"Photography, in other words, is heavily into subject matter…
POLARITIES, THEN & NOW
by Piri Halasz
"Photography, in other words, is heavily into subject matter,
whereas abstraction is (or appears to be) nothing but style.
As such, it is terribly difficult to describe in words."
In the 1970s, when I was in graduate school, it was already unchic to think in terms of the traditional polarities between neo-classic and romantic, between Ingres and Delacroix, between drawing and color, between reason and emotion. Instead, my favorite teacher urged me to get away from those "narrow stylistic" considerations and think in terms of "meaning " instead. Well, I tried, I certainly tried. And I did come up with my theory regarding meaning (a.k.a. subject matter) in abstract painting. By this, I mean that I concluded abstract painting doesn’t have to be non-objective, but can instead consist of simplified versions of sights the artist has seen and unconsciously fused together into a composite image to be seen on the picture plane.
Most importantly here, my theory on multi-referential imagery in turn led me to see how in contemporary art, we have a new set of polarities: still between reason and emotion, but now equating with subject matter versus style, figurative versus abstract, and—if one had to specify those individual artists who most helped me to appreciate this new alignment, Duchamp and perhaps Pollock will do as well as anyone else.
At the moment, there are two shows which help to illustrate the old and the new polarities: the first because it demonstrates a 19th century synthesis between classic and romantic, the second because on the whole it shows how one of the two contemporary polarities at present claims a lopsided share of the 21st century scene.
The 19th century show is "Th�odore Chass�riau (1819-1856): The Unknown Romantic," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through January 5); the 21st century show is "Moving Pictures," at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (until January 12).
The little-known and short-lived Chass�riau started out as a neo-classicist. Born in what is today the Dominican Republic, he was brought to France at the age of three and began study with Ingres at the precocious age of 11. Later on, however, he developed an interest in Delacroix and the ways in which Delacroix used color. In The Two Sisters (1843), you can see the linear precision of detail which will remind you of Ingres, but the rich red of the two women’s Oriental shawls contrasts vividly with the green of the background. This red/green contrast was one that Delacroix was particularly fond of, and a somewhat neurasthenic quality to the women’s faces also reminds you of the romantic’s fascination with feeling. Chass�riau was friendly with Gustave Moreau, who later became a teacher of Matisse. Thus Chass�riau helped to form a link between an early 20th century understanding of color, and a 20th century one.
"Moving Pictures" is all photographs, still and moving (videos and film clips). This is nice familiar territory for the young crowds who flock here, because after all, they have already seen millions upon millions of other photographs (if only because they’ve all been watching TV since they were children, and TV is essentially a very rapid succession of still photographs). It doesn’t require any effort to relate to these images, which after all are almost all figurative and can thus be described in words—words being a form of rational logical discourse. If you can put a name to something, it becomes much less scary. Emotions are hard to describe, and Freud’s notion that we are driven by our emotions is scarier still. For me this is the basic reason why people deny his perceptions and insist that the unconscious is only a "social construct." That way, they never have to think of themselves as out of control.
Photography, in other words, is heavily into subject matter, whereas abstraction is (or appears to be) nothing but style. As such, it is terribly difficult to describe in words. In the past, it has often been said that abstract paintings are all "about feeling." Machine-made art, on the other hand, tries to divest itself of feeling, at least if it’s in the tradition of Duchamp, who said that he wanted to get away from the painter’s touch, the personal expression of the artist’s patte, or paw. Though I won’t say it’s impossible to convey personal feeling in a photograph, I think that "Moving Pictures," composed exclusively of postmodernist photographs, avoids pictures either depicting emotion or seeking to inspire it. Robert Mapplethorpe’s masterful study of the two profiled heads of Ken Moody and Robert Sherman (1984) is icily precise. Certainly, it makes statements about race and homoeroticism, but it also reminds me of another phrase I picked up in grad school: Robert Rosenblum’s description of neo-classic art like that of Antonio Canova as "erotic Frigidaire."
