Bill Cunningham New York

After moving to New York City in 1981, one of the first people I began to recognize with frequency was a slim man on a bicycle, with a camera who would seem to be just about anywhere at any given time, transversing downtown, Midtown, the Upper East Side, etc.

I don't know when I became aware that this fellow, looking boyish and agile, with fine bones & smooth hair, was Bill Cunningham; nor do I remember when I became aware of his photo spreads in the New York Times. In those lean pre-internet days, the hefty Sunday edition would be a weekly weekend ritual: going out to get the paper to go with my morning coffee;  and when I lived in the Lower East Side, picking up a bagel with cream cheese at a place nearby on Essex Street, to eat while looking through it. Bill Cunningham's spreads would be about fashion trends, although identifying them strictly as fashion does not really describe them at all: there's an anthropological delight at work in finding commonalities in the chaos of urban crowds, making structural comparisons. In the numbing din of an urban setting there is great attention and focus, and a sense of life in movement.

Cunningham worked elsewhere too: in the Annie Flanders iteration of Details, for Women's Wear Daily - all of that was off my radar, although I did look at Details in those days, which was like a report from the then edgy East Village.

The photographs themselves are deceivingly artless: done with a telephoto lens, or cropped to emphasize a particular item, there's no apparent photographer directing the images. These are not quite surveillance photographs, what we see are an archive of fragments of life passing on the streets, from an ambiguously neutral position, fashion-reportage from the "field." There is a sense of the street as a living theater of display.

This idea of the street as shared theater came out of the industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century, in the revocation of sumptuary laws, and the blurring of social positions in the upheavals of modernity.  The invention of photography offered a scientific mirror of resemblances which could also, in apparent paradox, conceal meaning too. In the Poe story The Man of the Crowd,  the narrator, seeing a stranger, shadowing the stranger as if to unpack his secret (what secret?), leads to no conclusions except exhaustion and an uneasy truce with un-knowing.

Bill Cunningham's photos could be seen as our equivalent of Baudelaire's distinctions about the temporal beauty that comprises the work of Constantin Guys: a delight in the moment which has no shelf life in itself, transposed into the frieze of modern life. In the case of Cunningham and the New York Times, in the modernist layouts of the newspaper, this also touches on scrapbooking, motion studies, and collage.

The idea of being in public also seems in eclipse in the world we live in. Is Bill Cunningham a valiant knight of modernity in this sense? Holding up a collage of dandyism that is for both ourselves and others? Do people feel like they are even outside anymore or is the street simply a movement from one inside to another?

The Richard Press film Bill Cunningham New York is an amazing window into the milieu of Bill Cunningham, his daily work, and the range of his world, from photo lab to diner to New York Times to  rarified social orbits to his studio in Carnegie Hall.

In his ubiquity on the streets, on his bicycle, looking refined yet never imposing, Bill Cunningham is able to render himself more or less invisible. This lack of aggression is the opposite of classic street photography, in which there is a downright macho approach to the idea of being outside, among others, with an individual, alienated, abstracted camera frame at the foreground. Bill Cunningham comes off as a Fred Astaire figure - graceful, charming, humorous, attentive. The gestures and postures of those photographed are rendered with as close a photographic objectivity as possible. What keeps this from being machine-like is Cunningham's sensitivity to fashion, to display, and attraction.

The film is also a great document of the kinds of lives which could be lived in New York City that are now becoming obsolete in the harsh economic shifts of our present day, whether as an artist or "jobber" in the Fashion District. Seeing the studios of both Cunningham and Editta Sherman in Carnegie Hall should remind everyone that we are living in a shrinking, regulated world of less in our daily lives. Cunningham exemplifies thrift in some respects - the uniform-like nature of his clothes, his basic cot surrounded by file cabinets and books, his diner and take-out meals - he also has a measure of freedom which he attributes to living without money, which in so many ways seems impossible now except in terms of being homeless.

In the tapestry of dandyism, high society, and journalism detailed in the film, at the onset Cunningham mentions the work of Japanese designers in the 1980s, in particular Rei Kawakubo, looking at the homeless as inspiration for her work. This is also mentioned in one of the essays in John Waters' Role Models. Cunningham's mention is a weird flash, as it were, in what seems a fairly stable social fabric, even if Cunningham's eviction from Carnegie Hall is part of the narrative, which when mentioned in the film Cunningham responds with stoic indifference. Cunningham is a figure of constant paradox: a shy person who lives entirely in public events; a very sharp observant person who has little to say for himself. The difference may be partially generational, but I think we also live in a culture wherein disclosure of the self can lead to as much as "smokescreen" of concealment as saying little or nothing. The words we use enclose a subject rather than liberate it.

Beyond the interest in Cunningham that drives the film, I want to point out some of the virtues of the film itself, primarily its simplicity and its discretion.

 Near the end Cunningham is asked if he ever had a love in his life. "Do you mean 'Am I gay?'" Cunningham asks back, to which he adds that that is what his family feared - beyond that Cunningham didn't answer the question. I feared the film would lapse into a sort of emotional breakdown, a la the end of Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason or any Barbara Walters interview, but it veers away from any resolution beyond that awkward moment. What we see as we saw throughout the film is the oblique independence Cunningham and his devotion to his work. That gives a moral lesson beyond our contemporary world of stage-crafted personalities. The film ends with a birthday party at the New York Times with the crew singing a parody of the song "Kids" from Bye-Bye Birdie, transposed to "Bill" which includes the refrain "and you always get your way!" Enough said there.

Edward Hopper

Although it was never a complete thought per se, while visiting the exhibition of Edward Hopper drawings at the Walker Art Center, that I have lived with a misapprehension that Hopper was a fellow Midwesterner. That is, I knew enough of his biography, that he was from Nyack, & that he lived on Washington Square North in Greenwich Village most of his life, yet somehow, internally I shifted him much further inland.

The palpable isolation depicted in his paintings can seem more Midwestern, where even in cities it seems rare to see others. In Hopper's paintings the few figures depicted are puppet-like, with faces like masks and bodies more akin to plastic figurines than to individuated rendering.

Hopper's scenes also waver between a plein-air rendering and images that are an amalgam of traits: the late-night diner in Nighthawks is a hybrid of places in the West Village, on Greenwich St, and the sharp north corner of the Flatiron building (now a T-Mobile store if I am remembering this correctly). While the view from the platform of the Williamsburg Bridge, at Clinton St on Delancey, is extant although the bridge platform is now rebuilt - it was still "as is" & recognizable from when I lived in the Lower East Side.

