as too obviously maya and know that a thing is only what it is and that any color we give it is only the color that we give it. While this collection of objects might have profound meaning for the artist, that concern was not presented in such a way as to communicate a shared experience. Trained as a set designer I did not sense that the design of these Cells expressed the essence of the artist’s intention.
The doors, or in one case the panels to circuit boxes, had an apparent “as found” finish, but on some of them I wondered if a seemingly casual over painting might not have been the artist’s rather than as found. I wondered if there might not have been a little more scenic manipulation here than we were supposed to notice. I had an uncomfortable feeling that not all of this revelatory autobiography was as honest as it was stated to be. So let me be honest: I am suggesting that these cells read as being rather contrived: they were not really intended as an expression of the artist’s angst but as contemporary art works made for gallery consumption.
At the bottom of the ramp, at the beginning of the career, there are several paintings from the 1940’s. The drawing is poor, the limited colors are poor, and they are placed in the center of prevailing twentieth century “style”. The craftsmanship is emphatically nonexistent. On the whole they have the look: these are of interest because I made them. They are very bad paintings and the artist was well advised to turn her interest to sculpture. That they had been publicly exhibited at the time they were made brought to my mind an awareness of what I believe is commonly understood as “art world darlings”: those insiders whose social networking has secured a recognition for their work in the commercial venues of contemporary art. This was augmented by references in the museum literature to her marriage to the American art critic Robert Goldwater. I wondered: if she had not been married to that person, would her works have been taken on by an art gallery?
There are two areas where a number of her drawings were displayed as a group. Near the top of the ramp there were many drawings of what looked like loosely woven cheesecloth and others of free form spirals. It was apparent to me that she was also not a draftsman. Initially I was curious if she was referencing Chinese calligraphy. Chinese calligraphy is a very proscribed discipline with very rigid rules. In my reading I have been made familiar with the work of a Chinese artist, whose name I have forgotten, probably in the 800’s C.E., who took the stance of an anti-artist and whose works are valued for their fluency and spontaneity. Were the Louise Bourgeois drawings referencing that anti-art esthetic? Because there was no other reference to Chinese art, I decided that there wasn’t. They are simply not very good drawings. They are made on not very good paper. They were probably nothing more than working drawings for sculptures she intended to make
The only interesting drawings were nine engravings. These were made to illustrate some of the artist’s personal anecdotes. They are very good drawings. If there are more of these somewhere I would much rather have seen them than the working drawings we were shown. But these drawings showed high finish, a compliance with the standards of excellence in the arts, and I wondered if they might not have been included to show us that, yes, she can, when she wants to.
Her real talent is in sculpture and there are some very good pieces in the show. After the first paintings we find the first group of sculpture, Personages, carved wood, again wood as found in the street. But this discarded American wood has been made into African sculpture. I have no quarrel with an artist expanding his or her horizons by working within a foreign cultural tradition. But these are so obvious that I do have a problem with something like this that is only a studio exploration presented in a museum setting. Personages was followed by a series, Lair, again primitive, derivative, and again studio exploration. And the same can be said for a series of vertical assemblages of small pieces of wood, Mortise, Memling Dawn, et al. A large assemblage of half round shapes of wood, “Partial Recall”, painted white, looked like an exercise: how can I make something of this without referencing Nevelson? The answer was to make it horizontal and to paint it white. But that did not disguise the reference.
It was not until she began to work in bronze and marble, creating small intimate pieces that evoked a strong visceral response that the work began to be interesting. Again, if there is more of this somewhere I would much rather have seen it than those made from found wood…there is more than enough of that kind of thing around.
Among the best of these is Spiral Woman, the body of a woman hanging out of a spiral of “something” cast in bronze and finished in a polished gold. It is very tactile, it is very visceral and it has an extremely pleasant sense of form. Two larger spirals, in shiny silver, hanging above the lobby from the high ceiling, have the look of mere decoration. They are instantly forgettable.
“One and Others” a group of painted wood shapes, was somewhat interesting but it felt overworked because of the really fine and careful finish.
I was very favorably impressed with “Rabbit”, what looked to be the carcass of a partially gutted creature hanging by a foot from a nail, the skin of the back splayed out creating a diamond shape behind the spine. I suspect a mold was made of the real object and that it was then cast in bronze. It created an immediate remembrance of the 16th Century French ceramicist, Palissy. As both an object and as an art world and cultural reference I thought this was one of the most successful works in the exhibition.
I was very impressed by the works in marble. Moderately sized, each had a very monumental quality. These for the most part refer to body parts…breast, penises, and vaginas. Most of them were placed on large single blocks of wood serving as pedestals. It was a lovely contrast of materials and a lovely sensual subject matter. All of these marble works had the highest finish and in most the polished surface was contrasted to areas that were left rough cut. But this series was also marred by a number of works of forearms and hands, clasped or opened, that looked to have been life casts and cast in plaster and painted to resemble the marble. There was something really “off” about them in what seemed but more contrivance.
