Francis Bacon/John Deakin

The most profound moment I have had viewing Francis Bacon was not seeing any painting itself, but a brief scene in the Pier Paolo Pasolini film Teorema.

The plot of Teorema is simple: an unnamed visitor (Terence Stamp) comes to the house of of Milanese industrialist for an extended visit. The mysterious stranger sleeps with each member of the household: father, mother, sister, son, maid. This encounter has a profound effect on each, altered by an instance of unconditional love, & each begins to act in a way, for want of better term, less puppet-like than in their previous existences, they become "more themselves" to use pop terminology. The teenage son, formerly undistinguished & "one of the boys" becomes an artist. The boy becomes aware of his singularity, that his emotions & sexuality place him outside polite society, & that the transcendence of his alienation is in his creativity. There is a brief scene in which Terence Stamp sits with the boy & they look at a book of paintings by Francis Bacon, at which point, as the pages turn, there is a brief pause over a painting I know from the Detroit Institute of Arts, Study for a Crouching Nude, from 1952, which is now currently on view in the Bacon centenary exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.

I should also point out that as sweetly tender as the scene between Terence Stamp & Andres Jose Cruz Soublette is, it is equivocal as well. The "theorem" of the title is stated at the onset of the film: that no matter what, the bourgeoisie is always wrong. The boy's subsequent exploration of his self-expression has a parodic trajectory, wherein the boy uses paint gesturally & finally his own bodily fluids, semen & piss, as his medium. One has to laugh.

With some skepticism regarding "self-expression" through my cinematic dalliance with Pasolini & Bacon in the back of my mind, such self-expression is a bit jarring in its prevalence as a curatorial strategy in the current show at the Met, in the heavily attended guided tours of the paintings, which discuss Bacon's "lifestyle" as part of the aesthetic which shapes the work.

I have been to the show twice now & in each instance I heard the Detroit painting discussed by a guide with a thick notebook, giving, laudably, a very thorough discussion of the painting: citing its visual quotes from Michelangelo, the Eisenstein film Battleship Potemkin (The Ultimate Edition) (2pc) (Full B&W), & the Nazi Nuremberg rallies - an image ostensibly of a classic subject of western painting, the nude, it becomes overshadowed by the physical claustrophobia which such visual references render as a kind of disastrous fate. Also I heard that Bacon drank excessively, had sexual trysts with anonymous sailors & businessmen, that he was a sexual masochist who liked to be whipped, that he treated those near him poorly, especially his lover George Dyer, who committed suicide, etc. These are all biographical details which can be found in the literature about Bacon. Hearing them discussed along w/ formal discussions of paintings, to guided tours of mostly older people (trying to imagine my grandmother hearing this) adds a burlesque element to otherwise somewhat dry material. While there are numerous discussions of Pablo Picasso's mistresses, for example, mostly in terms of identification of the models in the paintings, none have the gravity ascribed to Bacon's vices as a kind of direct channel to the work at hand, & how it is there for us to look at and understand.

I find this curiously offensive. I can't help but think that Bacon's homosexuality & his openness about S/M sex, both socially marginalized aspects to his personality, are assumed to be the direct causes of the rather miserable emotional tenor of the work, as opposed to, say, the physical conditions of Europe after World War II, or the unredeemable atheism of the paintings (from a Catholic country no less - there's an entire gallery of screaming toothsome Popes in the exhibit). This is a conflation of art history, pop psychology & tabloid journalism presented as biographic narrative, explaining the grand masterpiece(s). Why something is what it is, like that.

There is a certain hilarity in guided tours being led on a tour of the wild side along w/ cultural information, but it does make me question double-standards in our society, in this supposed example of "frankness."

There have been intimations of deviant sexual practices of Picasso, also Man Ray (Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Storyby Steve Hodel includes accounts of an S/M "ring," possibly imagined, which included Man Ray & the director John Huston, with private parties in a "hidden" room inside Lloyd Wright's Sowden House on Franklin Ave.in Los Angeles in the 1940s) - Man Ray catalogs include images of hooded & chained women, without any charges of perversity accompanying the images, or any morbid kinkiness used to "explain" his practices. Picasso's erotic etchings detail male domination of the female, all of it "classical" enough to weave into the dry continuum of art history.

It's not my intention to detail perversities lurking in standard art histories, but I find the candor used to discuss Bacon in effect further marginalizes him as a kinky drunken fag, regardless if he was one or not, by making him further strange & different.

What interested me most in the exhibit was the use of photographs by John Deakin, as well as other images taken from Bacon's studio, which were all used for paintings (images by Eadweard Muybridge, stills from the Battleship Potemkin, newspaper photos). In the biographic accounts of Bacon, John Deakin (1912-1972) is an irascible figure, perhaps more gin-soaked than Bacon, basically always nearby on a barstool, a perfect sidekick, w/ a drunk's nastiness, & what seems little emotional connection to others. Deakin worked for Vogue, as well as making portraits for Bacon on commission for eventual paintings. Deakin's portraits lack glamor, they do not compliment, yet they have an amazing presence & in their high-contrast black-&-white extremes seem prescient of later photographic work such as William Klein's images of New York, or the portraits of Richard Avedon - all of which have some morbidity to them. The camera image works as a mechanical memento mori - ripeness & rot.

The retrieval of Deakin's prints, from filthy floors & garbage cans, speaks as well of Deakin's apparent apathy to his extraordinary work. His visibility now exists from the scavenging efforts of gallerists & the pungent memories of those who knew him. For me, looking at photos of George Dyer, Muriel Belcher, the Bernard brothers, Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes, Lucian Freud, etc. has more to say about lives in London in the early 1950s, those who didn't believe in much & found each other in various bars, including the Colony Club, run by Muriel Belcher. Photos, memoirs, movies speak more to me than the great paintings themselves.

There are 2 books of photos: John Deakin: Photographs and A Maverick Eye: The Street Photography of John Deakin. Both have an archaeological appeal as no systematic archives were kept & many of the prints are damaged. I doubt Deakin will ever emerge in any histories of photography: he is not stunningly innovative or original, but for the company he kept, but I can't help but think of how profound I find these little bits of a lost world, as despairing or destructive as it might have been, & how pitiful or pathetic it may have been perceived. This is where I would locate any weltschmerz, rather than in any grand artistic gesture.

from the NY Times, last week:

Den Mother to the Louche and Famous

By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT

LONDON

A VISITOR to the magnificent Francis Bacon exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art might easily pass by an alcove filled with photographs of Bacon’s friends. Among them is a tiny, yellowing snapshot of a striking woman gazing at the camera, taken around 1965. But then few Americans would even recognize the name of Muriel Belcher, or know about the part she played in Bacon’s life, as his den mother of sorts, and about the club she ran as his refuge.

She was the greatest of Soho hostesses, from 1948, when she opened the Colony Room Club on Dean Street here, until her death in 1979. The place we all called Muriel’s was a drinking club, a salon, a little community of its own (and one about which this reporter is regrettably well qualified to write, having spent too much of his early life there). What makes the story more poignant today is that not only have most of the players departed, but also the stage itself is dark. Muriel and Francis are no more, and neither is the Colony.

So we’re left with memories, of the kind novelists convey better: “It is an old timetable now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed ‘This schedule in effect July 5, 1922.’ But I can still read the gray names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality.” On another old timetable I can still read the names of those who drank at Muriel’s in July 1972.

Among them were writers, hustlers, shady politicians, decayed aristocrats and petty criminals, maybe more Anthony Powell than F. Scott Fitzgerald. But you could also find some of the most famous painters of the age, and Muriel’s deserves at least a small footnote in the history of art.

In those days Soho was full of clubs, though very different from the haughty gentlemen’s establishments of St. James’s Street and Pall Mall. They existed partly to refresh thirsty “afternoon men” at a time when the pubs were obliged to shut from 3 to 5:30 p.m., but each had its own character. Gerry’s on Shaftesbury Avenue was for actors (more likely “resting” than working). The Kismet, a k a the Iron Lung, on Cranbourn Street, also in a basement, had two bars for two clienteles. Back in the ’60s, in the more bohemian bar on the left, I briefly met “the Roberts,” the inseparable painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, while in the other bar somber men in raincoats and hats stood drinking and talking quietly: this was the London underworld and the plainclothes police meeting on equal terms.

But Muriel’s was sui generis. You passed through a door beside an Italian restaurant, climbed stairs smelling of damp or worse, and entered a dark green room with a bar to the left. The walls were covered with pictures, from a cartoon of Muriel by the jazz musician Wally Fawkes (a k a Trog) to a conversation piece set in the Colony by the painter Michael Andrews.

Nothing was more striking than the hostess herself, perched birdlike on her stool, drink in one hand and cigarette in the other, with one eye on the door to block unwelcome visitors and the other on customers to make sure they were spending enough. And all the while she kept up her machine-gun chatter: sarcastic, witty, scabrously obscene.

Her family was Birmingham Jewish, or so I believe. She had made her way to London and the demimonde, and during the war opened her first club, the Music Box, whose core membership seems to have been the better sort of homosexual officer in the Brigade of Guards (not as small a constituency as you might think).

Then she moved to that upstairs room on Dean Street. Although Bacon was already making his name, he needed pocket money, and Muriel paid him to bring in rich patrons. If the word isn’t too far-fetched, she became his muse, while he became one of Muriel’s “daughters.” Most men were “she” to Muriel; it could be disconcerting when some elderly major was introduced with the words, “She was a very gallant little lady on the Somme.”

Before long most of what would later be known as the School of London congregated there, including Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud as well as Bacon and Andrews. That painting by Andrews showed the names on the schedule in effect in the mid-1960s. Clustered around Muriel are her companion Carmel; Jeffrey Bernard (dropout, boozer, wit and later Spectator columnist); Henrietta Moraes (also much painted by Bacon); Lady Rose McClaren (the déclassé sister of the Marquess of Anglesey); and John Deakin, who took the photograph of Muriel, as well as several others in the Bacon exhibition at the Met.

Also Bacon and Mr. Freud, whose friendship had been commemorated years before in another painting, Mr. Freud’s haunting small portrait of Bacon. They could often be seen talking together in the corner, a study in contrasts: Mr. Freud reserved, ironic, abstemious (and conspicuously heterosexual — Muriel’s was very camp, not to say lewd, but far from merely what was then called a “queer club”); Bacon more expansive, especially while the drink flowed.

As it did when he was around. “Champagne for your real friends and real pain for your sham friends” was his favorite Irish toast, and he meant it, both ways. He said superfluously that Muriel’s was “a place where we came to dissolve our inhibitions,” and his were very solvent.

Even after a long drinking session Bacon might still be genial. Though he did once tear open my shirt front, that wasn’t anger, or lust, but simply because he couldn’t quite stand upright and was trying to break his fall.

But obstreperous on occasion veered toward obnoxious. Late one evening he was so truculent that Ian Board, Muriel’s barman asked me to get him out of the Colony, which I did by taking him down the road to a casino where, since he could scarcely tell rouge from noir by then, he lost an enormous sum.

If Bacon was by turns affable and abusive, Muriel herself was “a benevolent witch,” in the words of the writer and musician George Melly. Her humor was certainly distinctive. A friend once surprised us all by getting married and begetting a son. We lunched to celebrate, before climbing the stairs for a postprandial drink and to tell Muriel about this happy event. Her own slightly deflating mode of congratulation was to say, “It’s amazing what a poof can do when she tries.”