If I thought of Hopper as a Midwesterner I somehow dragged him along with me in my own youth in the Lower East Side & downtown Manhattan, & the view from the Williamsburg bridge, or the sharp light on the Doric columns of an apartment building off of Washington Square now embody my memories much more fully than any other revisitation. There's an awkward weightiness to Hopper's paintings, an inability to lapse into any sort of spatial abstraction, which brings up another displacement: how much like photographs they are. What kind of painter is Hopper? If he is a regionalist that region has been pared down to some attenuated architectural fragments; other than some vague intimations of office work, or clerks in hotels, nothing much is going on, maybe there's travel somewhere, by train or car, but what destination? Any location seems incidental. If Hopper as a painter is tied to realism, it is a realism that is stripped of signage or language, or any sense that language could potentially direct; it collapses into mute forms. There are early drawings done in Paris in the exhibition by Hopper that are pure caricature, after which all recognizable types flatten into toy figures in which the thingness of things in the scenes becomes the subject instead.

The exhibition at the Walker affected me much more than I anticipated. At the risk of reducing it all to my own neurotic tics, Hopper was a kind of ghost for me, who I had brought along with me all this while, from Michigan to New York City, & then seeing it mapped out in Minneapolis - indeed I put myself in walking distance from Hopper's studio, without knowing it, in my own youthful randomness. The view from the bridge, which I know from the painting at the Met, which is in the show too, the views around Washington Square & Greenwich Avenue - it all comes back, in a different form. It made me miss New York City so much.

This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s

note: photographs by Peter Hujar (1934 - 1987)

In February 1981 I moved to New York City from the metropolitan Detroit area. I was 21 years old. Also, I did not drive.

Years after the fact when I consider what might have been if I had stayed in Detroit I assume it would have been the same boredom I now recollect dimly, the same lack of stimulation - no art, no books, no film. Of course there was some, but on a limited scale & for one with no automobility, it could be inaccessible. & considering all the "dumb jobs" one could get in NYC, there was no comparable economy in the shrinking Midwest. I worked at one point at a used bookstore in Royal Oak on Woodward Ave near 13 1/2 Mile - the shop manager at one point told me (this may have been when she laid me off), "Go to New York - there's nothing here for you - you don't belong here." New York was considered highly dangerous for the most part, but open in ways that one wouldn't find in the duller & homogenous Midwest.

"Not belonging here" was also partial code for being gay - something I would understand with more depth, later. While there are environments much worse than Detroit for being gay, my own yearnings informed a sense that it could be better, somewhere else probably, probably meaning NYC. & it retrospect, it was.

By the time I arrived in NYC there was already a sense that whatever it was had ended already. The tawdry excesses of the 1970s were on the wane. For those who follow real estate in NYC, one of the curious unintentional documents of the 1970s is in the movie Saturday Night Fever, in particular the character Stephanie Mangano who becomes John Travolta's dance partner - she breaks out of the stasis of their Staten Island neighborhood to make a psychic leap to a grim studio apartment in the Upper West Side. Years afterwards when I hear people complain about "the people who've occupied rent controlled apartments FOREVER" as if this is the cause for the absurd rents in NYC, her unhappy, restless, alienated character comes to mind.

Although it was only a few years later when I got to NYC, such mobility was on the wane, although as was said to me by the Michiganders I knew who preceded me to NYC at Columbia, Barnard & NYU, "you can still find someplace."

The liberatory chaos of Delirious New York manifested itself in many ways. By 1982 I lived in a shared apt on Stanton Street off of Essex, paying $200/month, & I worked part-time (which could often be overtime - it varied) at the Bleecker St Cinema. There was still a sense of NYC in general as dangerous, & within that a sense of "downtown" - of those who live either entirely below 14th St, or entirely above it. These boundaries now seem absurd - the 10013 zip code in Tribeca is now wealthier than 10021 (the former BUtterfield 8). But my youthful blitheness factored in, let's say downtown was still poorer, economically mixed, & bohemian.

By the time I began living and working downtown there had been sea-changes in the real estate potentials of SoHo, which had become a prosperous & centralized gallery district for contemporary art. Whether working at the Bleecker, which was 1 block north of Houston, or later, beginning in 1984, when I began to work at Film Forum, at that point on Watts St at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, on the southwestern edge of SoHo, I spent the shank of my youth in the area, & its expanding galleries of the globalizing Art World. With its "success" the galleries moved elsewhere, replaced by high end boutiques, but that came later. In the 1980s there was still a texture of differences in the area. The cafeteria Food was still open (although now when I see the Gordon Matta-Clark film of it, I realize I was never there in that earlier incarnation), there were still some small storefront businesses, and the old Italian neighborhood on Sullivan & Thompson Streets, with the local tavern Milady's. Unlike Midtown or the Financial District (which had NO residents at the time - quite a place to bicycle in the dead of night), the buildings were not too high & there was more sunlight. There were streets of heavy traffic as well as smaller residential blocks. West Broadway had already transformed significantly from what is seen in the introductory NYC scenes of the film The American Friend, which came out in 1977.

One of my memories, which seems more like fiction or fantasy, occurred in my first week in NYC, when one of my Ann Arbor friends, D, took me to a SoHo loft where we had coffee with Hannah Wilke, who I did not know of at all until several years ago - all I recall is her chewing gum art. How goofy, but one of the charms of being young & witless in such a setting is that such things can occur randomly.

Another more professional encounter was at the Bleecker St Cinema, where among other tasks, I did 16mm projection (non-union) in a small space there called the James Agee Room. One afternoon it was leased out to Louise Lawler, who did a NYC version of "A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture" - I projected (without the picture) the Paul Newman movie The Hustler, which is 134 minutes - something a projectionist would notice first & foremost. Again - I barely knew this from nothing.

Without any specific personal agency, the galleries were part of my everyday, which now seems incredible. Working at the Bleecker & then Film Forum & the short-lived VanDam (run by a short-lived distribution company which I suspect was a money laundering outfit) & Anthology Film Archives, when it reopened on 2nd Avenue in 1988, I took it for granted, & it was the only time in my working life when lunchtime was genuinely interesting.

In the past 2 years, working with undergrads I've found the students are more informed with our hyper media saturated environment than us oldsters - or they think they are informed, & they think that it is theirs somehow. From my middle-aged perspective it seems entirely false & misleading, but I realize that I need to go against the same youthful impulses in myself, now a fading memory, in order to contend with the ideas brought up in the exhibit This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, curated by Helen Molesworth, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

The catalog for the exhibit documents cultural upheavals in the US (primarily), using a time frame of 1979- 1992, and as conceptual markers, the impact of feminism in art practices followed by the impact of AIDS. The essays by the curator Helen Molesworth and Frazer Ward, Kobena Mercer, Johanna Burton, Elisabeth Lebovici, Bill Horrigan, and Sarah Schulman present multiple perspectives of the time, in themes titled The End is Near, Democracy, Gender Trouble, Desire & Longing. This is an extremely rich book about art & the time.

As much as coming from the misery of Detroit to the horny energy of NYC was a boon, the 1980s was a remarkably alienating time in terms of culture. I was in Ann Arbor when Ronald Reagan was elected: the University of Michigan radio station played Leslie Gore's It's My Party on a loop for 24 hours. That is, it wasn't a party to be happy about any more.

