from Songs for Drella 1990 Songs for Drella, a brief musical by Lou
Reed and John Cale, pays tribute to the life and times of the twentieth
century’s quintessential image-monger, Andy Warhol. Warhol liked all kinds of images from all kinds of places: sad,
mean, dumb, pretty images found in everyday, out-of-the-way, extraordinary
places. Warhol took images from
everywhere; through multiple screenings they became his, and when he
finished with them he turned them back at us.
His images continue to frame contemporary art and culture. What follows is one artist/curator’s (and fellow image-monger’s)
reflections on the persuasive nature of seventy-two images selected
from the University at Albany’s art collections. Like Warhol’s images, my thoughts are framed
by a way of seeing that takes into account a world big enough to include
just about anything, as long as it makes me want to look again. At the heart of these reflections lies the
important distinction that it is one thing to be an image-monger—who
looks, consumes, and quickly moves on—but it is a different thing altogether
to be an image-maker— Elliot Erwitt’s photograph, New York, 1949, is an
elegant and lonely view through museum doorways. The museum experience it depicts (silent, crowdless, rarified) is
quite unlike the museum visit of today, now that corporate-sponsored
blockbusters, digital tours, didactic label texts, and gift shop sales
have changed the way we see. Compare
Audrey Flack’s photograph of an overly abundant floral arrangement,
entitled Time to Save, 1979, with the subtle play of grays in
Erwitt’s photograph. Flack’s photograph, a contemporary take on
seventeenth-century vanitas paintings, is gaudy. Its frozen lifelessness reminds me of grandiose
floral arrangements often found at visitors’ desks of museums with old
masterpieces. Now look at Ralph
Gibson’s luminous color photographs of peripheral objects such as a
curtain, a painter’s easel, or a divan, and observe how they speak of
luxurious moments without being precious or pretentious.
Golden and sumptuous, these photographs glow from within. Although Gibson crops his images at odd spots, the cuts are not
ambiguous or arbitrary; when viewed sequentially the images become fraught
with hidden meanings, temporarily illuminating a forgotten era. I like to think that my perceptions reflect my time and
place; perhaps that’s why I long for the immediacy of the gestural hand,
only to breathe a sigh of relief at the sight of mechanical reproduction. Is it nostalgic to long for a bygone state
of grace? Probably, but even
Warhol in his compulsive search for the blankest visage let himself
be persuaded by moments of truth and beauty.
Why is it that celebrity portraits taken seventy years ago by
Edward Steichen seem so noble in their elusiveness, while Warhol portraits
screened forty years later seem so familiar in their blankness?
Why does Helmut Newton’s portrait of Warhol (taken more than
ten years before Warhol died) already look like a death mask? I think it is that, despite contemporary culture’s ravenous need
to move forward while appropriating, reconstituting, and regurgitating
the past, through it all Warhol remains our most persuasive mirror.
Eakins, 1964, is a meticulously delineated etching by Leonard
Baskin done about the same time as Warhol’s first midnight-blue Jackies.
But while Baskin pays tribute to the American realist tradition
born out of nineteenth-century Victorianism, Warhol sheds light on a
sublimated sense of loss beneath late twentieth-century materialism. Often the artist’s hand persuades me. I look at Untitled, 1967, a lithograph
by Willem DeKooning, or The Brank, 1984, a lithograph by Leon
Golub, or Seated Woman No. 44, 1966, a drawing by Richard Diebenkorn,
and I feel the artist’s hand sweep, scratch, and skip across the drawing
surface. DeKooning’s agitated
scratchy line conjures up a genderless being.
Hovering in blank space, this creature is an oddly endearing
example of DeKooning’s uneasy experience with figurative imagery. There is no ambiguity in Golub’s jagged lines,
in his vile image of cultural force that is dispatched in uncompromising
riffs of red and black. And
even though Diebenkorn’s woman’s face is cropped at the lip, the artist’s
rigorous charcoal lines and telling strokes offer an intimate picture
of a specific woman—coy, graceful, hesitant.
Line hitting edge sucks me in; abstraction takes me away.
In William Tucker’s etching Untitled, 1986, Conrad Marca-Relli’s
collograph Ibiza, 1968, or Louise Nevelson’s lithograph Dusk
in August, 1967, l am again seduced by the strong presence of the
artist’s hand. Tucker’s abstracted
figuration, Nevelson’s mysterious world of light and shadow, Marca-Relli’s
organized universe culled from scraps of yesterday’s news are all fueled
by formal rigor: no room for commonplace musings here. Such elegies to pure form are calming; the
focus is singular and personal; the mad race to take it all in comes
to a slow and thoughtful halt. I
am in the realm of aesthetic experience.
