(The series of out-of-date art
exhibition reviews continues unabated)
”Photography… is bringing
something entirely new into this world.”
- Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, 1932
The Camera Lies Splendidly
After having Noel Gallagher to thank for a Lowry show at Tate Britain, it now seems it’s Elton John’s turn. Whether we’ll soon have a
Bauhaus exhibition brought to us by Gary Barlow remains to be seen.
His collection’s chiefly from the era
of photography’s coming of age, where cameras first became both
portable and affordable. (The Leica hand-held film-roll camera, for
example, was released in 1925.) The standard narrative is of course
that photography’s arrival liberated visual art. By offering to
faithfully delineate anything put before it, and at the press of a
button, it offered to take off art’s hands the plodding task of
just recording stuff. Picasso gave the orthodox view: “now at least
we know what painting isn’t.”
But perhaps what’s most interesting
is how many took precisely the opposite tack. The lens was taken up
as an artists’ instrument as much as the paint brush or sculptor’s
mallet, if not a tool for modern times which rendered its
predecessors redundant. Matisse countered Picasso: “We are
encumbered by the sensibilities of the artists who have preceded us.
Photography can rid us of previous imaginations.”
And you can see that by comparing some
of the photos here to the ‘Picasso Portraits’ exhibition showing contemporaneously at the
National Portrait gallery across London, with much the same subjects.
See for example, Picasso’s ’Portrait of Nusch
Eluard’ (1937), and May Ray’s 1929 photo, both above.
Yes, freed from fidelity to subjects, Picasso expressively warps and
distorts his subjects. (Though whether he waited for the Leica
camera to arrive and give him permission, that’s another matter.)
But the notion that the photography faithfully depicts while the hand
of the artist interprets, that’s played with throughout.
Take for example Man Ray’s well-known
‘Noir et Blanche’ (1926, above). The title
underlines the contrast between the face and the mask. Yet in many
ways the work’s a comparison, the woman (model Kiki de
Montparnasse) with her shut eyes and face made up, as much an
artifice as the mask. Similarly Norman Parkinson’s ’Edward
James With His Death Mask of Napoleon, Painted by Magritte’
(1938, below) up-lights two faces, one real the other a mask, again
both with closed eyes. In both it’s as if the objective was to blur
the distinction.
Marcello Nizzoli’s ’Portrait
of a Woman’ (1936) goes further – cutting part of a
woman’s face out of the photograph, revealing an image of a mask
beneath. And this reversal of the standard order may be a key image.
Once simple distinctions between mask and face, between appearance
and actuality, are at times challenged and at others simply
over-ridden.
May Ray’s ‘Glass
Tears’ (1932, above) pushes further still into the
contrast between nature and appearance. May Ray was a Dadaist, who
also produced the anti-art totem ’Object to be
Destroyed’ (1923). And here shed tears have turned into
valuable diamonds, a visual metaphor for the way an artist needs to
harvest his angst if he’s to produce material for the art market.
And yet at the same time as it’s an anti-art provocation it’s a
lush and glamorous image, a magazine cover in waiting. Notably, they
made it the exhibition’s poster image.
The Selfie Gene
And why should all this be? Partly it’s
a goldilocks moment. The democratisation of the portrait had been
underway before this show starts. You no longer needed to own land to
get immortalised in oil. Yet the significance attached to the
portrait still lingered. Being photographed still meant a form of
reification, whereas today we’re filmed for simply walking down the
street. (In what is in many ways a proto-modern exhibition, it’s
worth keeping that in mind.)
In series of 1948 photo-portraits by
Irving Penn not only are the diverse group (including Duke Ellington,
Noel Coward, Joe Lewis, Salvador Dali, Spencer Tracy and Gypsy Rose
Lee) united only in being photographed, they’re all placed in the
same plain, acute corner. Moholy-Nagy proclaimed proudly “everyone is equal before the machine
… there is no tradition in technology, no class-consciousness”.
We
might want to note that beyond such-high-mindedness the camera is
still being pointed at celebrity, that most of us remain unreified
and effectively
faceless. But there’s an equivalence established between
celebrities, which works as a kind of democracy
within them.
Painters sit alongside strippers and jazz musicians. What
characterises them is not the background, their clothing or
accoutrements as
it was in classic portraiture.
Instead
their physical presence emerges
out
of
neutral space. Who you are is based on innate qualities.
So Lewis lolls back, Ellington casually
slides one foot forward, while Dali (above) looks coiled, like he can
barely sit still long enough to be snapped, as pert as his patented
upturned moustache. As Steve Dunneen puts it, you see “his personality
exploding from the frame”.
And even when the sitter was not an
artist in their own right, the pictures often remain an effective
collaboration between them and the photographer. It’s the reversal
of the soul-stealing superstition primitive people are supposed to
have had. The camera takes nothing from you. In fact it's the
mechanism by which you can construct yourself.