Kobena Mercer writes:

The idea of a public space that is independent of commercial interests and separate from the state is one of the elementary building blocks of modernity. It is a concept that helped overthrow the absolutist monarchies of seventeenth-century Europe, and it was a precondition of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century. To say that the critical art of the 1980s lays bare the restructuring of public and private boundaries that took place in late-twentieth-century life is to suggest that it is only now, with some thirty years' distance, that some of the era's aesthetic tendencies begin to reveal their far-reaching political significance.
. . . In the late 1970s conservative forces took command of "the new" by winning popular consent for their vision of a future that would consign the welfare state to history. Back when the New Right really was new it took a leading or hegemonic role in the imaginative drive to push back the frontiers of perception by positioning itself as the agent of modernization capable of redressing the ongoing crises of industrial capitalism. Neoconservativism thus heralded a future based on consumerism, new technologies, finance capital, and a service economy - all of which were to be delivered by the privatization of almost everything, from housing to education to health, that defined "the public good" under the terms of the post 1945 consensus . . .it was precisely the generative agency of the intersecting forces clustered around the shifting borders of public and private life that gave rise to multiple lines of dissensus in 1980s art. . . 1980s art reveals the catalyzing antagonisms put into by by an emergent conception of multiple publics . . . (p. 135)

Mass media, as a condition of daily life, informs the art in question, which is seen as a break with an earlier heroic High Modernism which exempted itself from politics, whether it be the perceived in activism or in daily life. Helen Molesworth posits that this was the first generation of artists to grow up with television - itself highly mutable & expansive from the 1950s through the 1980s. The deregulation & privatization of Cable TV is brought up, & there is particularly ripe mention by Dara Birnbaum, quoting Manfredo Tafuri that "television was the real architecture of the time." (p. 156).

This Will Have Been reinvests the art from the period outside its mercantile potential (or mercantile splendor - this is not a "best of" sort of collection) with an agency that addresses the Reaganite/Thatcherite retro-spasms of change that occurred in this period.

The last 2 essays, by Bill Horrigan (A Backward Glance: Video in the 1980s), & Sarah Schulman (Making Love Making Art: Living and Dying Performance in the 1980s), touch on that of which I know next to nothing - that is, the history of video; & one that which touches on something that I experienced as well - the highly mutable performance scene in the East Village, once upon a time. After reading the catalog I read Sarah Schulman's book The Gentrification of the Mind - in it she makes a comment that doing "performance" for a young artist is now synonymous with "private income" - whereas the performance she relates in the MCA catalog predates such a denotation. It's a lost world of "Whispers" on Sunday evenings at the Pyramid Club, or Jennifer Miller the Bearded Lady, all highly extraordinary & accessible in an everyday world.

The Schulman essay is up front about varying incomes, capricious real estate, & porous emotional and sexual liaisons: She also suggests some of the joy of being young & relatively carefree, in a partially collapsed city. As an addendum, I would also recommend another project Sarah & Jim Hubbard put together, the ACT UP Oral History Project.

I found the 1980s to be an intensely alienating time. Competitive class differences became marks of distinction, from the top down. Any wayward bohemian dalliance with art was superseded by a hierarchy of professionalized practitioners. With the spread of HIV and AIDS a Foucauldian paranoia of a harsh indifferent Administration (that is, multiple administrations of power) became very real and did its best to remain immovable except under the duress of insistent, dedicated activists. In terms of real estate speculation, the city became a violent machine of gentrification which has driven so many out with a hostile economic logic, for greener but not necessarily better pastures. In the abstract I tend to think of it as a kind of Hell - there is a recoupment in all these sources which gives me a plateau to think otherwise.

Leon Levinstein at the Metropolitan Museum

A gift of a large collection of prints by Leon Levinstein is the basis for a very intriguing summer show in the Howard Gilman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum. Levinstein's images appear in anthologies about Coney Island, or vintage (post WWII) street photography in New York, but never in a way that foregrounds his work. One image in particular, a very modernist composition of the back of handball players in the Lower East Side, which has an almost Bauhaus formality to it seems to be the most reproduced, but it gives little indication of the salty character studies which distinguish his images, primarily. The modernist compositions can seem related to the lightning-reflexes of someone like Henri Cartier-Bresson, also the sense of the image passing into a scarily iconic passage which can also border on morbid caricature. & yet unlike Cartier-Bresson in which the remarkable composition seemingly unearthed by the camera has a redemptive, essentialist "Family of Man" aspect - the same skill set in Levinstein's hands reveals a much more misanthropic & isolated social perspective.

Levinstein is much closer to the likes of the Poe story The Man of the Street: looking at others in puzzlement which leads to a journey which reveals nothing, ultimately. A wild goose chase into unknowing. This kind of forlorn &, in 20th century terms, existential confrontation with other-ness is perhaps the ultimate theme of most post WWII street photography. The chaos of the streets, the lack of solution, as it were, for what seems random, endless & jarring, is both the horror & appeal of such work. The closest equivalent I can think of is the work of William Klein, but even Klein has an ecstatic aspect in his expressive printing methods & his dynamic book designs, whereas Leon Levinstein presents a portfolio which reverberates with loneliness & despair, with little redemption beyond that. Perhaps a torso or butt which may excite some erotic intrigue, somewhat. The most appealing (if one needs the images to be appealing) aspects border on figures which may or not be of a somewhat outlaw nature. Levinstein worked from the 1950s through the 1970s & one can see social aspects which are almost nonexistent in pre-1968 street photography: hippies, bag ladies (one of the sickest moments in 1970s pop culture were the cretins who made postcards of NYC bag ladies as comical gross figures), inter-racial relations which would have had a different emphasis before the civil rights movement, figures outside any normative formations - no one in his images is ordinary looking yet all seem utterly an everyman or everywoman.

One can see a pre-gentrified New York City in Levinstein's images which now can read as much nostalgic as they could be conceived of as harsh. Glimpses of this can be seen in films such as The Panic in Needle Park (which was at 72nd & Broadway!) & Serpico. This "olde" New York is always in black-&-white. It reached its apogee in William Klein, Diane Arbus, Sid Grossman, Weegee, Peter Sekaer, Rudy Burckhardt, Helen Levitt, Walker Evans, That's such a small list - there have been recent historical shows such as "The Women of the Photo League" exhibit put together by Kim Bouros at Higher Pictures last year which reveal much wider practices at hand, & a future task for the photo historian.

Housed at the Alice Austen House

The Alice Austen House in Staten Island is the former home of the Victorian photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952), which had belonged to her family & which bears the name Clear Comfort. The house was built initially in the 17th century but was updated through the mid-19th century. It is a "gothic cottage" on a lawn sloping down to New York Bay, just north of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which links Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with Staten Island.

The Austen house is absurdly pastoral & quaint in a city not usually known for such aspects. I walked from the ferry terminal in St. George, which took about an hour, & passed through different communities as well as strip malls, industrial areas & areas of such oblique nature I was reminded of the Rem Koolhaas essay "Junkspace."

