Eggleston’s Everyday

“A picture is what it is and I’ve never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn’t make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they’re right there, whatever they are.”

-William Eggleston in interview with Sean O’Hagen (The Observer, July 25, 2004)

“There are no ideas but in things.”

-William Carlos Williams, Paterson

I was lucky enough to catch the new William Eggleston show at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London yesterday. While a small show of 22 photographs themselves modest in scale (22 x 28 inches), it did not disappoint. In fact, the show was a welcome respite from the tableau-format aesthetic which has come to acquire a certain orthodoxy within advanced photographic practice. The show features work produced by Eggleston over the past decade and runs concurrently with a show at Cheim & Read in New York. A large number of the photographs once again reference the American South that has featured so prominently in Eggleston’s earlier work.

All the trademark Eggleston qualities can be found here: his remarkable use of colour and often skewed points of view, the contained painterly imperatives and the seeming casualness and ordinariness of his subjects. Indeed, the very words used by John Szarkowski to describe Eggleston’s landmark 1976 show at MOMA have never seemed more accurate. For Eggleston as for many other photographers of his era (Helen Levitt, Stephen Shore, and Joel Meyerowitz), the very use of color was “existential and descriptive; these pictures are not photographs of color, any more than they are photographs of shapes, textures, objects, symbols, or events, but rather photographs of experience, as it has been ordered and clarified within the structures imposed by the camera.”

With this in mind, it would perhaps be a bit misleading to suggest that Eggleston monumentalizes the everyday (as stated in the show’s press release). I would prefer to argue that he attends modestly to the structures of visibility that attach themselves to the ordinary and everyday. The compositional clarity and luminosity so lauded by Adrian Searle in his recent review of the show seem here to invest the everyday with a justifiable depth and complexity (and with a perhaps a nod to a new found sense of pictorial abstraction).

There is a wonderful passage by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that appears in the volume Culture and Value. It is a thought experiment on the nature of aesthetics and we learn from Wittgenstein that the “the work of art compels us…to see in the right perspective.” “[...]Without art,” Wittgenstein continues, “the object is a piece of nature like any other & the fact that we may exalt it through our enthusiasm does not give anyone the right to display it to us” (Wittgenstein, 1998 [1930]: pp. 6e-7e). This passage has been seized on recently by the art historian Michael Fried in a remarkable discussion of the photography of Jeff Wall and the relationship of Wall’s work to notions of the everyday (see Fried’s 2008, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before). There is something to recommend in this view though I think it ultimately misses the mark and I do wonder whether Eggleston’s work is more appropriate to the terms that Wittgenstein proposes. In other words, I would suggest that his photographs really do compel us to understand the everyday as a source of deep aesthetic contemplation. Wall’s own compositions – important as they are – possess a certain artifice or staginess that owes much to the painstaking construction of the depicted setting. In the case of Eggleston, this staginess seems to emerge directly out of the everyday itself whether it is shining spoon lying on a windowsill or a faded newspaper page on the ground (this is even allegorized by Eggleston in Untitled, Room with Old TV, Lamps, Wildwood, New Jersey, 2002). In other words, I wonder whether Wall’s photographs are meant to tell us that we should see them as works of art whereas we simply know when we look at Eggleston’s photographs that they are works of art.

Polaroid Landscapes… again

One eye sees, the other feels.

-Paul Klee

 

I’ve been finding it hard getting the Tarkovsky polaroids out of my mind over the past few days. Quiet moments between writing sessions find me flipping through them. I spent most of the afternoon sitting in Lee Rosy’s trying to put pen to paper…

My point of departure is an interview published at the back of Bright, Bright Days with the art historian Boris Groys. He describes the effect of the polaroids as one of “documentary romanticism.” For Groys, these are images that speak to the romanticism of a Caspar David Friedrich painting while attending to the documentary impulse of the photographic medium. Here’s Groys’s gloss: “It’s like a combination of Chekhov and Caspar David Friedrich – a kind of cottage-life with a bit of the decadent Russian aristocracy. These images are nostalgic, but not for the Soviet culture of the Russia that he left. Rather, they’re nostalgia for Russia before the Revolution” (2008: 124).

While there is something to recommend in these views, I don’t think they get the full measure of the signficant aesthetic claims at stake in the polaroids. That they ‘imagine’ a kind of intimate utopian refuge amidst the “collective space” of the Soviet Union is hardly remarkable. They were, after all, intended for private consumption. I would like to pursue another line of flight, however, and read them alongside the recent work of the philosopher Jay Bernstein. 

Bernstein has written extensively on German philosophy and Critical Theory in its various incarnations and afterlives (see especially his magnificent Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics) and his first sustained foray into modernist art, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting, tracks these concerns as they find concrete form across the range of modernist artistic production. The argument draws on a now familiar story involving “the disenchantment of nature” (Santner, 2009: 286) under the sign of an advancing modernity. As Eric Santner has recently noted in a re-reading of Bernstein:

“‘Disenchantment’ signifies here a process that delegitimates our experience of ourselves and our being-in-the-world as vulnerable and dependent beings, disqualifies the dimension of emphatic experience in which sentient embodiment, the felt-fact of aliveness, still bears a normative significance in relation to the object world and other human subjects” (2009: 286). 

Santner also seizes on a passage in Bernstein where he focuses on “what has been excised from the everyday” which is to say “the emotional significance of sensory encounter, sensory experience as constitutive of conviction and connection to the world of things” (Bernstein, 2006: 3). These are, I realize, dense opaque passages. What Santner is, I think, interested in working through are the affordances that Bernstein makes for reclaiming “lost forms of human vitality and animation” (2009: 284). If this has been for Bernstein at least, a defining characteristic of modernist art,  I’m especially interested myself in the degree to which the kind of picture-making we find in Tarkovsky’s polaroids can plausibly be understood as an exercise in capturing and holding onto a form of sensuous particularity. Whatever claims to modernism are at stake here, I do think it is possible to explore these images as scenes of “significant sensory encounter” (Bernstein, 2006: 7) that are capable of relaying both the felt materiality of the polaroids as well as the dense sensuous textures that are conveyed in the images whether they are portraits and scenes of everyday life or atmospheric landscape compositions. Taken together these images represent a significant contribution to advanced photographic practice and, if anything, only further radicalize the kind of demands that they put on the way in which photographs are meant to be seen.

Polaroid Landscapes

“An image is not some idea as expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected in a drop of water. In a single drop of water.”

-Andrei Tarkovsky

“Art is a sense of magic.”

                                                                   -Stan Brakhage

 

It’s been a long time since I handled a polaroid camera. There is something about the particular way in which they seem to offer access to an immediate present that I really miss. While there has been plenty of ink spilled recently about the contemporary emergence of large scale tableau-sized photographs, the modest artefactual quality of the polaroid would seem to solicit a form of beholding that merits further critical attention in its own right.  

I recently picked up a remarkable volume of polaroids produced by the famous Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky. Bright, Bright Day is edited by the photographer Stephen Gill and includes polaroids shot by Tarkovsky in Italy between 1979-1984 as well as some images shot in Russia in 1980 and 1981. 

The results are staggering. In an interview that the director made during the production of his film Nostalghia, he commented on the relationship between nostalgia and the experience of time. Nostalgia, he opined, “is not the same as longing for the past. Nostalgia is a longing for the space of time that has passed in vain” (quoted in Bird, 2008: 189). Or as Robert Bird, one of the director’s more prescient interlocutors has recently argued, “time becomes palpable when it coincides with space; it is at this very moment that it becomes the object of our longing and of our regret” (Bird, 2008: 189). 

If Tarkovsky’s films are famous for their long takes, his polaroid images transpose these concerns to a more intimate space. These are images saturated with the ‘substance’ of time and one senses that the very materiality of the polaroid format only serves to intensify this effect. Tarkovsky, it should be said, often likened the practice of filmmaking to a kind of “sculpting in time” and it is clear that such a ‘working method’ finds further distillation and perhaps even refinement in his series of polaroids. 

But these are images that also recall earlier painterly antecedents. As the art historian Boris Groys has noted, “they look like Romantic painting of the nineteenth-century, in their composition, and also in the play of light” (2008: 124). While Groys sees similarities with some of the early images of Jeff Wall,  their documentary qualities ultimately eschew the kind of constructedness which comes to overdetermine much of Wall’s impressive body of work. What distinguishes Tarkovsky’s polaroids from some of the more recent examples of advanced photographic practice is, in my view, an ability to somehow inhabit and bridge that seemingly irreducible discrepancy between intention and effect. These are images that rework the “extraordinary copiousness” of the medium in order to create a rich painterly texture out of the most ordinary and personal of scenes (see Fried, 2008: 272). There are few if any more important statements of why, to quote, Michael Fried, “photography matters as art as never before.”

Photographic Portraiture

Art is concerned with the difficult and the good.