I enjoy the reprieve; to be made privy to the artist’s internal
world and to be seduced by it is a beautiful thing. Why, then, does
it feel so exclusionary, and why do I end up staring longer at General
Dynamics F.U.N., 1970, by Eduardo Paolozzi, a portfolio of collaged
images from three decades of print ads, instructional manuals, and science
fiction trailers? Perhaps my restless, pedestrian, image-mongering roots are showing,
or perhaps the artist’s hand, with all its gestural and descriptive
force, is really more about the artist’s world than the real world—my
world. Paolozzi bombards us
with ominous signs of a doomed culture: color-rich images of gooey food,
acrid interiors, faded movie idols, crash-test dummies, and grounded
rocket ships commingle in a buoyant, non-hierarchical celebration of
American post-war abundance as seen through the yearning and perceptive
eyes of an outsider (Paolozzi is Scottish).
There is the persuasion of youth in America, too. Mary Ellen Mark’s photograph Three Girls
in Plaid, 1986, is a wistfully intense image; Isabel Bishop’s etching
Students Walking, 1971, suggests a contemplative evasiveness.
Both images depict young female students who seem somewhat uneasy in
their surroundings. Awkward
confidence is coupled with a gnawing sense of inadequacy.
Some (myself included) might say that this too is the stuff of
which American dreams are made. Of
course, the weight of false hope can come crashing in unexpectedly,
as it does in Elizabeth Blum’s staged photographic compositions, or
it can turn into unrequited role-playing as it does in Gayle Johnson’s
meticulously rendered gouaches. Conversely, the work of Helmut Newton,
Yasumasa Morimura, and Richard Lindner exude restrained Weimarian decadence
rather than plaintive American neediness. Newton uses suggestive narrative and Morimura
uses arch manipulation to create photographic images that turn the girls
next door into perverse sexual icons.
In We Are All One, 1967, Lindner uses razor-sharp lines
to depict a man and woman physically intertwined yet emotionally disengaged. All three artists serve up a persuasive, calculated
sexuality more about role-playing than genuine feeling. Resignation replaces titillation in the straight-up photographs
of Larry Clark. In Untitled,
1963, he presents a cigarette-smoking girl who hides her vulnerability
behind kohl-blackened eyes and Liz Taylor-like hair.
By reminding us of their presence, Clark gives his disaffected
subjects a place in the American social fabric; their loss is no one’s
gain. There is a different sense of loss in Manuel
Alvarez Bravo’s photographs and Manuel Guerra’s etchings. Rooted in Mexican tradition, their poetic images
merge fantasy and allegory to create mysterious images filled with contradictory
meanings; resignation is made whole through awareness. What happens when all hope fades and the dark side of persuasion
sets in? In Mary Ellen Mark’s
portrait Roy Cohn with the American Flag 7/1986, a casual,
seemingly benign Roy Cohn languishes in an armchair holding an American
flag. But forget the warm and
welcoming V-neck sweater and leather mocs; look at the cocked head,
tight lip, furrowed brow. The
other Roy Cohn lurks here like a menacing cloud waiting to darken the
view. In Flag Face, 1984, Vito Acconci carries flag-waving to different
heights. An oversized lithograph
segmented in three frames forms a cascading banner, and a black mask-like
shape hovers over a friendly blue ground. Gaping holes become eyes, nose, and mouth through which tall buildings,
tangled highways, and generic city crowds are revealed. Puffy clouds drift past. An anonymous harbinger of doom, Acconci’s menacing
mask floats over the American landscape, and we know all is not bright
on the horizon. In Nicholas
Monro’s screenprint Cosmic Consciousness, 1970, an oversized
head of Lyndon Baines Johnson floats across a patterned surface suggestive
of television airwaves. Monro,
a Scottish artist with an eye keenly tuned to America’s shifting fortunes,
gives us an unflinching portrait of LBJ whose omnipresent image loomed
over American life during the Vietnam era, when even a happy suburban
kid like me knew that people were angry, divided, and dying.
Like everyone else, I saw those images on television, in magazines,
in newspapers. Images of street-fighting
men and women like those depicted by Juan Genoves in System of Vigilance,
1971, or Broken Man, 1971, are now etched in the collective conscience.
Kara Walker uses silhouetted cutouts in the form of a children’s
pop-up book in Freedom, 1997, to tell the fictional tale of a
nineteenth-century slave girl who dreams of living in a better world,
a world where color will not matter.
Her wishful vision is mocked by her white master and by her fellow
slaves. The artist-student collaborative Tim Rollins
+ K.O.S. uses literature and visual images to tap into universal messages
found in both media. In The
Temptation of St. Anthony, 1989, black stains smolder across actual
book pages, slowly obliterating Gustave Flaubert’s text; first words,
then sentences, and finally whole paragraphs disappear beneath encroaching
blackness. In the photographic portrait Product Managers, 1979,
by Neal Slavin, a group of suited men stand watch, holding things in
check as they survey the intricacies of their domain. I wonder: does their managerial proficiency extend into their personal
lives, or do they live with messy contradictions like the rest of us?
The hitch with narrative photography is that the viewer is always
trying to imagine what happens outside the frame.