Late works are made in fabric and the most successful of these were those made from remnants of tapestries. These had wonderful colors and texture. This material was intended to reference the artist’s early years and her family. Whereas the interpretation makes much of a childhood trauma inspired by her father, because there is so constant a reference to the mother I think there is a stronger case for an unresolved mother/daughter separation anxiety. This is not to say that an artist cannot take that reference and turn it into a major art work: O’Neill gave us some major masterpieces using his family history. But as art works the remnants of tapestry were more interesting than what was made of them.
On the floor of the lobby stands a large sculptural work of two spiders about eight feet high. Bourgeois has said that she wants to rehabilitate the reputation of the spider. And she has. These are silly but fun.
“Don’t Swallow Me” a flat and framed work incorporating a petticoat laid out in a flat circle, two long red arms painted on the paper ground and some other markings was also interesting because of the composition and the contrast of textures.
Interesting. Interesting is the most that I get from this exhibition. Except for Arch of Hysteria, a polished gold headless male torso, sans genitals (?), bent backward and hanging at eye level from the naval, none of the images elicited a shock of recognition or the sense of a confrontation with something deeply buried in the collective unconscious. However, while there are no masterpieces neither was there an overload of signature images that look to have been manufactured for the many hundreds of museums in America. Instead, there is a constant sense of an ongoing exploration for… “something”. That’s fine.
One image that does stand out in many of these works is the spiral. Initially when I saw it in the series of the drawings I responded to it as if it were a contrived effort to create a universal image: the spiral is the most universal of all symbols and has been found in every early culture. At first I assumed that we were being directed to the works of Jung and Joseph Campbell. But next to those drawings was a work which included a skein of linen and so I came to understand the fascination of the spiral as referencing that: the spiral is the skein from which the creativity flows.
A second image which was almost as commonly used was the dress maker’s or tailor’s sausage or gourd. But because the interpretation never identified it, for most viewers it was probably simply an odd object. But knowing what it was did not invest it with any deeper meaning for me. As I have said, I’m a Buddhist and a gourd is a gourd is a gourd.
Despite the well known fact that Louise Bourgeois is a celebrity, an insider of the New York art world, her work, as presented here, seems not worthy of museum attention. Does that have to do with her work or with this selection of her works? From the early to the late works there is a vacillation between a too fine finish and an indifference to finish; I sense that a decision had never been made one way or the other. Thus overall the approach to the work seems unfocused and…casual. I’m not sure that I would even consider all of this minor or of secondary importance. At the end of the day it is really just the stuff of art world galleries. The most powerful experience here was reading the artist’s comments about her works that merge human form with buildings. (Which are also …interesting.) She is reputed to have written: “Skyscrapers reflect the human condition. They do not touch.” Nothing else I saw here had so strong an impact, nothing else so succinctly spoke to me from the depths of the artist’s being or told me so much about her. Ironically it was not a visual experience, it was a verbal communication. Painting, sculpture, and photography are visual experiences. There is no reason for an artist to spend his, or her, time making an image of something that can be more powerfully said.
Postscript: Museums would do the arts a great service if they would curtail the hyperbole in their guides and interpretations. The interpretation for this exhibit is printed as a brochure and available at the entrance, as well as on the web site. It is an okay accompaniment to the exhibit but with a few too many histrionic utterances. For example: “the fraught dynamic between…”, “unprecedented emotional intensity…” “these troubling connotations…”, “sinister traps”, and “fraught (yes, fraught again) with the suggestion of life concealed…” It presents, overall, the image of a woman who has lived her life as the victim of her childhood traumas and her adult gender anomie. As described in this document, in the whole wide universe it is all about her. Because I do not know her personally my experience of the universe has been otherwise. As so many of us have grown weary of the professional victim, I’m sure many observers other than myself wondered why she simply didn’t chuck it all and go to a therapist.
I am suggesting that with a less breathy guide we might have more readily felt what the artist was attempting to express. I certainly did not buy into this rhetoric: for the most part what it described was not evident in the work. Eventually the emotional high pitch of that document had the effect of creating in me a feeling of resistance. I know that’s what it was because I have been to the therapist.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/26/arts/0627-BOUR_index.html
While I recognize the artist’s name as one among the Twentieth Century American artists with name recognition there is no image in my mind that connotes her work. And while I have seen her work in other museums, especially over the last several years, I cannot remember exactly which of her works I have seen: she has created neither a signature image nor have the works she has created created a lingering iconic image in my memory.
While giving these works my attention two things became apparent to me: finish and celebrity.