At the end of long lonely industrial street I walked there was a short fence & sloping lawns & trees & in the midst there sits the white clapboard house, smaller than I expected. The ceilings are low, & the rooms are kept as a museum of Alice Austen's everyday, although Austen in her lifetime lost her family money in the 1929 stock market crash & died in 1952 in a poor house, called the Staten Island Farm Colony. Austen lived with her companion Gertrude Tate (1871-1962) in the house from 1917 until they were forced to move.

The discreet tact of the term "companionship" between Austen & Tate, the impossibility of knowing its exact nature, yet seeming quite clear as a loving relationship (unconsummated old maids? or a Boston Marriage?) informs a very sweet small show of photographs in the house for the summer, entitled Housed, curated by Joseph Maida & Katie Murray. The two key images in the show are a modern print of an Austen image of 2 girls in masks, lighting a cigarette together, dressed in underwear, which is next to a contemporary image by Catherine Opie of a drawing of a house with 2 stick figure women outside it, cut into her back.

There are thousands of negatives extant from the Austen estate. Many of the images are reportage of Staten Island & New York City. Austen also photographed private events. The images are a curious window into times past & unknown social circles. The images are remarkably candid. I find the party images the most interesting as they show a great deal of spontaneity & also a very direct engagement w/ the camera as a thing, as part of a social practice. Most fascinating of all are her staged images, which the masked girls could be considered part of, as well as a series of Austen & her girl friends dressed as men & posing as such. These are remarkably earthy & casual & seem much more modern than studio portraiture or art photography of that time.

The very subtle exhibit, Housed, touches on the idea of the "home" as a kind of private theater of shifting identities & perimeters. In addition to the Austen & Opie images, the other resonant image for me in construing a theme for the show is one of Peter Garfield's images of a destroyed house flying in the air (falling, I am assuming, like the house in The Wizard of Oz - or in the context of the show, a conventional house rent from its foundation, spinning in the ether). Or perhaps it is Peter Stanglmayr's fashion photo of a "girlie-boy" - a very pretty androgynous boy posing for a knitwear company's catalog. These images all show both a sense of an imposed social order & its transformation, for whatever needs that may arise (& these can remain oblique even if they seem very apparent). This is an invigorating show in a truly wonderful setting. All of us at the opening, sitting on the porch w/ a cooler of chilled rose (thanks to Peter Stanglmayr), with people playing badminton & croquet on the lawns, while ships passed in & out of the bay, below - we all commented that we wanted to live there. The Austen house is truly cozy. I found the house such a generous site & so lovely. It's something to think about. A refuge in the general storm of life.

The simultaneous visibility & invisibility of the Austen/Tate household reminded me of other such examples in the realm of photography. There are remarkable images of the actress Charlotte Cushman by Matthew Brady and Southworth & Hawes which are of remarkable gravity & presence, as strong as any of the other "great Americans" photographed by either firm. What is also apparent is Cushman's self-possession & lack of "feminine" mask. & in the 20th century, while working as a portrait photographer in Paris, Berenice Abbott photographed a remarkable array of "Sapphic" characters from the upper classes & artistic spheres. Abbott herself would not associate herself with lesbian feminist groups in the 1970s when approached for support (& also a sense of historical continuity) - despite her long-term household with the photo historian Elizabeth McCausland. I have heard the same of Djuna Barnes, who is the same generation as Abbott, & also a subject of remarkable photographs by Abbott taken in Paris in the 1920s. & the writer I knew in the 1980s, Marguerite Young, by then elderly & outspoken, would nevertheless deliberately obscure her sexual orientation & in fact criticize others (I recall a conversation in which Iris Murdoch was referred to as a bull-dyke, in an emphatically pejorative moment, & she would use the term fairies to describe some men, while always surrounded by a coterie of gay friends).

My former student L., who defines herself emphatically as a "butch dyke," would say "My kind are invisible, but it's not like we're not there." While not quite a contradiction of the inequalities & prejudices of the world we live in, the Alice Austen Houses of the world show us a much more diverse planet, nevertheless.

flower power

(in memory of Susan Kleckner, July 5 1941 - July 7 2010)

One evening in the mid to late 1980s (I cannot date it any more precisely than 1986-1989) with my friend L., we went out with her childhood friend, Andy Sherwood, visiting town. L. & Andy had gone to the Grace Church School & the Friends Seminary on E. 17th St. They grew up in lower Manhattan in the late 1950s, early 1960s, which from their descriptions sounded like an entirely different city (L. mentioned running away from home & renting an apartment on Avenue D for $13/month).

Andy had relocated to Paris where he taught harpsichord & he also did some photography. Andy knew my friend C. in Paris. C. left NYC for Nicaragua in 1985, returning to Paris in 1986. Andy detested C. & told me so in emphatic tones, which is how the evening began. "Do you really like this horrible person?!"

Andy took L. & me to a loft on Washington St. in the West Village where a couple, the Harris' lived. They had a theatrical background. On the wall there was a poster for The Angels of Light, which was led by their late son George. The poster for The Angels of Light was from a small theater in Paris, the Theatre Campagne-Premiere, which by coincidence had been owned by my friend C.'s father, Andre. George & Ann Harris mentioned that they were owed money by the proprietor of the theater, which, after the circumstances of my earlier conversation regarding C., I did not mention this further connection to them.

Also framed on the wall was a photo of a boy inserting a carnation into the barrel of a rifle held by a National Guardsman. The boy in the photo was the Harris' son George in 1967, outside the Pentagon at an anti-war rally, before George relocated to San Francisco & incarnated himself as the performer Hibiscus.

My memory is rough about this, but I think George may have modeled at some point. There were numerous photos by L.'s friend Andy of young George in the house.

I hadn't thought of the "flower power" photo in quite a while, but it came to mind reading the blog Amber Waves of Brain.

& then, today, 2 days later, Phyllis Levine, "Communications Director" at ICP, where I work, brought in a luscious print of the Pentagon photo from her archive (the photographer's name is Bernie Boston) for possible identification as no one in Exhibitions knew it. The image is not obscure by any means - it was a nominee for a Pulitzer Prize after it was published in a newspaper (the Washington Star), but it brings to mind others, such as a similar image by Marc Riboud.

While I do not have a belief in a greater significance to coincidence or of a secret cosmic order, these immediate serendipities were still somewhat reassuring: I can appreciate an apparent trace of order in what usually seems random & disconnected. It brought back lives I & others have lived, lost worlds & fragile connections.

& it brings to mind the weird potency of photography, how it embodies both the known & the unknown it its stimuli; it shows us something we didn't see & will never be able to see directly, except as a photograph, &  that experience can permeate our memories, or as Siegfried Kracauer would term it, replace them.

Outside of such harsh reckonings, I can admit a kind of succor in such technological fantasies - found in blogs, websites, magazines, newspapers & paper archives as much as my memories. & while I cannot cite Hibiscus with any authority, what a splendid figure to invoke this week.

