I’m becoming accustomed to conversations changing overnight over the last year or two; and certainly the context of those conversations is being altered more or less continuously. Less expected is when the perceptions of a set of issues or phenomena of any variety – whether social, cultural, environmental – previously more or less settled and rapidly receding in the historical rear window, are suddenly resurrected as if, however resolved or settled, they simply hadn’t quite been dealt with enough care, devotion or rigor. (Is this the domain between theory and physical (or metaphysical) law?)
In the meantime, as the future pushes relentlessly into the present, the sheer forward momentum expands and deepens our perspective of that historical evolution viewed over the millenia. (Between technological acceleration and the crashing biosphere, that seems to be where we are right now.)
Horst (Mainbocher corset)
So I woke up to Vanessa Friedman’s preview feature on the Getty Museum’s Icons of Style exhibition in The New York Times on Sunday; and, as I read through it, wondered for a moment if we had lived through the same past decades (or perhaps more precisely if we had arrived at the same moment). She gets to the right conclusion—in fact she gets there right away, in the title/headline: “It Was An Ad? So What. It’s Still Art.” And with that ‘so what’ the hed encapsulates a subtle qualifier —in that it’s always smart to distrust an image with an agenda. In a way, this would have been the more interesting discussion—especially as we encounter it even more relentlessly in the world of on-line advertising.
Instead, I meandered through a retread of a narrative and conversations that belonged to a generation (or two or three) prior to my own (which is going quite a ways back). In other words, it’s a conversation we might have had with Edward Steichen himself (who enters on the very early side of this survey). “[P]alpable tension around both disciplines [photography and fashion]” in the “hallowed halls of a museum”? It’s a fact that for those of us who revere great art and music, these places can be regarded as sacred spaces. But art doesn’t have to go through an embalming (or for that matter a varnishing) to enter the ‘hallowed halls.’ All it has to do is live eternally—emphasis on the live—because eternity just gets more abstract and more ephemeral with each passing year; and whether or not the art survives the civilization or the biosphere, it’s probably not going to fare too well in the next gallactic collision.
“Photography had to fight to get taken seriously, and fashion photography had to fight even harder,” Nick Knight is quoted saying; and again I wonder whose fight he’s talking about. Surely it’s not his own. He wouldn’t have the career he’s had if he were still ‘fighting the battles’ photographers like Steichen, Munkácsi, Man Ray and Lee Miller, Penn and Avedon had waged—and won (not without cost)—long before he dived in. And whatever Avedon’s qualms about his fashion photography being exhibited in 1970, he had certainly doffed that hairshirt by 1978, when his 30-year retrospective went up at the Met. There were the serious portraits against the stark white voids, the performers making something of their moment in more atmospherically lit studio space (or alternatively dropping their masks), the panoramic parades of Watergate scoundrels, Washington Post heroes and the Warhol Factory; and dancing (or swanning) through it all, the fashion photography. Could there be any question that there was as much art in the fashion photography as the portraiture and celebrity studies? You could have made a movie out of the Veruschka and Twiggy images alone. (And in a way Avedon already had—with a big assist from Mike Nichols—with his antic series of photographs of Suzy Parker and Nichols cavorting as Taylor and Burton-like celebrities hounded by papparazzi.)
Richard Avedon, Sunny Harnett in Mme. Alix Grès evening dress, Casino Le Touquet, 1954Richard Avedon, China Machado, Galitzine pajamas, 1965Veruschka by Avedon (Kimberly dress) 1968Avedon portrait of Sophia Loren with hair by Ara Gallant, 1970
Then we get an even more irrelevant retread of the kind of puritanism that once actually did infect not only the museum world, but the art world as a whole. (It’s still there to some extent, but most of us who have to hang out in that world try to ignore it.) This is a legacy that can be partially attributed to Duchamp and his particular strain of the Dada movement, trying to move the conversation away from its superseding aesthetic preoccupations toward a much broader intellectual scope; to break off the aesthetic carapace from the corpus of an idea and its extended implications. But even Duchamp recognized that between the perception and design—that is to say the idea itself—the aesthetic inevitably creeps back into the conversation. There’s a reference here somewhere to photographers preferring to refer to themselves as artists—which is probably true and further indication that the conversation has moved on. Fine art photography is rarely about simply the photograph. Something has been done to the photograph or to the process, or the ‘subject’ in its largest sense. The photography—the light, lens, performance, process, materials, etc.—itself is the subject. Or not—it can be part of a much larger performance, ensemble, assemblage, installation—the largest possible field imaginable.