Near the top there is a series of works, “Cells”, from the 1990’s, which have been made from discarded doors of various descriptions found, I assume, on the streets of New York. In the 1960’s it was common to see doors like these fronting construction sites in the city. Tableaux have been created inside these cells and there are windows or small openings through which we can look inside. There we see various items that look, to be perfectly honest, as if they were things that had also been found on the street or purchased at flea markets. Although the interpretation rhapsodized about the intensity of the emotional experience within these cells, as a viewer I felt that they never rose above the reality of being a collection of found objects. Perhaps I am too successfully a Buddhist and accept life as too obviously maya and know that a thing is only what it is and that any color we give it is only the color that we give it. While this collection of objects might have profound meaning for the artist, that concern was not presented in such a way as to communicate a shared experience. Trained as a set designer I did not sense that the design of these Cells expressed the essence of the artist’s intention.
The doors, or in one case the panels to circuit boxes, had an apparent “as found” finish, but on some of them I wondered if a seemingly casual over painting might not have been the artist’s rather than as found. I wondered if there might not have been a little more scenic manipulation here than we were supposed to notice. I had an uncomfortable feeling that not all of this revelatory autobiography was as honest as it was stated to be. So let me be honest: I am suggesting that these cells read as being rather contrived: they were not really intended as an expression of the artist’s angst but as contemporary art works made for gallery consumption.
At the bottom of the ramp, at the beginning of the career, there are several paintings from the 1940’s. The drawing is poor, the limited colors are poor, and they are placed in the center of prevailing twentieth century “style”. The craftsmanship is emphatically nonexistent. On the whole they have the look: these are of interest because I made them. They are very bad paintings and the artist was well advised to turn her interest to sculpture. That they had been publicly exhibited at the time they were made brought to my mind an awareness of what I believe is commonly understood as “art world darlings”: those insiders whose social networking has secured a recognition for their work in the commercial venues of contemporary art. This was augmented by references in the museum literature to her marriage to the American art critic Robert Goldwater. I wondered: if she had not been married to that person, would her works have been taken on by an art gallery?
There are two areas where a number of her drawings were displayed as a group. Near the top of the ramp there were many drawings of what looked like loosely woven cheesecloth and others of free form spirals. It was apparent to me that she was also not a draftsman. Initially I was curious if she was referencing Chinese calligraphy. Chinese calligraphy is a very proscribed discipline with very rigid rules. In my reading I have been made familiar with the work of a Chinese artist, whose name I have forgotten, probably in the 800’s C.E., who took the stance of an anti-artist and whose works are valued for their fluency and spontaneity. Were the Louise Bourgeois drawings referencing that anti-art esthetic? Because there was no other reference to Chinese art, I decided that there wasn’t. They are simply not very good drawings. They are made on not very good paper. They were probably nothing more than working drawings for sculptures she intended to make
The only interesting drawings were nine engravings. These were made to illustrate some of the artist’s personal anecdotes. They are very good drawings. If there are more of these somewhere I would much rather have seen them than the working drawings we were shown. But these drawings showed high finish, a compliance with the standards of excellence in the arts, and I wondered if they might not have been included to show us that, yes, she can, when she wants to.
Her real talent is in sculpture and there are some very good pieces in the show. After the first paintings we find the first group of sculpture, Personages, carved wood, again wood as found in the street. But this discarded American wood has been made into African sculpture. I have no quarrel with an artist expanding his or her horizons by working within a foreign cultural tradition. But these are so obvious that I do have a problem with something like this that is only a studio exploration presented in a museum setting. Personages was followed by a series, Lair, again primitive, derivative, and again studio exploration. And the same can be said for a series of vertical assemblages of small pieces of wood, Mortise, Memling Dawn, et al. A large assemblage of half round shapes of wood, “Partial Recall”, painted white, looked like an exercise: how can I make something of this without referencing Nevelson? The answer was to make it horizontal and to paint it white. But that did not disguise the reference.
It was not until she began to work in bronze and marble, creating small intimate pieces that evoked a strong visceral response that the work began to be interesting. Again, if there is more of this somewhere I would much rather have seen it than those made from found wood…there is more than enough of that kind of thing around.
Among the best of these is Spiral Woman, the body of a woman hanging out of a spiral of “something” cast in bronze and finished in a polished gold. It is very tactile, it is very visceral and it has an extremely pleasant sense of form. Two larger spirals, in shiny silver, hanging above the lobby from the high ceiling, have the look of mere decoration. They are instantly forgettable.
“One and Others” a group of painted wood shapes, was somewhat interesting but it felt overworked because of the really fine and careful finish.
I was very favorably impressed with “Rabbit”, what looked to be the carcass of a partially gutted creature hanging by a foot from a nail, the skin of the back splayed out creating a diamond shape behind the spine. I suspect a mold was made of the real object and that it was then cast in bronze. It created an immediate remembrance of the 16th Century French ceramicist, Palissy. As both an object and as an art world and cultural reference I thought this was one of the most successful works in the exhibition.