Such is not the case with Edward Ruscha, Mel Bochner, and Joseph
Kosuth, artists for whom facts rule.
Fact devotees, these artists give the cold shoulder to Modernist
photography and all its artistic flourishes.
Ruscha’s tiny artist book Babycakes begins with an unremarkable
black-and-white snapshot of a baby; his weight (15 pounds 8 ounces)
is typed below. Each subsequent
page features a different cake (a cupcake, a birthday cake, a wedding
cake), with its weight (4 ounces, 2 pounds 8 ounces, 8 pounds 12 ounces)
typed below. There is little
room for aesthetic nuance in Ruscha’s deadpan approach. In Bochner’s
Misunderstandings: (A Theory of Photography), 1969, and in Kosuth’s
Notebook on Water 1965–1966, defined text is given top billing
over descriptive image, only to play up the impossibility of either
producing a valid depiction of reality.
Bochner’s handwritten quotes on the power of photography are
attributed to such indisputable sources as Marcel Proust, Mao Tse-tung,
Marcel Duchamp, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the
Encyclopedia Britannica. It turns out that Bochner has made up three of the quotes, although
he never reveals which ones. By
interfering with written authority in this way, Bochner persuades me
to question the veracity of authorship; all those random quotes collected
at the end of Susan Sontag’s On Photography come to mind. In Notebook on Water 1965–1966,
Kosuth provides pertinent facts about water: its ubiquity, its chemical
properties, its dictionary definition, its potential to become ice or
steam. Lackluster black-and-white
images accompany the facts: a map of the world, a photograph of a radiator,
a drawing of an ice cube. Such
a literal presentation produces a variety of overlapping realities;
it offers little in the way of aesthetic experience, yet after the intellectual
burn fades, the visual components linger on—modularity, regularity,
banality. In Robert Smithson’s Torn Photograph from the Second
Stop (rubble), n.d., a photograph of nondescript rubble is
torn into four near-equal sections.
No longer part of a larger natural landscape, Smithson’s debris
enters the realm of man-made experience.
He charts a course that points toward depletion and exhaustion
as both nature and culture disintegrate around us; perhaps in the end
it’s their mutual cancellation that continues to propel us forward.
The man-made intrusions that mar the landscapes in Marilyn Bridges’
photographs and Stephen Poleskie’s prints are what make the images more
compelling. Bridges’ aerial photographs of remote landscapes
are sharply incised by things unseen by the grounded eye; Poleskie’s
prints of imaginary flight maps are riddled by unknown targets. Shifting destinations mark the course of many contemporary
artists’ best digressions; it’s what keeps art moving and I, for one,
like the ride. Pop art: manic,
foolish, dangerous, cluttered, pathetic, exhilarating; call it real
life, only shinier. The metaphoric
snap in Roy Lichtenstein’s comic assaults like Explosion, 1967,
make me want to come up for air, and when I do I know that I’m not breathing
something pure or rarefied. Rummaging
beyond the fray, collecting trash, filling the gaps is Robert Rauschenberg,
who wrings a visceral poetry out of life’s detritus.
He’s not like Lichtenstein, who serves it up big and silly, or
like Paolozzi, who brings it together clearly and brightly, or like
Warhol, who hones in on it only to shrug and walk away.
For Rauschenberg, art’s about the hard-won renewals that follow
life’s ironic, poignant, violent, beautiful obfuscations. In Storyline I (Bonnie and Clyde), 1968, or The Week in
Review, 1973, images from movies, magazines, and newspapers are
partially wiped out; Rauschenberg’s layer of violation on top of the
initial saturation becomes a conflicting act of reclamation and disavowal. In Revolver, circa 1967, five Plexiglas
disks are silk-screened with images cropped from ads and art history.
By gently turning the disks, an endless combination of images
is revealed and concealed; this time Rauschenberg lets the viewer determine
the course. Looking for temporary solace, I turn to the work of artists
whose vision is so impenetrable that impure moments never sully the
view. Clarity abounds in the eloquently distilled
vision of Ellsworth Kelly or the unitary world of Donald Judd—and then
it’s back to the fray. Dieter
Roth’s artist books and his Speedy Drawings deliver a visceral,
pungent response to all that life offers.
Whether contained within the pages of his books or let loose
in the reckless focus of his drawings, Roth’s approach takes nothing
for granted. Through the combined forces of inclusive vision and audacious hand,
Roth’s experimentation with unlikely art materials such as cheese, chocolate,
and molded dung further the stakes of making art out of dross. He takes a mordant look at the life of the
artist in his book Gesammelte Werke, Band 17, 1962. Filled with comic sketches, cryptic messages,
and confessional musings, the book calls to mind similar efforts by
R. Crumb, Philip Guston, and more recently Sean Landers. I accept these words at face value. Like Lou Reed and John Cale’s song about Warhol,
they too are an ode to persuasive images; and contained within their
contradictions are the chords of this artist/curator’s unceasing infatuation
with the nature of persuasive images, in and beyond this exhibit. |