Man Ray said of his subjects in 1934:
“They collect themselves. Carefully, as if tying a cravat, they
compose their features. Insolent, serious and conscious of their
looks, they turn around to face the world.” It’s reminiscent of
the famous Rimbaud quote: “I is another… I witness the unfolding
of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it.” We have no a priori
existence. We bring ourselves into being through assembling
ourselves. We click the shutter therefore we are.
And this is perhaps clearer still if we
look to photographic self-portraits. For Paul Citroen’s
‘Self-Portrait’ (1930) he poses with his
camera. While, further down the same path, Alma Lavenson
‘Self-Portrait With Hands’ (1932, above) is
titled as though the camera is her, an eye with an
added record button, capturing film inside itself as our heads do
memories. With all our fleeting, varying appearances it’s the
camera which has become the constant.
Plus the camera is not the only lens
here. Herbert List’s ‘Lake Lucerne, Switzerland’
(1936, above), defies its own title by placing glasses on a table
before the scenic view. There’s no further context or integration
between the two, the table just juts out abruptly before the lake.
And this leaves us less prone to see the table and objects simply as
sign of a human presence before a nature scene. Those glasses become
both a synecdoche of their owners, and an emblem of looking.
The show breathlessly tells us how
“this re-evaluation of photography coincided with a period of
upheaval.” Indeed, photo-journalism had done much to reveal the
horrors of the Great War, to the extent that (perhaps for the first
time) cameras had been banned from the battlefront. Yet you would
never guess from the images above what tumultuous world events were
going on. It lies outside their camera frames, as everyone took turns
to compose their features and record each others’ existence.
You can see the embryo of today’s
selfie culture, with it’s ceaseless Facebook updates, clear as day.
From here it’s easy enough to spot how this degenerated into
narcissistic self-absorption. Yet perhaps we see that slide all too
easily. The chance to construct yourself, rebuild yourself in your
own chosen image, was then much more of a new and exciting notion.
The Camera Chops
Along with portraits, there’s
frequent close-cropping on parts of the body, with heads de-centred,
obscured or even cut out entirely. The indica comments that
“fragmented limbs and flesh were depersonalised and could be
treated like a landscape or a still life.” Edwards Weston’s
‘Nude’ (1936, above), presents a curled figure
reminiscent of Matisse’s ‘Blue Nude II’ (1952). These anonymising images should seem
incongruous set against the constructed portraits, so keen to project
a self, and yet they don’t.
It’s easy to imagine that in art it’s
the paint that leads the mind to compare forms, by transforming
everything that it depicts into some variant of pigment. Yet with
Frantisek Drtikol’s ’Untitled (Nude With Wave
Construction)’ (1925, above) we quite readily compare the
woman’s body to the wave-shaped block. This may be partly because
it’s in black and white, reducing both to the same tones.
And this segues neatly into the photos
of movement. Faster shutter speeds meant the camera could now beat
the eye in capturing movement, a development readily taken advantage
of. In Ferenc Csik’s ‘Diver’ (1936, above)
the act of diving angles the figure away from us, half-obscuring it.
The movement itself is the subject, the diver just instrumental to
the dive.
The Object as Subject
If a painting wants to suggest a wider
frame, it has to go out of it’s way to convey it, starting to
depict elements in order to danglingly not finish them. Whereas
cropping is inherent to photography. And a photograph which
ruthlessly crops the image out of its context will dispel scale and
replace it with composition. The show smartly makes use of this by
hanging works adjacently that use completely different scales.
And this can make photography
essentially abstract. What initially makes the notion seem
counter-intuitive is what makes it so compelling. You soon realise
that all those art history books lied to you, that abstraction was
never a genre in art but a way of looking. The composition is all
that counts, and so it doesn’t matter much what it’s composed of.
Yet for all that abstract photography
has it’s own spin. Abstract painters often begin with a real scene,
but when they turn this into pigment it is soon left behind. In
photography it’s ghost remains. In ‘Ice Cube Tray With
Marbles and Rice’ (1939, above) by Margaret De Patta she
even cheerily gives away it’s components in the title. But it still
looks like a cosmic Malevich or Miro. Miro, in particular, had a
similar penchant for lattice structures.
While Gordon Coster’s ‘The
Spigot and the Shadows’ (1927, above) works differently.
This time we can see straight away what this photo is composed of,
but the central thing remains the framing and composition. We look
at, for example, the shadow of the colander in it’s own right,
without thinking of the thing which cast it.
Whereas with Edward Weston’s
‘Church Door, Hornitos’ (1946, above) the
camera is aimed quite pointedly at a piece of the world. The image is
sharp and, once you stop to consider it, the composition strong –
yet all is naturalised. You cannot but wonder what’s outside the
composition, what’s behind that firmly closed door. Painting might
evoke this feeling too. But with a photo you know instinctively there
has to be something.
Weston
was a member of the f/64 group, named after the smallest camera
aperture, one used for the most close-up work. Unlike de Patta’s
abstracts, they
were hostile to influences from other media, insisting in their manifesto “pure
photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique,
composition or idea, derivative of any other art form.”