My friend S. died this week after 6 years of struggling with cancer. S. was a rebellious character - in the hospital her sister said, "I don't know why she didn't teach fighting - she was certainly good at it - " in consideration of S.' past as filmmaker, photographer, performance artist, writer, teacher, & a non-denominational minister (I'm not quite sure what that means). I think of S. as primarily a teacher & her relentlessness in it - she also taught up until a few weeks ago, getting around with a portable oxygen tank.

S. made the daily papers in 1987 when she climbed the Berlin Wall & took photographs from that vantage point, getting arrested by the Germans. The Berlin Wall itself was not that large physically - what was massive about it was the constant policing it required.

I first saw S. in the mid 1980s when I worked at Film Forum when it was on Watts St. & S. spent a year living in the window at Sohozat which was 2 blocks away on West Broadway, just above Canal. I didn't know her then - we met years later. I recall joking to another friend, in crisis about looking for a place to live, that maybe when the window at Sohozat was unoccupied . . . I never saw any of the films S. made with Kate Millett. There were rumors as to what those included (nudity, sex). S. did a partial reenactment of the Sohozat window in the window of New Museum, as part of the Martha Rosler retrospective held there & at ICP - in this case it became a home office.

In the hospital the other day, while S. lay in a coma, a minister from the hospital came into the room for last rites. The minister was shooed away like a nasty pest; instead a friend of S. enacted a ritual w/ healing waters, which we all passed to one another in a circle, making faint streaks on the palms of each other's hands, while someone else read from a book of anti-war poetry from Vietnam from the 1960s.  The ejection of the hospital minister had a comic aspect otherwise absent in the room as we all sat with S. as she expired. The healing waters & anti-war poetry were also hard to take. It made me aware that even in a group I would be mourning alone.

Climbing the Berlin Wall with a camera does not seem dissimilar to the carnation stuffed in a rifle. How lucky we are to have photos of such acts & to have had any encounter w/ those who would do such things.

Anthony Hamboussi, Newtown Creek - A Photographic Survey of New York's Industrial Waterway

Newtown Creek: A Photographic Survey of New York?s Industrial Waterwayby Anthony Hamboussi is a journey around the perimeters of the Newtown Creek in New York City, an industrial canal which separates north Brooklyn from the western perimeters of Queens, flowing westward towards the East River. It is a self-propelled project, which began with Hamboussi's knowledge of the area, beginning in a childhood in nearby Maspeth, Queens. A seemingly casual project became an obsessive chronicle of several years. The images are presented chronologically which suits the essentially private nature of the enterprise, that of Hamboussi's journey into a polluted heart of darkness within New York City limits. Thoroughly researched & plotted, Hamboussi's itinerary also incorporated intuitive aspects, which can be seen in the fitful un-mappings of the area, giving it more the fitful mutability of dreams, in its starts & stops & divergences, while it inventories a large area of mixed industries.

I have been struck by how many New Yorkers do not know where the Newtown Creek is, although it is a ubiquity to those living in Greenpoint, Bushwick, Long Island City, Maspeth. The community with the most unlikely name in such a gray mess is Blissville, which straddles a cemetery & a Best Western Motel, on the Queens side. The creek stinks. It is poisonous. Its most notable landmark is the sewage treatment plant through which flows 3/4 of New York City's waste (& which now features a remarkably innovative park within its facilities). Good friend of mine once lived in Greenpoint, at the end of Manhattan Ave., on the other side of the Pulaski Bridge from the sewage treatment plant, which when the wind blew in a certain manner, mixing with the scents of a nearby scented candle factory, the area would be imbued with odors of intense sweetness & shit, even for those with a high gag threshold. There are now 2 centuries of industry layering its shores, & within it the boundaries have blurred between public & private, as streets mysteriously disappear into the gated confines of corporations, as maps mutate with no reason other than as the residue of decades of corporate aggression homesteading on these filthy borders. Seemingly deserted, it is actually active & dynamic as an economic nerve, sinking below the horizon of freeways, warehouses & factories.

Perhaps the most acute irony I could discover about the area is that in the 18th century, before its industrialization, the Newtown Creek gave its name to the first cultivated apple in the US: the Newtown Pippin. Grassy meadows sloping down to sweet waters, a peaceable kingdom of fish & fowl, a New World . . .

At this point we can only take someone's else's word on this. Hamboussi's photos show a diverse area of industry & infrastructure. While the frontage on the East River is now being developed as a corridor of high-rise apartments, the filthy core of the creek is still a crazy-quilt cross-section of industries & abject histories.

What will happen to the parking lot for the Fink Means Good Bread trucks? What pollutants were left behind by Phelps Dodge, before its site was taken over for the Fresh Direct warehouse? How can National Grid justify legally its prohibition of photography at its perimeter, outside its fenced borders?

Hamboussi looks at the Creek with the eyes of both an insider & an outsider. Given the lugubrious tally of industry & its aftermath at hand, Hamboussi's photography has a contrasting lightness of touch. While I know the work he has put into it, the images flow with their attention to detail, to the ability of Hamboussi to guide us through a landscape which would be so easy to ignore in its harshness, yet which reveals so much about the world we live in.

Alice O'Malley, Community of Elsewheres

Alice O'Malley lectured at ICP last week, showing work she has done since around 1990, which seems not so long ago, albeit it's almost 20 years. Alice's early work is from the Clit Club & other nightclub venues downtown, but her main body of work is a series of black-&-white portraits, a tiny portion of which have been published in the book Community of Elsewheres.

The portraits are done simply - frontal, centered, collaborative with the subjects. Many of the subjects are performers and artists & as such have some public existence, such as Antony of Antony & the Johnsons, or Kembra Pfaler. However what I find of interest is the great attention & regard O'Malley brings to her subjects. I am not convinced one has to know anything about the sitters to find them thoroughly alluring. The photos are dandyish & witty. The photos are an excellent guide to the low-rent talents of downtown NYC & all that has been great about living in NY, even as it seems a kind of diminishing world, at the mercy of landlords & mortality. O'Malley uses the camera as a kind of memory guide, citing, among others, the photographs of Peter Hujar & the paintings of Romaine Brooks.

Some artists need never cite any other artists in their presentations; I am struck by O'Malley's citations (also she mentions Cecil Beaton & the salons of Natalie Barney) as indicative of her seriousness, as well as her consciousness in making a kind of history, which would potentially be ignored otherwise, which is queer & lush & fabulous.

O'Malley cites Peter Hujar as an influence. I would also include another photographic portraitist, David Armstrong, who likewise makes seductive, compelling images. The portrait, as a form, flirts with utility & function: it has a job to do. It needs to be recognizable as a portrait to be understood. & it revels in its illusionism: we have to believe it for it to exist. I think of Hujar, Armstrong, & O'Malley as being almost like Victorians, in their dedication to portraiture. While each has been depicting their immediate social orbit, a bigger picture emerges in this endeavor & how fortunate we are to get a glimpse of it.

Another aspect which comes to mind is that in these portfolios there is also a sense of loss - from AIDS, drugs, the vagaries of time. We can see how much preciousness has slipped through our fingers, as it were, leaving us with these shadows of what had once been.