I was very impressed by the works in marble. Moderately sized, each had a very monumental quality. These for the most part refer to body parts…breast, penises, and vaginas. Most of them were placed on large single blocks of wood serving as pedestals. It was a lovely contrast of materials and a lovely sensual subject matter. All of these marble works had the highest finish and in most the polished surface was contrasted to areas that were left rough cut. But this series was also marred by a number of works of forearms and hands, clasped or opened, that looked to have been life casts and cast in plaster and painted to resemble the marble. There was something really “off” about them in what seemed but more contrivance.
Late works are made in fabric and the most successful of these were those made from remnants of tapestries. These had wonderful colors and texture. This material was intended to reference the artist’s early years and her family. Whereas the interpretation makes much of a childhood trauma inspired by her father, because there is so constant a reference to the mother I think there is a stronger case for an unresolved mother/daughter separation anxiety. This is not to say that an artist cannot take that reference and turn it into a major art work: O’Neill gave us some major masterpieces using his family history. But as art works the remnants of tapestry were more interesting than what was made of them.
On the floor of the lobby stands a large sculptural work of two spiders about eight feet high. Bourgeois has said that she wants to rehabilitate the reputation of the spider. And she has. These are silly but fun.
“Don’t Swallow Me” a flat and framed work incorporating a petticoat laid out in a flat circle, two long red arms painted on the paper ground and some other markings was also interesting because of the composition and the contrast of textures.
Interesting. Interesting is the most that I get from this exhibition. Except for Arch of Hysteria, a polished gold headless male torso, sans genitals (?), bent backward and hanging at eye level from the naval, none of the images elicited a shock of recognition or the sense of a confrontation with something deeply buried in the collective unconscious. However, while there are no masterpieces neither was there an overload of signature images that look to have been manufactured for the many hundreds of museums in America. Instead, there is a constant sense of an ongoing exploration for… “something”. That’s fine.
One image that does stand out in many of these works is the spiral. Initially when I saw it in the series of the drawings I responded to it as if it were a contrived effort to create a universal image: the spiral is the most universal of all symbols and has been found in every early culture. At first I assumed that we were being directed to the works of Jung and Joseph Campbell. But next to those drawings was a work which included a skein of linen and so I came to understand the fascination of the spiral as referencing that: the spiral is the skein from which the creativity flows.
A second image which was almost as commonly used was the dress maker’s or tailor’s sausage or gourd. But because the interpretation never identified it, for most viewers it was probably simply an odd object. But knowing what it was did not invest it with any deeper meaning for me. As I have said, I’m a Buddhist and a gourd is a gourd is a gourd.
Despite the well known fact that Louise Bourgeois is a celebrity, an insider of the New York art world, her work, as presented here, seems not worthy of museum attention. Does that have to do with her work or with this selection of her works? From the early to the late works there is a vacillation between a too fine finish and an indifference to finish; I sense that a decision had never been made one way or the other. Thus overall the approach to the work seems unfocused and…casual. I’m not sure that I would even consider all of this minor or of secondary importance. At the end of the day it is really just the stuff of art world galleries. The most powerful experience here was reading the artist’s comments about her works that merge human form with buildings. (Which are also …interesting.) She is reputed to have written: “Skyscrapers reflect the human condition. They do not touch.” Nothing else I saw here had so strong an impact, nothing else so succinctly spoke to me from the depths of the artist’s being or told me so much about her. Ironically it was not a visual experience, it was a verbal communication. Painting, sculpture, and photography are visual experiences. There is no reason for an artist to spend his, or her, time making an image of something that can be more powerfully said.
Postscript: Museums would do the arts a great service if they would curtail the hyperbole in their guides and interpretations. The interpretation for this exhibit is printed as a brochure and available at the entrance, as well as on the web site. It is an okay accompaniment to the exhibit but with a few too many histrionic utterances. For example: “the fraught dynamic between…”, “unprecedented emotional intensity…” “these troubling connotations…”, “sinister traps”, and “fraught (yes, fraught again) with the suggestion of life concealed…” It presents, overall, the image of a woman who has lived her life as the victim of her childhood traumas and her adult gender anomie. As described in this document, in the whole wide universe it is all about her. Because I do not know her personally my experience of the universe has been otherwise. As so many of us have grown weary of the professional victim, I’m sure many observers other than myself wondered why she simply didn’t chuck it all and go to a therapist.
I am suggesting that with a less breathy guide we might have more readily felt what the artist was attempting to express. I certainly did not buy into this rhetoric: for the most part what it described was not evident in the work. Eventually the emotional high pitch of that document had the effect of creating in me a feeling of resistance. I know that’s what it was because I have been to the therapist.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/26/arts/0627-BOUR_index.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
