Victoria Olsen

Annette Messager, "My Vows," 1990.

The incoming students at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts are being asked to visit and write about the “Haunted” exhibition at the Guggenheim before it closes next week. Although I’ve already written about the Casebere photograph in that show, I visited the show again yesterday in order to follow my students’ exercise. They are supposed to describe a moment at the show that was particularly significant to them — a sight, sound, interaction, impression, memory….

On site, I found myself thinking about spirals. They were everywhere: in Annette Messager’s photocollage “My Vows” (at right), in Robert Rauschenberg’s self-portrait (below), and of course in the museum’s architecture itself.  The theme of the exhibit suggested the simultaneity of absence and presence. To haunt is to be there and not there at the same time. The spiral too is a form of balance and doubleness: does it move inward or outward? Clock-wise or counter-clockwise?  Spirals imply journeys, and Messager’s work reinforces that by dividing hers into progressive increments, like steps. The museum, though, allows one to walk that path in either direction. I walked mine counter-intuitively: starting at the top and walking down the spiral toward the center. On the way I ran into a colleague, walking the other way: from the inside out.  I saw the art backwards.

Does it matter? Is the center alpha or omega? If the spiral leads us toward the center then that center must matter. Is art, then, like a blow pop– hard on the outside, with a delicious treat in the middle? or is it more like a chocolate Easter egg — sweet on the outside and hollow? There were times I felt the exhibit was like the swirl of stars around a black hole: full of beautiful fragments without a center. Some pieces, once their conceit was explained, deflated. Other pieces felt full of presence: figures emerged mysteriously from behind red paint or assembled, like Messager, from pieces. In Janaina Tschape’s “Lacrimacorpus” a young woman in an empty room twirls in a circle. The wall text leans heavily, ponderously on meaning–mythology, Latin etymology, Buchenwald–but the girl spins on despite all the symbolism.  She’s just there. In “Autobiography” Rauschenberg recounts his life in words that turn in circles, spiraling outwards. The result is an uncanny fingerprint– forensic evidence of his uniquely individual presence and absence.

Robert Rauschenberg, "Autobiography"

Perhaps the spiral is an ear, not an eye. At the Guggenheim the music was commissioned by Susan Philipsz, who re-appropriated a song from a film version of Henry James’s story “A Turn of the Screw.” I heard a ghostly choir, but also a ringing phone. Is anybody home? What is the turn of the screw? A surprise, a realization, an arrival. It expresses that we learn as we turn in circles, going around and over and over again.  Think of this as my first circling around an idea.

Imogen Cunningham, "Martha Graham, 1931."

The last post got me thinking about how one art represents another — as in photographs of musicians there or photographs of dancers here. In this case photography seems to submit to dance: the lighting that may have been artistically manipulated instead looks like simple stage lighting. Graham doesn’t look “posed” by Cunningham, but rather in character for her choreography. Graham fills, and even exceeds, all the available space.

Yet the strong lighting on that upturned face and forceful hands is the photograph itself; it is really a shared spotlight for both women. In an interview Cunningham said that women are easier to photograph because you can “do” more to them. She noted that not every subject can inspire a great portrait. This portrait seems pared down to essentials, and in Graham Cunningham found a model overflowing with sheer vitality.  Both photographer and dancer are on beautiful display in this image, but somewhat obscured as well.  With her eyes closed, Graham seems to deny us some part of herself — just as Cunningham reduces her technique until it seems almost invisible.

The audio interview with Cunningham that I refer to is posted on MoMA’s website.

Herman Leonard, "Frank Sinatra, Monte Carlo, 1958."

Jazz photographer Herman Leonard died last weekend. His iconic photographs, including the one of Frank Sinatra at right, are said to have “caught jazz itself” and represented the “whole spirit” of his musician subjects. I get impatient with commentary like that, though Leonard’s work had an undeniable signature and impact. Instead, I like the quote on Leonard’s website from Quincy Jones:

Herman’s camera tells the truth, and makes it swing. Musicians loved to see him around. No surprise; he made us look good.

The quote is a great paraphrase of a famous line from an Emily Dickinson poem — and Sinatra looks very good indeed in this image. It shows the star with his usual dapper grace, but the view from behind is a surprise. Instead of the charismatic face and voice, we see a dark silhouette: Sinatra framed by the light and adulation of fame itself, in the very moment of acknowledging it.  The blurry foreground and blank background evoke the vagueness of immortality  – Sinatra is in some other realm beyond or above everyday life.  Alone, yes, but with an implied audience of the infinite.  The slightly diagonal pose, the balanced S-curve of the body, the inevitable wisps of smoke rising to the heavens….these all contribute to a portrait of genius that is both conventional and iconoclastic.  Great artists make art their way.