                                                -Goethe, Elective Affinities

 

I missed the Deutsche Börse photography show when it was in London at the Photographer’s Gallery so I was excited to find out that it is now showing in Berlin at the C/O gallery at the old Postamt on Oranienburgerstrasse. The show in no way disappointed and both Paul Graham and Tod Papageorge’s work stood out. At the same time, the show was, in some way, overshadowed by the much larger Visions of our Time gig featuring 10 years of photography at the Deutsche Börse. The list of ‘protagonists’ was virtually self-selecting and included Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Barbara Klemm, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Beate Gütshow, Sebastião Salgado, and Beat Streuli.

For some reason, I’ve found it hard since the show to shake Thomas Ruff’s blank and deliberately expressionless photographs of friends and acquaintances. They have always troubled me and I’ve never quite been able to express what my dissatisfaction with them has been. I’ve always found their large format ‘to-be-seeness’ somewhat disingenuous and false. Alienating but without any form of mediation. Surprisingly, it is a passage in Goethe’s Elective Affinities which offers perhaps a modest point of purchase on what I have in mind here. It is a brief excerpt from Ottilie’s journal (itself a mediation on art as a ‘form of life’) on the nature of painterly portraiture:

“You are never satisfied with a portrait of people you know; which is why I have always felt sorry for portrait painters. You rarely ask the impossible, but that is what you ask of them. They are supposed to incorporate into their portrait everyone’s feelings towards the subject, everyone’s likes and dislikes; they are supposed to show, not merely how they see a particular person, but how everyone would see them. I am not surprised when such artists gradually grow insensitive, indifferent and self-willed” (164).

While the very nature of photography may magnify the kind of ‘indifference’ expressed by Ottilie, there is something about Ruff’s images that, in the words of Ottilie’s aunt Charlotte,  “[do] point to something distant and departed and remind [us of] how hard it is to do justice to the present” (160). Maybe this is why to parphrase Ruff’s own words I ultimately find it hard to simply accept these pictures as pictures. If anything, I would argue that something of Theodor Adorno’s telling reading of the disappearance of essence in appearance is made palpably manifest in these photographs. In their large-scale positivity, they dissolve and dissimulate what is meant to pass as a form of strict realism. This isn’t art, pace Nietzsche, in which “the lie hallows itself” or where the “will to deception has good conscience on its side.”

Rethinking the Photographic Image

I’ve slowly begun to think about a book-length project which tracks the relationship between landscape and contemporary photographic practice. Such a project will undoubtedly have to come to terms with a growing scholarly interest in the philosophical stakes underwriting what the art historian Michael Fried (2008) has recently dubbed the “new art photography” (3). Indeed, Fried’s own challenging (if deeply frustrating) book on the subject has brought a new awareness and sensitivity to the status of photography as an ontological medium. I will have more to say about Fried’s book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before in a later post. For the time being, I would like to briefly flag up a recent article in the journal Radical Philosophy (July/August 2009 issue) on the photographic image by Jacques Rancière. I’ve often found Rancière’s recent work on aesthetics both provocative and unsatisfying though there is much to recommend in this piece. In particular, I want to single out his understanding of photography’s aesthetic indeterminacy which Rancière adopts via Kant’s formulation of the “aesthetic idea” as it is set out in the Critique of Judgement. For Kant such an idea represents a “presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e. no [determinate] concept can be adequate” (Kant, 1987 [1790]: 182). Rancière suggests that the aesthetic idea is in fact an indeterminate idea that inhabits the gap between the “intentional production of art which seeks an end, and the sensible experience of beauty as finality without end” (2009: 15). This is, according to Rancière, very much a condition that is explored by contemporary photographic practice. If Rancière sees a form of artistic “indifference” at work here, it is one that is capable – by its very nature – of neutralizing social and artistic hierarchies. As he points out, we don’t ultimately know what aesthetic intentions shaped an image such as Walker Evans’s photograph of a kitchen in a farm in Alabama. “The photo,” writes Rancière, “does not say whether it is art or not…It tells us neither what the person who laid the planks and cutlery in this manner had in mind nor what the photographer wanted to do” (2009: 15). While this may plausibly be seen as a form of dispossession and decontextualization, it is also tantamount, if we believe Rancière to a form of radical equivalence between the subjects of art.  Much more can be said in this respect though it certainly highlights for me a potential for rethinking a wide body of photographic work in terms of a radically common set of aesthetic precepts. How this might change the way in which we attend to the photographic image is, however, a project that still remains to be written.