The post-Conceptual legacy to art was that, even as artists felt free to return to very traditional media and craft traditions; also free to explore them entirely within or outside their cultural or historical contexts, they were similarly free to explore every new medium and technique available to them, to make art that required fresh theoretical perspectives, that made demands on language itself to do critical justice to it. We move in a world where art can take virtually any form and happen anywhere, whether crafted solitarily or collaboratively, quietly (or noisily) behind the doors of a studio, assembled by two hands or hired hands, or seemingly spontaneously erupt on the street – and I’m not necessarily talking about ‘street art’ either.
Helmut Newton, Yves Saint Laurent, “le smoking,” editorial feature for Vogue, 1975
So we’re still talking about photography being art? Really if there is anything even remotely controversial about this show it’s the notion of advertising design (or the photograph in service of advertising) being art or the vehicle of art. That is something I’m happy to see shaken off and confronted—and curator Paul Martineau has done this directly, including not simply the photography, but the entire graphic package. Beyond editorial fashion photography, which in the case of certain famous photographs (or a series of fashion photographs laid out as a ‘story’) effectively amounts to a full-blown advertising campaign (e.g., Helmut Newton’s photography of the Yves Saint Laurentle smoking looks in 1975), Martineau also gives us photographs that were in fact ads (although it’s interesting that we don’t necessarily remember them that way, at least not immediately—that’s how genius some of them were and are).
The pioneer and master of this genre was Guy Bourdin, who did not begin shooting fashion until the mid-1950s, but within only a few years was already pushing his style forward. It was as if he arrived at 1968 six or seven years early. There was always a surrealism to the Bourdin composition—he was mentored by Man Ray—and, as off-handed as they’re intended to come across, the images are all meticulously composed. Bourdin’s compositions are self-contained caches of surreal theatre, boxed interior or exterior spaces suggesting alternately compressed, oblique narratives, or obscure, almost recondite objects of desire. An intense alienation is held in suspense against a more amorphous sense of distraction that seems to diffuse through the subject, with only the frame holding it all in—a kind of visual ‘Situationism’ that gives a late-1960s edge to Bourdin’s surrealism. It was interesting to have an opportunity the following evening to look at a few series of small Polaroids Bourdin executed in preparation for a few of his fashion shoots. Within these very small dimensions, Bourdin holds his subjects as if they were insect or shell specimens. A Bourdin photograph offsets an avidity for the erotic impulse with a healthy contempt for his human subjects.
Guy Bourdin, “Chapeau choc” 1954
A Bourdin photograph—that is to say, a Bourdin advertisement—‘locks us in’ with our objects of desire (or contempt) even as it casts us adrift. The avenues of escape are all around us, but we’re helpless and trapped regardless. I’m not sure what kind of a filmmaker Bourdin would have made judging from the bits and pieces of Bourdin films I saw that evening at MILK Studios; but he would have been a perfect choice to direct a J. G. Ballard adaptation.
Consider his ad for Bloomingdale’s. We’ve seen this before and we’re seeing it now; though as the kids would say, the shit is getting real. The setting: exurban desolation, apparently a point of transit (La Guardia?)—we’re a long way from 59th and Lexington. Two figures are posed almost referentially—securely placed, but tentative in attitude—in the upper-left quadrant of the picture, half-way between a hangar-like white cuboid and the foreground. What looks like a cargo container disappears into the upper-right margins. They may be wearing fashion, but they’re not selling it. We might read them as travelers. A plane passing leftward some distance behind the site through a cirrocumulus scudded sky echoes this notion. The view is from an extreme low angle—call it a rat’s eye perspective—on a scrubby barren pavement of asphalt and gravel with the debris rolling towards us. (There may be a surveillance camera, though it’s hard to tell.) ‘Oh that’s what it is—a page from this morning’s discarded Times, with a portion of the crumpled advertising just visible—the clean Helvetica ‘-dale’s’ from ‘Bloomingdale’s’—the fishwrap that missed the fish. The ‘fashion’ is an afterthought. It’s all about the brand; and we’re in on the joke—it’s a part of the mental furniture and clutter we take for granted, like graffiti on the subway, the shmear on the morning’s bagel. Always moving, changing, decaying—until it’s not there anymore.
This is where the conversation is going—both in art and fashion. I refer to fashion here as design viewed within its contemporary actuality—the context of life itself.
