| I had always believed that it was the primary role of the artist to challenge and reinterpret the medium in which it performs. With photography, this becomes a major annoyance and contradiction. Photography began as an artist’s way of capturing a moment in time, as the Dutch would say, a "blik" of the natural world. But oh no, no more capturing the natural order of things. |
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Letter to Joseuh, Exiled PhotoArtist by Tony Zaza
I had always believed that it was the primary role of the artist to challenge and reinterpret the medium in which it performs. With photography, this becomes a major annoyance and contradiction. Photography began as an artist’s way of capturing a moment in time, as the Dutch would say, a "blik" of the natural world. But oh no, no more capturing the natural order of things. Now artists are compelled to create artificial realities, their own private Idaho. In a recent jaunt through Chelsea, I mused whether this artifice is a flexing of the imagination, a preparation of dream, or a costly manipulation toward decoration.
In his recent ìAwakenedî at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, David La Chepelle has fabricated beautiful moments in time. They seem like the moment of death. Figures float in Rembrandt’ s unidirectional light. 507 years ago, that was divine illumination. What is it today? These works are created at a great expense with a great exhibition of effort and manpower. Like the works of Damien Hirst, a factory-like expenditure of resources is required to achieve the result. This limits my appreciation of the art and heightens my jealousy as a practitioner who cannot afford the luxury of my creative dreams. Would I be equally annoyed with Michaelangelo because he alone was able to muster the patronage that allowed him the luxury of working on large globs of marble while other contemporaries remained unknown because they couldn’t afford the stone?
I was more impressed by the technology and craft required to create these alternate realities, especially the large mural-like rendition of the Flood without Noah’s Arc of the Covenant. I marveled at how easy it seems to be now for Mr. La Chapelle to get people to be very naked, not just nude, but very exposed, vulnerable, naked for the purpose of impact and decoration and pure virtuosity? I do not have the same issue with Jock Sturges at Bemarducci-Meisel, whose pubescent totally naked mums and daughters, mostly affluent princesses both domestic and foreign, affect a curious nobility of choice in that all the subjects conform to the artist’s single-minded one note theme of virginal beauty. And I thought, ìIs this as facile as Dianne Arbus taking advantage of the misery of the found subject in the streets?î I have always had an issue with people’s appreciation of the content of a photo over the artistry of the photo. Are both pure luck?
Then there is the annoying artifice of the Whitney’s favorite, Cindy Sherman, whose self-indulgent simulations of the lives of others has drawn a cult audience who obviously find the works cute and poignant as well as technically clever and proficientólike the craft of a makeup artist but with hardly more soul. So, too, lacking soul, at Robert Miller, Mayumi Terada, like so many technocrats, presents a minimalist reduction of space and light that results in compositions that some of our art patrons who actually buy art claim go well over the dining room table, but which she claims are ìmemories of intimate relationships inhabit absent space.î Does it matter that this is totally unshareable?
The defect in all of this work is that all of it fails to extend the borders of the mediumî to really redefine it, to stretch its possibilities and most importantly, touch your soul (and for pagans, your gonads). Whichever hormones you may choose, these works fail to make them flow. At the Cohen Amador Gallery, Joseph Mills made a noteworthy attempt to demonstrate how even subtle technical changes can alter the reality of the subject. Printing on expired photo paper and then varnishing carefully, he achieves a false aged look that one might condemn as pure decorative vanity, yet his subjects are transformed into simulations of the past. Like old Soviet Supremacist agitprop. Isn’t it funny how photographers want to be like painters and painters wanted to be like photographers?
What to make of the photo lions: Melvin Sokolsky, (at the Staley-Wise)? You are immediately stunned by how he was able to get those icy bitches suspended in globes over Montmartre in the 60s when the French truly hated America more than now! The pure artifice of fashion circa 1963 now seems like an impossible masterpiece of American ingenuity. So too, Arnold Newman at Howard Greenberg. His early works, bland compositions of the commonplace, now appear to be austere abstract compositions in light and dark, closer to 50s painterly abstraction than to photo. His sitters in formal black and white portraits configure unnaturally an artist/celebrity with an example of their work, but they do what only the photographic image can do, freeze the moment of intimacy and introspection as a kind of signature.
And finally, Chuck Close, bless his little pea pickiní heart, has chosen to re-invent the daguerreotype. His grand scale works at Aperture repeat the exquisiteness of the medium at a huge expense. The shear size impresses. Production values conquer emotion. The form, however imposing, lacks any feeling.
Most of these culprits don’t transform the medium into something greater, they only manipulate the audience.