Peter Hujar - Photographs 1956-1958

The current show of Peter Hujar's early photographs, dated 1956-1958, at Matthew Marks Gallery, convinces me (not that I really needed to be convinced) that Peter Hujar is one of truly great photographers of our time. "Our time" may be a bit porous - these images are now over 50 years old, & Hujar died in 1987, but perhaps his "time" is now & in the future. My suspicion is that there is much work that has never been seen, like the images in the show, which I do not think have had much circulation.

The photographs are of what are now referred to as "developmentally challenged" children. One of my students, who accompanied me to the show, asked, "Are these special needs students?" These terms are bureaucratic & with all good intentions, more inhuman than any pejorative term in their sentimental but airtight classification. It's language which acts as a placebo for the speaker, absolving the speaker of having to say much else. The Hujar images predate a very well-known body of work by Diane Arbus of the same subject, by about 10 years & have some structural similarities (square format, black-&-white). The Arbus images are rightly famous for their moodiness, their sense of isolation & incarceration. Peter Hujar's images have a very different emotional tenor in what could be seen as ebullience, anarchy & a very deep sweetness. Both bodies of work were done in institutions - institutions for those who would be classified (using the volume titles employed by August Sander for his planned books of portraits) as among "The Last People." Such institutions also function as as a kind of container for society, hiding away its defective members. The intrusion of a photographer in such a setting has many possibilities, such as a journalistic narrative of whatever stripe. What distinguishes both the Arbus & Hujar portfolios is their media-uselessness. Why? What for? The photographer in her/his naked voyeurism shows a curiosity & suspension of judgment which allows for multiple readings of the subjects & their images. We can't look at the photos & know automatically what to think.

Peter Hujar's photographs resonate with me so strongly. Everyone I know thinks he's great, so I feel a bit presumptuous saying this, but he appears neglected in histories & anthologies. His photographs of animals are as strong as his portraits. His photographs of nighttime streets are as erotic as his nudes. Hujar's work is permeated with mortality: I hesitate to describe his work as morbid, despite the many photographs of dead animals, or the photographs of the catacombs in Palermo, or a portfolio I saw once of the tableaux of the long-gone Wax Musee at Coney Island, which was primarily of serial killers in action (I remember Richard Speck strangling a nurse, in particular). Or the portrait of Candy Darling in her hospital bed. Or the portrait of Edwin Denby just before Denby died. Nevertheless in such finely wrought forms I think there's a strong sense of corporeality: Flesh has its own life, whether it is a waddling duck or the enormous cock of a nude boy.

Estimations of mortality are written out of a lot of current photographic discourse. The photographic is understood more in semiotic terms, or as a cultural product. Hujar's photographs are more like a 17th century memento mori image: a Dutch bouquet in which in such splendid beauty there is the beetle & the worm, slightly hidden, the slight but advancing wilt, with their intimations of passing.

I try to discern: what are my favorite Hujar images? The list just extends - it is a useless prospect. I hesitate to use the word "classic photography" to describe his work, which evokes more formal black-&-white images of western landscapes or abstractions of natural forms done with The Zone System, yet Hujar is part of such a former photographic world. Hujar's work can be classified in very traditional terms: portraits, nudes, cityviews & landscapes. But the work is intense & immediate which undermines its great formality. Hujar's work is imbued with a remarkable moral sense: the same level of carefulness goes towards both a woman passed out in his stairwell on 2nd Ave, or a portrait of Miss Peggy Lee. I am also reminded of this in his portraits of the elderly Edwin Denby or Lotte Eisner. I have little reference to Hujar's psychology, except in the work, which is perhaps a more ideal way to contemplate anyone's creative endeavors. One hopes that at some point there is a truly great book of this work, in all its scope.

Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West

Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West at the Museum of Modern Art is primarily a showcase for the riches of MoMA's photography collection, from the 19th century to the present, with a few loans from other institutions (the Getty, the Whitney, the Amon Carter). The exhibit mixes historical & contemporary work. Much of the work is familiar: Timothy O'Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, for example. & among more recent & contemporary photographers there is work by Robert Adams & Lewis Baltz - perhaps a bit more dystopic in their vision, but working in black-&-white, in a seeming continuum of practices from mid-century (Adams, Minor White). These are all photographers w/ long associations w/ MoMA. What the exhibit does against the grain of grand old traditions is mix work which is unrelated to these practices, to include work which deals with the West as cultural myth & image, & to include work which is primarily urban & suburban, as opposed to the unmediated serene horizontal landscape associated w/ the photographed West.

Perhaps the idea of the "West" is too vague a concept. Where does it begin? Visitors to the Thomas Jefferson home Monticello in Virginia are told that the view west to the Blue Ridge Mountains represented the West, in the difference between charted & uncharted lands - what can be seen was once a view into absolute wilderness. The Mississippi River is a traditional boundary - what do St. Louis & San Francisco have in common? What do Promontory Point, UT, & Venice, CA, have in common? What does it mean to place the self-conscious work of Cindy Sherman & Richard Prince, which are not geographically specific, in the midst of work wherein the specificity is all-important? One sees the beginnings of an idea but not its culmination. The separate parts do not add up to a whole.

This seems like a very East Coast conceit to me, overall. It is vague platitudes about due west from the Hudson River. The original MoMA stalwarts such as Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Lewis Baltz, look best in a mish-mosh of banalities mixing exploratory wonderment with world-weary consumption. It bears some similarities for the show I saw last year at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Ca, This Side of Paradise, which dealt with images specifically of Los Angeles, mixing commercial work with artistic endeavors - also images which were not dependent on Los Angeles as contributing to their meaning (here thinking of the work of Lyle Ashton Harris & Laura Aguilar). & as opposed to the MoMA show, I thought the Huntington show rather extraordinary. As heterogeneous as "Los Angeles" may be - it is much more specific than "the West." That's all I can think of, comparing the 2 shows. Also, "Los Angeles" as a sequence of images, has little history, compared to "the West" which has an amazing iconography without it being necessarily photographic. It makes me long for what seems missing rather than what is there.

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcardat the Metropolitan Museum explores what has been otherwise a footnote in the surveys of the work of Walker Evans: his postcard collection. & in relation to Evans' own photographic practices.

The premise of the exhibition flirts with kitsch. Evans is the great modernist photographer: as much as one can locate content in his images (the things they are of - Victorian houses, the families in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, detritus of the Great Depression, etc.), the content is subordinate to the framing, the presentation, the bigger project of Evans' work as a whole. From a formalist point of view it all becomes radical composition, a kind of interrupted illustration, illustration aware of itself & pulling back from meaning, from function, but one could also cite it as an archive of relentless curiosity & disengagement. In Evans' work there is no progress, no movement; all is stasis, & without motivation. Avant la lettre, there is an existential repulsion to social engagement or meaning, as well as a relish of the act of doing, nevertheless.

At this point, institutionally, Evans has entered into an unimpeachable canon of Great Artists, which seems to do him disservice, turning him into a patrician expert, when what seems most vital about him could be described as neurotic, alienated, dissatisfied. Compared with other documentary photographers of the 1930s, from the politically motivated work of Ben Shahn to the spectacular magazine work of Margaret Bourke-White, Evans seems unmotivated, depressively aesthetic, unconcerned. & this gives the work a wider valence of sensibilities, a mood as opposed to the thing itself. Evans valiantly defined his work as "documentary style" as opposed to "documentary" which is perhaps a richer statement now, more meaningful, in what I honestly think is the twilight of documentary work as it disappears from mass media & migrates to the realm of museum practices.

There has been a serious amount of writing about Evans: Alan Trachtenberg, Tod Papageorge, John Tagg, are who I think of, but there is much more. Evans' images were appropriated by Sherrie Levine in the early 1980s in one of the great moments of post-modern photography. & there is not just 1 but 2 biographies of him, as well, in a world wherein there are next to no biographies of photographers (I tell my students that's because most photographers had such boring lives, that it's a dull existence & there's not much to say about it), as well as a fairly blunt memoir about Evans' last years before his death. One unspectacular but meaningful book for me has been Walker Evans at Work, which addresses Evans' work practices. There is a racy passage in John Cheever's journals about Evans, which is in dispute (did it really happen?), but indicates, at least, a psychological tension (for both Cheever & Evans) that is more Patricia HIghsmith than Clement Greenberg. How to add such a literature?

The Met, which now possesses the Evans archives, has done a truly meaningful exhibition & book exploring Evans' interest in the common mass-produced picture postcard. Genealogies of Evans' methods have been traced from the Civil War images of Matthew Brady to the extensive archives of Eugene Atget (inartistic images, factual, informational). The Met show shows another genealogy in strictly banal mass-produced imagery. & Evans, with his large collection (1200 or so), seems all the richer for his interplay with such drugstore imagery. Postcard imagery depends on its accessibility, its simplicity, its lack of hierarchy - anything is fit to be a postcard. & it shows the world now, which means postcards become obsolete, they will always need to be updated.

This obsolescence becomes historical artifact in Evans' collection. Say unlike most photojournalism which deals with a "spot news" aspect to history - seeing it as it happens, Evans' work & likewise the voluminous postcard collection, indicate a history only in retrospect. Evans photographed the detritus of happenstance. Postcards are of an unlikely objectivity, things as they are, presented as such, in an utterly dreary, banal way, which as such becomes quite fascinating.

The Met shows some of Evans indexing, his categories - town centers, industry, etc. These are vaguer & more opaque than what can be found at any flea market, but otherwise, just the same.

Painting the Dark Side - Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America

Browsing last weekend at Labyrinth books I found Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Americaby Sarah Burns, on remainder. Purely by chance.

I bring up the chance aspect as it has been such a rich, fascinating read - I am rather sorry to finish the book, albeit the notes can keep me busy for quite a while too & I think it's an excellent reference for the future. With the exception of a Pittsburgh artist, David Gilmour Blythe, I am familiar with the artists discussed: Thomas Cole, Washington Allston, John Quidor, William Rimmer, Elihu Vedder, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

Growing up in proximity to the Detroit Institute of Arts, I recall being baffled by the enormous Allston painting Belshazzar's Feast, which is discussed at length in Burns book. Thereabouts I also developed a taste for American romantic painting. The DIA also has the Allston Flight of Florimell, & some paintings by Rimmer - Civil War Scene & Victory, & extravagantly hermetic works by Vedder & Ryder.

In NYC there is the American Wing at the Met, as well as the New-York Historical Society, which has the cycle of Thomas Cole's Course of Empire. Although the Met wing is now being reconfigured, my favorite gallery previously was the "romantic" room which included work by Rembrandt Peale, Raphaelle Peale, Samuel Morse, George Caleb Bingham, Quidor & Allston.

In the worlds of photography & contemporary art this is almost like having a secret - where would I go w/ such enthusiasms?

Bush discusses the art in the context of race, slavery, Civil War, Edgar Allan Poe, pulp literature, temperance, the women's movement, bohemianism, drug use, industry, madness, medicine, poverty. It is varied & speculative.

Looking at Burn's CV at Indiana University I see she teaches the history of photography - I would be very curious to hear her discuss 19th century photography, as outside of its progressive technological & formal histories, I think there is work and practices which are equally haunted.

Andy Warhol - A Boy For Meg

Now in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, "A Boy for Meg" was on long-term loan to the Detroit Institute of Arts, where I saw it on numerous occasions as a child. It is one of the first paintings I can recall, distinctly, & as such represents a kind of primal memory (as it were) of aesthetic experience in my childhood. I was not directly aware of tabloid newspapers such as the NY Post, which was the template for the painting, I could recall tabloid "style" - my education was primarily cartoons (Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, Rocky & Bullwinkle) & the Warhol in its own way followed such a suit. Easy to recognize, it seems.

My mother read movie star magazines rather obsessively in these days - Photoplay, etc. which she would hide, like pornography, & I as an inquisitive child, found them & read them cover to cover, before returning them to their hiding-place. Ethel Kennedy's affair with Andy Williams (my mother & I would watch his TV Christmas special together every year), Jackie K becoming Jackie O & as such transforming from Great Widow to Great Whore in the scheme of things, Ted Kennedy's "incident" at Chappaquadick (I think we paid attention to the Kennedys because they were Catholic - I went to a Catholic grade school at one point & my 3rd grade teacher told us all that if a Kennedy was elected, this was before the death of RFK, then God would be in the White House, helping out). for example.

Along with Photoplay, etc. my favorite book at that time was Edith Hamilton's Mythology - Timeless Tales of Gods & Heros. Itself a compendium of (truly) immortal gossip. I would attribute any ability on my part to recall intricacies of connections to these 2 random aspects of my childhood culture. Seeing Renaissance & Baroque tapestries for example I could recognize attributes of Gods unseen to my family: Mercury, Apollo, Aphrodite, etc.

The Warhol somehow fit into the pop mass cultural world around me & also remove itself from the "shelf" as it were - I could recognize the same Campbell soup cans, the Brillo boxes, the ads in the back of comic books, etc. to be found in any supermarket. My aunt Lucille, a secretary at GM Overseas, had taken me to the DIA for an exposure to culture, something neither of my parents would have ever attempted - it meant an exposure to that great entity, "the finer things in life" which from her petit bourgeois world meant also that they were the stuff of museums, others, "not for us." This was not dissimilar from the car rides we did on Lakeshore Drive in the Grosse Pointes to look at the mansions of the Fords, etc. Look but don't touch. But like the illicit photos of Jackie O being stalked, the weirdness & splendor of an art museum was another form of forbidden fruit. & although making no claim at all for any deep illuminations in all this media hubbub, I think I did discover & discovering knowingly, looking at the Warhol, a way to mediate the mediation all around us. & it had humor & spirit - a child could understand its mockery, it camp, & its independence.

Andy Warhol - Portraits and Landscapes

There is a Sufi story about a group of blind men feeling an elephant, each at a different part of its body, each trying to describe the totality if the animal, from the point at which they touch it. The story being that none fully describe it. Andy Warhol as an artist seems as perplexing as this hypothetical elephant. What did he do? What did he mean? I can think of few artists who can embody so many contradictory practices and tastes - someone held in esteem both by the editorial board of October, & family members of the deposed Shah of Iran.

Depending on what work is seen, a different Warhol appears. If I were to have seen only the installation at the DIA Foundation in Beacon, for example, with its enormous gallery of abstract shadow paintings (which I found rather uninteresting except in the excesses of the installation), it would be different from the more spectacular gallery in the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin, with its enormous Mao, its even larger camouflage painting, & some of the Disaster silkscreens.

Or I think of one of the first paintings I can recall clearly from my childhood, a painting entitled "A Boy For Meg" - a painting of a NY Post headline about Princess Margaret. It is now in the National Gallery in Washington, but was on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts, when I saw it. An early lesson in camp for me.

Or the films, which are wonderfully terrible as drama (Vinyl, Poor Little Rich Girl), & mesmerizing about the "film" experience.

Or the very ambiguous celebrity portraits. Was Warhol a court portraitist to a global power-elite?

To add to the bewilderingly prismatic Warhol bodies of work is a great catalog of a show at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London of black-&-white photographs which was curated by Steven Bluttal.

"Portraits & Landscapes" is a collection of black-&-white photographs done over an extended period. The title refers to the layout of the images - portrait is vertical, landscape is horizontal. Unlike previous collections of Warhol's photographs which relate to work such as the silkscreens, or were exhibited independently, such as the stitched photographs, the images in the show do not represent any any specific artistic project per se. These are random photographs. The Warhol we see in this is near anonymous - this is the work of an active snapshooter. We look at them because Warhol's name is attached to them. The Warhol we see can baffle us further: a photographer accumulating images, shooting constantly. This is about bulk, much more than a studied delectation. The camera becomes a tool of acquisition.

The design of the book is based on the Ed Ruscha book Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Like the Ruscha it is an accordion book, in a foil-covered slip case. The images are reproduced at the top & bottom of the pages, counting to over 200. It's a genuinely lovely book, well-done. There are other books which parody or emulate Ruscha's self-published books, such as Louisa Van Leer's Fifteen Pornography Companies, which wear a little thin in such recognition. The catalog from Timothy Taylor is both similar & different enough to exist independently as a book, even in the long tall shadow of Ruscha.

Steven Bluttal is also the editor of a book of images of the designer Halston - it is a thick brick of a book of ads, editorial images, & other visual ephemera. Bluttal is bright & sensitive to the fascination of materials which could very easily be overlooked. Given the excesses of what is coming out of the Warhol Museum, one can only hope for more & different work to emerge.

Coleman Dowell photographed by Carl Van Vechten

In school my teacher, Warren Hecht, recommended I read the novels of Coleman Dowell: Island People (American Literature Series (Reprint of 1976 ed)). Too Much Flesh and Jabez. The Houses of Children (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)). Mrs. October Was Here. White on Black on White. At this time Dowell's first published novels were relatively new, recently published. My first association w/ Dowell is from this time & w/ such a relatively primitive attachment as my talisman, a vague nostalgia for misspent youth, I still associate the books as some sort of secret to those early years of my life.

In all honesty I did not read Dowell all that seriously until a few years later, in New York. Bomb magazine published 2 fragments of memoirs which were later published in the book A Star-Bright Lie. As I understand it now, the memoir may not be all that "accurate" although what distinguishes it may not be the successes or failures noted so much as the tone, the atmosphere, the feeling - like his fiction which as linear narrative is disorienting, yet in such fragmentation so much is revealed nevertheless. Coleman Dowell's memoirs aren't necessarily the letter of the law of facts so much as a great tale being told. In Edmund White's memoir of Dowell fantastical meals are described as are late night long elaborate conversations. Late at night seems to be the most appropriate time for any of Dowell's stories Again more associations: secrets, night, late.

The chapter about Carl Van Vechten has a great deal of fascination for me. Van Vechten was a name I associated w/ my paperback of Gertrude Stein, only. In Dowell's memoir Van Vechten emerges as an irascible social puppeteer, a scatological bad boy (with the emphasis on bad - mocking, rude, cutting) along the lines of the figure of Lord Merlin, who is in 2 of Nancy Mitford's books, The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate: Two Novels: An omniscient older sort, who is as socially and artistically well connected as an arriviste such as Dowell is not. A diabolical art-father. (my comparison between Coleman Dowell & Nancy Mitford is strictly in terms of the archetype of such a surrogate father figure - I can't think of 2 writers w/ less in common, otherwise). The memoir brings up figures who now seem quite forgotten, such as Dagmar Godowsky (author of her own rather fanciful memoir, First Person Plural), and bits of catty gossip (why is Gloria Vanderbilt nicknamed "Ears"?), along with accounts of social ambitions, intrigues, and other diabolical associations. To be honest the memoir is remarkable in how thoroughly downbeat it is, even if it is written in prose that is magical in its phrasing, its wit, as well as it's ability to explore the petty & the dark.

& what I learned from this as well is that Carl Van Vechten was a prodigious photographer & devoted several years to photographing his amazing acquaintanceships with writers, actors, singers, ballerinas, models, et al in a homemade studio in his apartment on Central Park West, that there are literally thousands of images by him, printed in postcard sizes, 8x10, & 11x14, usually marked by a blind stamp. The photos are readily available still on Ebay, which is where I found a print of Coleman Dowell, the same image that appears on the cover of A Star-Bright Lie. The seller knew who Van Vechten was, but had no idea as to the identity of the sitter. Curious.

Keith Davis wrote a short book about Van Vechten's portraits for the Hallmark Collection, The Passionate Observer: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten. The collection is now at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Van Vechten's photographic techniques were not strong & the prints can vary wildly in terms of surface. Likewise as a diligent amateur the images are not all that consistent - one can find the remarkable as well as the banal, visually. What does inform the images is the enormity of the archive as well as the variety of sitters. The Davis book ends with biographies of the sitters - their identities are part of the fascination with the work. This is a bit of the obverse of a photographer such as August Sander's portraits which are intended to be of "types" although one can find remarkably accomplished, famous people in such roles (Wilhelm Furtwangler, Otto Dix, for example). Van Vechten's portraits are DIY glamor shots of very distinct characters, akin to say Victorian cabinet cards or carte-de-visites of actors, beauties, celebrities. Although intended perhaps more as bit of private glamor, the images now have another life as a remarkable document of the artistic social orbits of New York City after World War II, especially Van Vechten's support of African-American artists as well as what was not perhaps identified directly at the time but what amounts to a great gay subculture.

I treasure my image of Coleman Dowell, which isn't especially great, & the print is irregular, portions of it faded, but like any fetish for a person, it functions as something which touched the person, somehow, while alive. This brings up the much darker & more irrational uses of photography, as a kind of totem of connection, or desire, a cult object - or is that a cargo cult object?