Although its originality speaks for itself, Bourdin’s art here is directed to a fairly specific (though broad) audience and range of tastes within the culture of the American bourgeoisie. This was the state of American commercial culture in 1977, which regardless of its sophistication could be viewed on the same continuum as it had at the beginning of the 20th century; which is more or less the way it might be viewed today. We demand art of our goods and services—it’s essential to our culture and civilization.
I loved that in addition to the actual commercial lithographic advertising or editorial art Martineau included some of the couture featured in some of the photographs, or similar designs. The classic evening dress Avedon photographs on Sunny Harnett by Alix Grès at the Casino, Le Touquet in 1954 is here, as is another famous Dior day dress and hat photographed by Avedon in 1947. Yet Martineau felt compelled to undergird his discussions (he’s authored two essays in the catalogue) with a kind of ‘ars longa, vita brevis’ preamble and foundational chronology. The epigraph to his introduction is a characteristically epigrammatic (and disingenuous) quote from Oscar Wilde’s essay, “The Philosophy of Dress.”
“Fashion rests upon folly. Art rests upon law Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal. A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months.”
This was rich, coming from Wilde; and he knew it. (Though between reading Friedman’s Times piece and looking at the exhibition the following day, I paused to consider the gulf between law and theory in different disciplines.) Civilization rests upon law—which, as Americans know too well, often itself rests upon folly. Art and fashion both rest upon theory; while both are frequently driven by folly. Art may or may not be eternal; but it is more likely than law or fashion to survive the civilization that nurtured it. If you ever return to that essay with a view to the fashion of the last few decades, you’ll wonder if Wilde was simply waiting for designers like Chanel, Cardin, Courrèges, and Calvin Klein to come along. And to be photographed by, say, Herb Ritts—the subject of Martineau’s 2012 exhibition of fashion photography.
Ritts belonged in the Getty then just as he does now, surrounded by his fellow laureates; and so does the work of Cardin, Courrèges and Calvin Klein. Setting to one side the sophisticated languages and ‘systems’ (as Barthes once analyzed it) of fashion, couture and fashion design are about an architecture for the body that moves with the body. But fashion is also much more. It occupies a space between art and life. It’s about what happens around that architecture, mediating between role or identity and culture. It’s inherently aspirational. It’s about the atmosphere we create around ourselves; an approach to life and the way we want to live. The photography inevitably reflected and magnified this. Avedon summed it up perfectly in his 1963 tribute to Munkácsi: “The art of Munkácsi lay in what he wanted life to be, and he wanted it to be splendid. And it was.”
Richard Avedon, Carmen (“Homage to Munkácsi), coat by Pierre Cardin, Place François 1er, Paris 1957
But aspirations can fail. Or they can succeed in one moment only to fail in the next. Once one of the most successful and wealthiest of commercial photographers, Munkácsi’s life ended in almost catastrophic poverty. We live in a time of fallen and failing icons, where even the designation, ‘iconic’, seems increasingly debased and devalued. (Or simply tentative or temporary: we recognize certain things as iconic by definition, but realize they may not hold that status through more than one or two generations.) Monuments fall almost routinely; and if civilization hasn’t quite fallen, we’re seeing cracks as terrifying as those in the Antarctic ice shelf (Syria, Turkey, Hungary, Washington, D.C.)—and it could be said the two are not unrelated.
Martineau was smart to close off the survey at 2011—the dawn, as he puts it, of Instagram and yet another culture of image-making that has sprung up around it. I was slow to see this shift myself; it surprised me more than a little that the curators of the 2014 edition of Cincinnati’s FotoFocus made it the physical centerpiece of their photography biennial. The speed and decay of fashion trends is yet another pressure point with consequences that may or may not have been foreseen, the most significant of which is simply over-production and waste (with the predictable environmental fall-out). The larger implication of disposable fashion in our late capitalist economy is that it implies disposability at both ends of the production chain: the workers who produce it and the product itself, which ends up as more than slightly toxic trash. It is the antithesis of the aspirational.