Leonard’s work is published in two photo collections, The Eye of Jazz and Jazz (available in November).

For another, written portrait of Sinatra see Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (1965), which Esquire considers one of the best pieces of nonfiction it has ever published.

James Casebere, "Garage" (2003)

The multimedia exhibit “Haunted,” on display at the Guggenheim Museum until September 6, draws on a longstanding association between photography, film, and the supernatural. From Victorian “spirit” pictures to the quintessentially cinematic genre of sci fi, new visual technologies have always been seen as literally incredible. One can’t believe one’s eyes.

In that context, James Casebere’s photograph, included in the exhibit and reproduced here, is remarkably simple and unassuming. It is just a garage, as advertised: empty of everything but light. The composition is intriguing though. We can’t quite see around the corner of the room and the lit windows are curiously irregular. The image evokes the cinema, where darkened rooms are pierced by light. In fact, the combination of light and empty room makes this photograph a visual representation of a camera itself. What is a camera, after all, except a dark chamber that light can enter? The camera is also a mechanical eye, not just in its function but in its form: another chamber for incoming light that is made intelligible as it is manipulated.  It is almost as if Casebere is revealing a magician’s secret here.  Look, he seems to say, photography is not all smoke, shadows, and mirrors; the illusions are illusions too.

Jack Delano, "Connecticut Town by the Sea" (Stonington, CT, 1940)

In this Great Recession, we are constantly being reminded of the Great Depression. And when we think of the genre of Depression photos we tend to think of the migrant workers of the rural South and West, the food lines, and the close ups of human misery. But the Depression hit different parts of America differently, of course, and it was just as significant in the North, in cities, and among factory workers. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographer who documented this “other” Depression the best may have been Jack Delano, who spent several months on assignment following migrant workers up the Atlantic Coast from Florida to Maine.

Born in the Ukraine, Delano was a transplanted American, but in New England he came face to face with its art history as well as its economic conditions. This photograph reads like a painting, and you’ve seen it before — it is a Winslow Homer seascape, it is every picture postcard of a small coastal town…. Delano, who studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, seems to be paying subtle homage to a deeply American tradition. If there is social commentary here it is indirect — in the flat sea juxtaposed with the heavy clouds, in the relative isolation of those miniature figures in the foreground. There is smoke, but where is the fire? Delano points us toward something bigger and deeper than a particular fact or source. In an interview conducted in 1965 he said,

speaking for myself, I felt that I was part of an organization which was basically interested in the cultural values of America, which had nothing to do with politics but had to do with the American tradition, with the bad things, the good things, the difficulties, the problems, the joys and inspirations and everything that went with it. And it could be a tight little Jewish community someplace in Colchester, which we covered, including the synagogues and everything that went with it, or it could be a horse show at a county fair in New Hampshire somewhere. It was all part of what was making the United States and what the United States had come from, and this was the exciting thing for us. Through these travels and the photographs I got to love the United States more than I could have in any other way.

This mission statement goes beyond the FSA’s directive to document the results of Franklin Roosevelt’s economic policies. It’s an outsider’s effort to make a visual record of an essential America.

Thomas Annan, "Close no.11, Bridgegate, Glasgow," 1897.

Thomas Annan is best known for documenting slum conditions in Glasgow at the end of the nineteenth century. His photographs of the “closes” of the old city show the growing population, displaced from living on the land and recruited into factory work, squeezed into a new urban landscape. The buildings are literally close and Annan draws on perspective to emphasize the narrowing retreat of these alleys into dead-end space. Brick walls appear to emerge organically from flagstones and reach toward the light, which often seems to be elsewhere. Here, the rectangular unit of the brick is repeated everywhere: the shadowed entry in the left foreground, the peeling wood plank on the right, the windows in the building high above and far behind, and finally the apotheosis of light on the back wall. That lit wall makes a beautiful pairing with the bleak, empty doorway up front, lessening the harsh effect of the image.  The stripe of light that bisects the composition is broken, but it does enter the frame.