The
portrait of the Hollywood star is perhaps most associated with the
soft focus. To see the stars themselves would be almost an
irrelevance, the point is to see the image of them through the
distancing camera lens. Sharp focus was the linear and aesthetic
opposite to this, not evocative but flatly descriptive, the
difference between stage lighting and bare bulbs.
Rodchenko’s ‘Shukov
Tower’ (1927, above) exemplifies his photography based on
“points of view impossible to achieve in drawing and painting.”
Moholy-Nagy’s ‘View From the Berlin Radio Tower’
(1928), looking down on the ground from a tower, makes a kind of
companion piece. That these are physical scenes, yet which could not
have been taken in times before, is central to them.
As I said another time: “Rodchenko’s photos see the world
as a ceaseless succession of new angles and viewpoints, never flat or
neutral, never something self-evidently ‘real’ which merely
required recording.” As part of the New Vision movement, he intended to create literal new perspectives to
match new social perspectives.
Conversely, Ilse Bing’s ’Greta
Garbo Poster, Paris’ (1932) sharply explodes the
distinction between real space and constructed image. The image of
Garbo the glamorous icon is placed up in the weatherbeaten world,
then photographed again. It runs counter to every received image we
have of both Garbo and Paris.
Facing The Strange
Yet isn’t there something odd here?
Check out the date of the works above, almost all are inter-war. A
time when the dominant Modernist movement was Surrealism. And
photography, surely that was singularly useless in depicting
Surrealist dreamscapes? In fact it’s quite the opposite.
For Surrealism had never been a
movement for daydreamers, seeking an escape into fantasy from the
daily grind. Its name meant ‘above realism’, not ‘away from’.
And so photography felt very much a Surrealist medium, it’s
flashbulb exposing the inherent strangeness of supposedly familiar
things. Like ectoplasm captured on gelatin, photography proved their
point. As Dali insisted “nothing has proved the rightness of
Surrealism more than photography.”
André Kertész’s ‘Underwater
Swimmer’ (1917, above) is an untreated shot by an artist
only tangentially connected with Surrealism taken before the movement
emerged. The distortions come from the lapping water, something we
are all familiar with from daily life. Yet that doesn’t prevent his
focus upon them having a Surrealist dimension.
And distortions were to recur in his
work. In ‘Clock Distortion’ (1938, above),
this time he does manipulate the shot. While we see this is the case
the result is still more arresting than when Dali paints the same
image, because we more closely associate the photograph with an
actual clock bent out of shape.
Herbert Bayer’s ’Humanly
Impossible (Self Portrait)’ (1932, above) echoes the
‘body parts’ images of earlier. But rather than obscuring and
emphasising parts through the composition, Bayer chops a section from
his own arm. The artist himself looks astonished, like he can’t
take in himself the implications of this new medium that upends our
physical integrity and turns us into sections.
More widely, Surrealism lurks in the
majority of these images. It’s there in the glamour. Man
Ray’s’Glass Tears’ looks odd as a Dada work
because it’s already part-way to the seductiveness of Surrealism.
Surrealism’s sexuality was paradoxical, often charging inanimate
objects with libidinous allure, yet also treating the body as a
combination of discreet objects and the sex act as purely mechanical.
With photography it can collide both.
The show quotes Mohoy-Nagy: “the
enemy of photography is convention… the salvation of photography
comes from the experiment”. But alas, photography’s most
experimental frontier, photomontage, does seem to be the biggest
blind spot in John’s collection. John seems more interested in
photographers than photography, and those who turned existing works
into collages show up less often on his walls. So while Surrealism
may be present it’s at Dada’s expense. Man Ray is here but
Heartfield and Hoch, the great practitioners of photomontage, are
absent. This is something of a shame, but let’s focus on the few
which do make it in.
Frederick Sommer’s ‘Max
Ernst’ (1946, above) places a mud-flaked image of the
artist (who himself bridged Dada and Surrealism) before a
rough-textured wall. Only his eyes, enhanced by being placed within a
ridge on the wall, are enhanced. It looks like one of Ernst’s own
frottage and grattage works, which similarly suggested at half-seen
images, an artist turned into one of his own works.
To return to Bayer, his ‘Lonely
Metropolitan’ (1932, above) is based on a conceptual
comparison between hands and windows – both can be either open or
closed. But the irises in the palms, when placed before those
depeopled windows, suggest surreptitious spying eyes. And the
centrality of the eyes suggest an image which peers back at you. The
effect is sinister in extreme.
As with any show based on a single
collection, John’s personal tastes inevitably determine everything.
And he does seem to have a penchant for celebrity portrait
photography of one kind or another. But, beyond that and the somewhat
glitzy framing, whatever interest you have in his music his taste in
photography is good enough to make this a show to see. It’s focused
enough on an era not to be scattershot, while not so narrow as to be
too exclusive.
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