At a moment when contingency and conditionality increasingly define the way we live, the ‘icons’ themselves blur. The Icons show is large enough that, ‘iconic’ or not there may be images that fade to footnotes. (And it’s not as if there aren’t a few notable misses here: e.g., under-represented Italian fashion and fashion photography and Hollywood film costuming and its photography.) But aside from the presentation of advertising images, what seemed almost breathtakingly audacious, given the exhibition’s broader foundational reticence, was the inclusion of the actual commercial lithographic and photomechanical packaging: magazine covers—not in vitrines or flat-file displays, but on the walls, directly alongside the platinum prints. One of these is the LIFE Magazine cover that featured Grace Kelly in the ice-blue duchesse-satin gown by Edith Head she wore to accept her 1955 Oscar for The Country Girl. The other is the cover of the October 2011 S Moda (the style/fashion magazine of the Spanish news organization, El País) featuring a fashion model then on his way to supermodel status, Andrej Pejić. The cover line: “¿Hombre o Mujer? El estilo no entiende de sexos.”
No kidding—nor, we might add in 2018, just about any other distinction. Pejić famously transitioned to Andreja a couple of years later. But that moment, too, had its own iconicity—when we embraced the blur. By framing the ephemeral souvenir, Martineau makes a concrete demonstration of that new superlative—the ‘transitory iconic’. It can safely be assumed that many thousands of similar magazine covers—LIFE or S Moda—were destined for trash heaps and recycling. But even the stars are destined to die.
Patti Smith (1975), gelatin silver print; courtesy The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
Fresh (if that’s the word for it) from the carbon cycle conundrums posed by the FotoFest 2016 Biennial in Houston, I faced the ambivalence of ‘homecoming’ between LACMA and the Getty Museum, returning to, if not the ‘haunts’ of my mole-dark youth, certainly a few of its ‘hauntings.’ The world Robert Mapplethorpe documented between the 1970s and 1980s was in part my own: New York-steeped, sexually misfit, aesthetically preoccupied. And then there was Patti Smith – with whom I was obsessed even before Horses debuted with a cover portrait that might have been pulled from one of my own family photographs. Yet however familiar, a large part of this world was unapproachable – even close-up. I can recall a gallery event Mapplethorpe attended in San Francisco. (Or was it a sex club made into a gallery space for the evening? – the experience was that blurred.) ‘Ya gotta go,’ all my pals said; and – not being one to let the team down – naturally I went. There was a lot of leather – in the photographs and on the bodies clustered in the small rooms of this gallery – so much so, I can’t specifically recall most of the images (though I recall bullwhips in rectal terrain). Finally I managed to squeeze through an opening into a corner room, where a small throng of muscle boys clad head-to-toe in leather, everyone of them smoking, parted just enough for me to see Mapplethorpe at their center, posed in a kind of James Dean slouch with a Dylan-esque ‘I’m-not-really-here’ expression on his face, clutching a cigarette of his own. He might have been a hologram. Here was an artist who might be pierced (and photographed), but could not be touched – not that night anyway, under what looked like a mushroom cloud of tobacco smoke. I retreated while I could still breathe; and wouldn’t revisit this world until Catherine Opie’s slightly female-friendlier (and not quite so claustrophobic) version of it.
Patti Smith (1978), gelatin silver print, courtesy LACMA
You can’t go home again; but there’s no abandoning it, either. Instead, we build small shrines to it – little dark places, perpetually lit by the wavering lights of our devotions and regrets, and the smoulder of secret shames. I’m probably overstating it a bit, but there is that element in Mapplethorpe; and I was delighted to see that the LACMA exhibition included a gallery given over to non-photographic work, including, in addition to some very durable and beautiful drawings, collage and assemblage pieces (with bits and pieces, drawn from magazines and commercial products, very much in Pop’s shadow, though with a fetish twist), as well as jewellery, personal objects, effects and ephemera. And an actual shrine: actually this was an untitled sculpture/assemblage, with the parenthetical title magnifying its religiosity – Altarpiece. It includes an actual Jesus statuette (along with a faded image, beneath a lampshade ‘baldachin’) – no doubt a more forgiving Redeemer than we were likely to encounter at St. Patrick’s. Kyrie eleison. But how distant really is the notion of religious veneration from sexual fetish? Counter-Reformation anyone? Go ask Saint Theresa – or Bernini’s version, anyway.