This image is unusual for having a figure in it. The person provides a focal point for the dizzying, grid-like composition of bricks. She becomes a living scale by which to judge the size of this social problem. The cage-like impression of her habitat is underlined by the wooden door frame in the foreground, making it seem as if she is somehow indoors, as if we are outside looking in to her domain. Which of course we are — and so is Annan. Unless we are inside and she is the one looking in? The door frame, like the photograph itself, reveals her to be both accessible and inaccessible at the same time. The intersecting lines, angles, and light make meaning much less stable than it seems.

Hilla & Bernd Becher, "Watertowers, 1967-80."

The German photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher are justifiably famous for serial portraits of aging industrial structures.  Like these watertowers, the work can easily be interpreted as commentary on a decrepit system: we see the literal ruins of capitalism’s faith in industrialization and vice versa.  The photographs, repetitive and devoid of people, seem to be hymns to a mechanized modern workforce.

But the towers are also beautiful objects in and of themselves, and the Bechers were skillful in showing that.  Here the simple composition of columns, towers, cones, and rectangular grid emphasize the classical shapes on display in drawing manuals.  One can imagine the pleasure in arranging this grid: four rows and four columns of balanced forms.  Perhaps darker, heavier shapes would go toward the perimeter and eye-catching complexity belongs in the middle?  I’m not sure what their criteria were, just that the result works.  This feels, too, like the natural result of an artistic collaboration, which the married Bechers sustained for decades. There seems to be a sort of discreet optimism here– for equality, for fairness, for humanity.  The image demonstrates a cautious faith in art’s ability to salvage the past.

I’ve been reading, and writing, about characters set against backdrops of texts, and here is a wonderful visual example of that juxtaposition. Photographer Carl Van Vechten often took portraits against geometric backgrounds, which creates a complex formal composition. It seems to set human variety within a grid of some kind.

Here the grid is especially interesting because it too is man made, or written. Yet Van Vechten disrupts our expectations that culture will be predictable and regular by making the words all aslant and senseless.  Against that background of torn posters and mangled phrases stands another photographer, surrealist Man Ray, also at an angle. The effect is disorienting in the best way — Ray’s tie appears to hang sideways, disturbing gravity; the words appear to climb and fall. Van Vechten, best known for his portraits of Harlem Renaissance figures, was both an artist and author himself. This photograph seems his attempt to be both at once: both writer of image and photographer of text. It particularly suits Man Ray’s own art of surprising juxtapositions. The artist here, conventional in shirt and tie and profile, also borders on the absurd–as if that black and white frame can’t quite contain him.

To see more photographs by Van Vechten check out the Library of Congress’ collection.

“To think through things, that is the still life painter’s work– and the poet’s. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon.”

The quote is from Mark Doty’s essay Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, but it could also apply to filmmakers and this polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky, taken in the early 1980s and published in Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids in 2006. I found it online here, with a sample of others, equally beautiful. They all have the same grainy, still quality, and focus on light itself. Here the comparison to Vermeer’s paintings and Dutch still lifes seems unavoidable. The window, the table setting, the lemon. There’s an implied synesthesia that was a conscious element of still-life composition: smell, taste, touch, and sight combine into a fused experience of longing. Is there an implied sound too? Or is silence itself an auditory element?

The palette has the eerie, surreal tone of Tarkovsky’s films. The greenish light is unexpected and seems to offset the otherwise sunny flowers and lemon. The color intensifies the texture, as the image as a whole seems to take on the pebbled skin of the lemon. Suddenly the black shadows seem velvety, the light strained through a colander as well as glass. As in his films, Tarkovsky makes you work for your visual pleasures. Doty explains,

“We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences.  Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, these demonstrations.”

Yves Klein, "Untitled Anthropometry," 1960.

Yves Klein, the subject of a current retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. and the maker of this image, liked to compare his work to “ashes.”  Creativity is often likened to an inner fire, and this work is the end product of an elaborate creative process.

Klein, a proto-performance artist, wanted art to be both distant and intimate and he solved this dilemma creatively. He thought of himself as the director of his work and used nude models smeared with paint to make a print-like image on a mural. In this image a woman’s body presses against the page, but only the legs and torso really register. Klein liked that the “psychological” or most personal aspects of the self were traceless: unlike most art, this is not about an artist’s eyes or hands. The body makes the art, quite literally, and the artist maintains both distance and control. Despite the distance, though, Klein directs every aspect of the work, even creating a patented shade of his own “International Klein blue,” which he used throughout his short career.

The exhibit runs until September 12 and the Hirshhorn has set up a multimedia site through Dipity that includes clips of Klein introducing his own work and process: