“We just spent a fortune doing additions on this fabulous house, it’s huge and beautiful and kind of like we have all these empty spaces. . . . We had our art consultant come two different times. . . . When it comes to artwork, I don’t know that I know the value. Are you buying it for enjoyment, or are you buying it for investment? If you buy some Yves Saint Laurent or Halston, you know that you are getting value.”
Melissa Fink (in The New York Times)
Matt Black, Saint's Day Celebration, Oaxaca, date unknown
Matt Black photographs the lives of agricultural workers in California’s San Joaquin Valley and Oaxaca, Mexico. That those lives are difficult the photographs leave little doubt, but their principal subject is not the difficulty but the community that persists in spite or because of it. And although Black’s connection with and affection for that community are also not his subject, or at least not overtly, they are plainly visible in the pictures, which are grainy, black and white, and haunting.
(thanks to olivier laude)
In this time of untruth, John Berger’s Hold Everything Dear is a pleasure, and an antidote to despair, although despair is also its subject.
We seldom honestly answer, Berger reminds us, the most important question raised by the events of September 11: Why? Why were we attacked? And why were our attackers so willing to die? But Berger does:
“What makes a terrorist is, first, a form of despair. Or, to put it more accurately, it is a way of transcending and, by the gift of one’s own life, making sense of a form of despair. . . . This despair consists of what? The sense that your life and the lives of those close to you count for nothing.”
How, then, should we respond to those who despair? We had, and still have, two choices: Kill them. Or try to alleviate their despair.
How? By fostering conditions in which Third World lives might count for something. How? By ceasing to support corporate devaluation of those lives. And by withdrawing our support for the illegitimate governments that facilitate it.
And that’s pretty much all you need to know, isn’t it? Because we aren’t going to do any of that. We might as well just kill them all.
But Berger understands that there is no imminent end to despair. Hence the advice of his title, from a poem by Gareth Evans of which these are the first lines:
“as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey
as the rose buds a green room to breathe
and blossoms like the wind
as the thinning birches whisper their silver stories of the wind to the urgent in the trucks
as the leaves of the hedge store the light
that the moment thought it had lost
as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a wren in the turning air
as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky
and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark
hold everything dear”
We could do that.
Almost every night my girlfriend and I fall asleep to the Notwist’s Neon Golden. Usually, we’re out cold after the first couple of tracks, although some nights we hear the whole thing, and, sometimes, if we wake up during the night, we listen to it again. That might not seem like much of a recommendation, even for weird German electronica (albeit with cellos, banjos, woodwinds, and who knows what else). But Neon Golden is a masterpiece, beautiful and complex. And so soothing.
Mikael Kennedy, Mandy Glover Lamb, 2007
Mikael Kennedy’s portraits would be striking in any medium, but as faded and distressed Polaroids they have an emotional (and visual) subtlety that is unusual. There’s something ineffable about that combination of cyan and yellowish brown; it’s the literal embodiment of chemical confusion.
Katy Grannan, Nicole, Potrero Hill, 2006
Katy Grannan’s most evident talent is for inspiring trust in people already eager to shed not only their clothes but whatever vestiges of dignity might remain to them. The resulting photographs have not been very good. Her latest effort is The Westerns. In it, she gives us pictures of Gail and Dale, transsexual best friends, Nicole, a woman struggling with unspecified demons, and a couple of guys, equally troubled, whom she apparently stumbled across on the beach.
Why The Westerns? Grannan, we are told, considers her subjects to be “new pioneers” struggling “to define themselves under the scrutiny of relentless sunlight” in San Francisco, “a mythical destination and a real end-point where sunshine illuminates both the abject and the joyful.” What crap. “Abject” may be apt, but the sunlight in San Francisco is never relentless, and there is no joy in any of these pictures.
Diane Arbus, Mexican Dwarf in His Hotel Room, 1970
Instead, there is only Grannan’s exploitation of her subjects’ confusion and unhappiness. The extent of that exploitation is best illustrated by reference to another woman who photographed outsiders and was accused, in her day, of exploiting them. In fact, Diane Arbus’s freaks are paragons of dignity in comparison. Some of them are even joyful. That’s because Arbus knew all along that she was one of them. Grannan is just a tourist.
Katy Grannan, Gail, Point Lobos, 2006
Thus, the illuminating comparison is not with Arbus, but with the painter Andrew Wyeth, whose sticky taste for bathos is echoed even in that peculiar and creepy pose that Grannan’s subjects so often assume. As far as I’m concerned, one Christina’s World is enough. More than enough, really.
Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World, 1948
(At Fraenkel, until Saturday; also at Greenberg Van Doren and Salon 94.)