Flower with Knife (1985), platinum print; courtesy LACMA & J. Paul Getty Trust
Mapplethorpe was looking for more than mere ‘redemption’ in his work and ambition. He wasn’t going home – which can never be far enough away for a sexual outsider; he was going downtown. There’s a kind of articulate magic-making at play in both the photographic and non-photographic productions, an alchemy of light and dark. Consider for example (in addition to the aforementioned Altarpiece), an untitled construction with a small cylindrical cage of dice (in various sizes), a leather-gloved and braceleted mannequin hand, and rabbit’s foot linked to something that looked vaguely like part of a hand-cuff. (And there are so many other examples.) Even in some of the earliest black-and-white photography (Patti Smith obviously figures in some of these), there’s a deliberation in the composition of light, shadow, pose and setting – not the ‘decisive’ moment exactly, but a moment when the magic might be triggered. There was a fugitive glory at stake here.
Joe, NYC (1978), gelatin silver print; courtesy LACMAParrot Tulips (1988) dye imbibition print; courtesy LACMA & J. Paul Getty Trust
The sense of control, both mental and physical, is almost palpable here – and that’s part of the pleasure. It was inevitable that Mapplethorpe should turn his camera on the not-very-far-underground world of sex clubs and S/M dungeons where the instruments of control and pleasure might be one and the same, where conventional dialectics of pride and shame were reversed or entirely subverted. (Who says we can’t have our quality of mercy strained through a pound of flesh?) It’s easy to understand why the performance artist, Lisa Lyon, one of the original women bodybuilders (and certainly the most beautiful) would have captured Mapplethorpe’s eye. The aspect of gender-role subversion could only be the most superficial part of the attraction. More compelling is, once more, a ritual of control and release; the tension between strength or potential energy and physical exertion or applied force; also the tension between what is veiled or concealed and what is revealed or exposed to light. (No cropping needed here.) Again, the deliberation – in pose, in props – is striking: the veil, the hat (the boot, the harness; cut or uncut).
Lisa Lyon (1980) gelatin silver print; courtesy LACMA
The veil might be Mapplethorpe’s dominant visual metaphor; he veils with light and shadow in equal measure. He’s drawn to beauty, and always finds means to plumb fresh forms and aspects (consider, e.g., his gorgeous color screen prints and dye transfer prints of mostly floral subjects); but holds a discreet distance – sic transit gloria mundi – destined to disappear like all vanities before it.
Lisa Lyon (1982), gelatin silver print, courtesy LACMA & J. Paul Getty Trust
Like any great artist, he knew how to steal from the best. We see the influence of many great predecessors here: André Kertesz, Irving Penn, George Dureau, and especially Hoyningen-Huene. It’s almost surprising not to see more fashion and music-related commissions. (One of the Lyon/Lady photographs is strikingly reminiscent of a Huene Vionnet sitting.) His influence was evident in the commercial music world (e.g., David Bowie, Iggy Pop). But time was not exactly on his side; by the time the fashion world might have seized upon his vision, he was already in failing health. Those color studies and screen prints, with their gorgeous color geometrics and beautifully raked with shadow, give some indication of where he might have taken his art. This is where control has finally taken him – that fragile but transfigured intersection of medium and moment.
Happy New Year, dear reader(s). I know I was living up to the blog title just a bit excessively in the last month of this just past year; but I wasn’t just staying at home. First of all, there was Norma – the Los Angeles Opera’s production of Bellini’s classic tale of a preternaturally, anomalously powerful woman undone by that most common of invasive species. (Jeeeezzzus – ‘aren’t we bloody over the patriarchy by now?’ I was thinking as I exited the L.A. Opera’s production of Moby Dick (dreadful libretto)– or was it Matthew Barney’s gesamtkunstdreck, River of Fundament? Really – do I have to go back??) And then there was Norma – putting the bel into the canto like no other work before or since. And then I was thinking about … Norma – all the productions and recordings I’d seen or heard – and swept under all the thresholds I’ve crossed since that fateful day I first heard the CallasLa Scala recording. Well … we move on. Living things do that. (Let’s hope we still can in 20 years – the Paris climate conference didn’t exactly inspire confidence. If this is what we’re dealing with given a single degree of warming, does anyone really expect anything short of apocalyptic disaster with another degree? Or two??)
The holiday season always brings a crush of big shows – plays, especially musicals; films from holiday blockbusters to late Oscar contenders (Adam McKay’s comic spin on Michael Lewis’s The Big Short had everyone buzzing amid the global dollar fueled downtown building boom and housing bubble expanding around us and congressional Republicans aiming their artillery at Dodd-Frank); less so museum shows, though the Getty Museum’s exhibition of l6th and 17th century French tapestries, most of them commissioned for the court of Louis XIV, fairly glittered with gold and silver, and LACMA’s peerless Noah Purifoy and New Objectivity (and other:) exhibitions were gifts that kept on giving. In the meantime, there were smaller, but nonetheless substantial gallery shows that were glittering ornaments to be prized and celebrated.
Eben Goff, “Channel Slope,” 2011
On the same evening I was eagerly anticipating Jayson Musson (better known as Hennessy Youngman for those of us who have been fans of his Art Thoughtz on YouTube) and Casey Jane Ellison, the L.A. art world’s favorite stand-up (I’m still trying to get over not being invited on What the F:shion? and Touching the Art) at Steve Turner (I was too early), Diane Rosenstein opened a show that was like a giant gift box nesting, Russian doll style, yet another gift within, each opening upon some sparkling gem(s) of art – in painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, photography and other works on paper, and objects almost unclassifiable. Cumulatively, it was almost breathtaking. I ran into a prominent local curator who happened to be viewing the show at the same time I was there, and neither of us could conceal our elation. The consistent excellence of the work gives the show a kaleidoscopic, almost celebratory dazzle; yet it also touches on some of the most pressing issues of our time.
Sarah Awad, “Casement,” 2015
The show is titled, peace love freedom happiness; and however its spirit may or may not be carried away with the viewer into the new year, I think I can safely say the viewer will experience some moments of intense joy within the gallery’s spaces. The first of those moments is a small Sarah Awad painting, that may have been a study (or simply a smaller work) for her Gates paintings, a beautiful show Awad opened earlier in the year, that used the filigreed wrought iron gates and fences that typically surround large residential properties and estates all over L.A.’s more affluent suburbs and urban enclaves as motive and springboard for a painterly excursus into the view ‘through’ and ‘over’ implicit in both landscape and abstract conventions. The painting, “Casement” could be a kind of talisman for the series, and it’s simply exquisite.
Miranda Lichtenstein, “Cue,” 2013
Viewers might be familiar with the explosive quality of some of Anish Kapoor’s work – not least from his show earlier this past year at Regen Projects. But he can bring the volume down now and then; and the Rosenstein show included a beautiful suite of slightly more subdued ectoplasmic eruptions in a suite of beautiful color etchings. That muted quality connects with the Miranda Lichtenstein photographic prints and Polaroids of mostly floral and foliage subjects. Lichtenstein comes at her subjects obliquely (and sometimes from several angles simultaneously – or so it would seem). Lens, ‘filter’ (in any number of senses) and lighting may veil, distort or simply complicate the view, the surround, the atmosphere around a subject that, finally, eludes firm definition.
Miranda Lichtenstein, Untitled #25 (flower), 2006
Nature (or a kind of counter-nature) is treated with similar ambiguity in works on paper, canvas and panels (and even sculpture) variously by Eben Goff (extensively), Jane Wilbraham, David Schafer, and Roland Reiss (including the rippling Bent Field of 1969, which has its own talismanic, almost iconic power). Each produces a kind of visual poetry that ranges analogously from the sparest haiku to elegant lyricism to the elegiac. Fissures register prominently in many of these works – in nature, in perception; and Karin Apollonia Müller’s earthbound subjects have long considered them; also the aura of ambiguity, even ambivalence that envelops the concrete – our slippery apprehensions of physical actualities. But from here, she simultaneously soars and submerges in the cosmic apprehension of our tenuous, intermittently luminous, imprint on the cosmos in the “Citylight” and “Starlight” series of lightjet prints produced from NASA/JPL telescope data transmissions for her 2013 Far Out show.
Karin Apollonia Müller, “Starlights #2,” 2013
The show, which runs through January 16th, also includes work by John Adelman, Eleanor Antin, Jedd Garet and Arnold Helbling.
Something of the sublime quality of this show (as well as its larger concerns beyond the material and formal) carries over (not surprisingly) to Whitney Bedford’s strong show of painting at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, West of Eden, but I have to leave a more extensive discussion of the show for another post. (It’s up through January 23rd.) And as if there’s not enough of the peerlessly first-rate to be had at LACMA this last holiday week-end,: you might check out Living for the Moment, an amazing show of Japanese prints from the Barbara S. Bowman collection. To paraphrase a Masunari poem included in one of Kunisada’s woodblock prints – “Nothing can compare … not even seeing Mount Fuji in a New Year dream.”
Hokusai, Tago Bay near Ejiri on the Tôkaidô, 1830-31
I’d taken a photographer friend to The Getty to look at the Light, Paper, Process show curated by Virginia Heckert – a must for any photographer and, for that matter, for anyone interested in process-oriented form and media (which includes myself, in recent months). My friend’s work involves considerable compositional and chromatic manipulation and intervention in her entire process of creating a finished image, as well as a certain meticulousness in her use of materials; and it was interesting to compare notes and hear her specific appreciations of some of the artists. Walking through it a second time also rekindled a fascination with the way several of the photographers’ engagement with earthly and cosmic phenomena paralleled their engagement with the entire process and the medium itself; at its furthest extremes (e.g., Lisa Oppenheim, Chris McCaw). The process itself becomes a kind of gestural recapitulation and reenactment. Our interposition of a means of recording this natural or elemental trace inevitably changes our relationship to and perception of it.
Chris McCaw, Sunburned GSP #202 (San Francisco Bay), 2008
Oppenheim dramatizes the process still further by almost diaristically recording the various exposures of these phenomena (sun, moon, smoke—themselves vintage negatives taken from 19th and 20th century sources), including interruptions – when the negatives weren’t exposed at all – a visual absence, pause or silence that underscores the ‘sound,’ or ‘mark’ of the interaction. Oppenheim’s education in semiotics and background in structural/materialist film clearly informs the work (as curator Virginia Heckert’s points out in her catalog essay for the show). The photographs ‘read’ on several levels simultaneously, functioning as cultural, even political commentary, and placing the viewer/observer in an ambiguous relationship to subject, time and placement. The smoke of the documented explosions – a World War II bombing raid over Normandie – might read as clouds, also as the (exploded) earth itself; the aircraft – the instrumentality of this action and document – lost amid sky, clouds, smoke.
The fundamental changes in perception and subject-object relationships are borne out still more dramatically, yet contemplatively in John Chiara’s – I hesitate to call it – ‘landscape photography.’ Chiara is quoted in the catalog, insisting, “The subject of my work is Photography itself. Its manifestation through its means.” But the choice of words here is as revealing as the photography is alternately dramatic or contemplative: ‘photography’ with a capital P, the writing, inscription, mapping by means of Light; the ‘manifestation,’ as in the reveal, what is disclosed and made manifest. The resulting photographs hardly need theatrical amplification. Chiara’s intensively hands-on process – incorporating both in-camera (direct on photo-sensitive papers) and darkroom techniques – has yielded truly breath-taking imagery that richly document both the artist’s physical (and psychological) trace and the passage of time and elements.
John Chiara, Verdura De La Montura at Camino
If I thought my second view of the Light, Paper, Process show would be somewhat more cursory than the first, I was clearly wrong. I’m sure I spent as much time with each photograph (or photogram) as I had the first go-round. But my first priority that day was the magnificent show of Hellenistic bronze sculpture, jointly organized by the Getty Museum, the National Gallery and the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World. Again – not to discount in any way the power of the sculpture itself – the title conveys so much: specifically the word, Pathos, which after all comes to us directly from the original Greek. Its fundamental power was recognized almost from the moment it was expressed. The original meaning itself connotes expression, its roots related to both suffering and experience – subordinate in classical rhetoric only to logos, the word itself, the power of logic. (The other ‘mode of persuasion,’ in Aristotelian terms, being ethos – the fundamental ‘character,’ guiding beliefs, ideals, etc. of society and state.) It would be absurd to dredge up Aristotelian rhetoric to sum up a show of this cultural, artistic, and emotional scope. But in a way, we can see an argument unfolding here – an assertion and demonstration of what it means to be human in the centuries between Alexander and the Caesars; an individuation of human character beyond social, biological, or religious function, beyond the functional or ideal forms of gods, heroes, athletes, soldiers, rulers, law-givers and rulers, to something approaching character, personality, type, psychology, even style. Moving from idealized portraits of Apollo that would become the template for classical portraiture through the High Renaissance, to figures like the “Arringatore” – which would not be out of place in a line-up of Republican presidential candidates – to the penultimate galleries, where the scarred, seated “Terme Boxer” seemed to contemplate his more youthful incarnations, we trace an evolving humanism, but also clarity regarding the frailty, weakness and vulnerability of the species.
It could not have been more of a contrast to the show we moved on to at the Getty Research Institute galleries – A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660-1715 – the propaganda function of which might be summed up as the promotion of the Sun King and his power (and by extension France itself) to sky-filling Apollonian glory. This was a project that required more than filling the swamps of Versailles (the taming of nature is an important theme in this campaign for hearts and minds). It required great strategy, style, and art – but that will have to wait for another post.
Instead, I meandered through a retread of a narrative and conversations that belonged to a generation (or two or three) prior to my own (which is going quite a ways back). In other words, it’s a conversation we might have had with Edward Steichen himself (who enters on the very early side of this survey). “[P]alpable tension around both disciplines [photography and fashion]” in the “hallowed halls of a museum”? It’s a fact that for those of us who revere great art and music, these places can be regarded as sacred spaces. But art doesn’t have to go through an embalming (or for that matter a varnishing) to enter the ‘hallowed halls.’ All it has to do is live eternally—emphasis on the live—because eternity just gets more abstract and more ephemeral with each passing year; and whether or not the art survives the civilization or the biosphere, it’s probably not going to fare too well in the next gallactic collision.
Instead, I meandered through a retread of a narrative and conversations that belonged to a generation (or two or three) prior to my own (which is going quite a ways back). In other words, it’s a conversation we might have had with Edward Steichen himself (who enters on the very early side of this survey). “[P]alpable tension around both disciplines [photography and fashion]” in the “hallowed halls of a museum”? It’s a fact that for those of us who revere great art and music, these places can be regarded as sacred spaces. But art doesn’t have to go through an embalming (or for that matter a varnishing) to enter the ‘hallowed halls.’ All it has to do is live eternally—emphasis on the live—because eternity just gets more abstract and more ephemeral with each passing year; and whether or not the art survives the civilization or the biosphere, it’s probably not going to fare too well in the next gallactic collision.
The pioneer and master of this genre was Guy Bourdin, who did not begin shooting fashion until the mid-1950s, but within only a few years was already pushing his style forward. It was as if he arrived at 1968 six or seven years early. There was always a surrealism to the Bourdin composition—he was mentored by Man Ray—and, as off-handed as they’re intended to come across, the images are all meticulously composed. Bourdin’s compositions are self-contained caches of surreal theatre, boxed interior or exterior spaces suggesting alternately compressed, oblique narratives, or obscure, almost recondite objects of desire. An intense alienation is held in suspense against a more amorphous sense of distraction that seems to diffuse through the subject, with only the frame holding it all in—a kind of visual ‘Situationism’ that gives a late-1960s edge to Bourdin’s surrealism. It was interesting to have an opportunity the following evening to look at a few series of small Polaroids Bourdin executed in preparation for a few of his fashion shoots. Within these very small dimensions, Bourdin holds his subjects as if they were insect or shell specimens. A Bourdin photograph offsets an avidity for the erotic impulse with a healthy contempt for his human subjects.
I loved that in addition to the actual commercial lithographic advertising or editorial art Martineau included some of the couture featured in some of the photographs, or similar designs. The classic evening dress Avedon photographs on Sunny Harnett by Alix Grès at the Casino, Le Touquet in 1954 is here, as is another famous Dior day dress and hat photographed by Avedon in 1947. Yet Martineau felt compelled to undergird his discussions (he’s authored two essays in the catalogue) with a kind of ‘ars longa, vita brevis’ preamble and foundational chronology. The epigraph to his introduction is a characteristically epigrammatic (and disingenuous) quote from Oscar Wilde’s essay, “The Philosophy of Dress.”
At a moment when contingency and conditionality increasingly define the way we live, the ‘icons’ themselves blur. The Icons show is large enough that, ‘iconic’ or not there may be images that fade to footnotes. (And it’s not as if there aren’t a few notable misses here: e.g., under-represented Italian fashion and fashion photography and Hollywood film costuming and its photography.) But aside from the presentation of advertising images, what seemed almost breathtakingly audacious, given the exhibition’s broader foundational reticence, was the inclusion of the actual commercial lithographic and photomechanical packaging: magazine covers—not in vitrines or flat-file displays, but on the walls, directly alongside the platinum prints. One of these is the LIFE Magazine cover that featured Grace Kelly in the ice-blue duchesse-satin gown by Edith Head she wore to accept her 1955 Oscar for The Country Girl. The other is the cover of the October 2011 S Moda (the style/fashion magazine of the Spanish news organization, El País) featuring a fashion model then on his way to supermodel status, Andrej Pejić. The cover line: “¿Hombre o Mujer? El estilo no entiende de sexos.”