Writers and moviemakers as well as painters have portrayed Muriel. Rodney Ackland’s play “The Pink Room” opened in London in 1952, but not for long, since critics were shocked by the frank picture of inebriation and sexual variety in a club very much like the Colony. But the play was revived and televised many years later as “Absolute Hell,” with Judi Dench as the formidable hostess, and very good she was, if too ladylike for Muriel.

In the 1998 biopic “Love Is the Devil,” Bacon is played by Derek Jacobi, his companion George Dyer by Daniel Craig (whose fans can see more of him anatomically here than in his later James Bond films), and our hostess by Tilda Swinton. Although she doesn’t sound anything like Muriel, she looks curiously like her, and the tricksy-arty cinematography through a fisheye lens captures the atmosphere of the Colony rather well.

Not everyone loved Muriel and her club. I once took my friend Shiva Naipaul — younger brother of V. S. Naipaul and a brilliant writer himself, who died suddenly in 1985 at 40 — up to the Colony for a digestif. After a few minutes he said: “Can we please leave? I find this place infinitely depressing.”

But many others were captivated by that room, and not just the people you might expect. The Labor member of Parliament Tom Driberg might be found talking to one of the journalists who liked to look in at Muriel’s, like Peter Jenkins, the liberal columnist, and, more surprisingly, the radical turned conservative Paul Johnson.

Now we can look in no more. Muriel died barely into her 70s, and by the time Bacon died in 1992 he and Mr. Freud had fallen out, quite why I never knew. To make it sadder, that beautiful portrait by Mr. Freud was stolen from an exhibition in Berlin and has never been seen since.

After Muriel died, the Colony was kept going by Mr. Board, and after his death in 1994 by Michael Wojas. But he closed the club some months ago, and sold the contents. Great efforts were made to save the Colony, which had acquired a newer membership, some of them well-known younger artists, and a fund-raiser was held before Christmas, but to no avail. This is not the place to describe the acrimonious and litigious upshot, and although there are some plans to reopen the Colony, almost certainly in some other location, it will not be the same.

Many years ago Jenkins gestured round him, and said fervently he hoped places like this would never vanish. But Muriel’s has, and for some of us Soho today is a place of ghosts, gray names from a green room.

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.

Berlin Film Festival 2009

Marie Losier presented "Papal Broken Dance" at the Berlin Film Festival. Our photo of Genesis P. a la the writer Colette as a cat hung above the scopitone, but unlike the Chesire Cat, it did not disappear, as far as I know.

afternoons in Chelsea (NY)

When I moved to NYC in 1981 the majority of contemporary art galleries were in SoHo. At that time it felt rather bourgeois - large industrial spaces had been stripped - brick walls, new blank walls of drywall, white walls & polished wood floors. High ceilings. Victorian accents (moldings, etc.), tall windows. The not-so-past epoch of an artists district seemed long-gone. I must confess that my 2 earliest artistic encounters in SoHo were 1) going to an opening of faux Pre-Raphaelite paintings (mostly self-portraits I believe) by Norris Church, i.e. Mrs. Norman Mailer, which was high society but not necessarily high art by any means, on West Broadway, & 2) being taken by a friend from Ann Arbor, who had come to NYC the year before, to a loft presided over by (although this meant nothing at the time) Hannah Wilke. All I recall is we had to chew gum & give it back & my friend Deborah later laughed, "she thinks all women are goddesses!" which may or may not have much of anything to it. I thought the paintings of Norris Church rather tacky & I had no sense of Hannah Wilke as a great radical artist. In terms of the latter: my loss!

I bring this up, for if anything, SoHo in 1981 looked remarkably store-bought & fancy & it had the highest concentration of contemporary art galleries in NYC at the time, distinct from the more staid galleries of 57th St., or the Upper East Side (perhaps most vivid fictionally in the film of Portrait of Jenny - an elegant walk-up presided over by Ethel Barrymore - if only it were really like that) - large, flashy, carved out of an industrial past. If anything, my sense of this in terms of scale has nothing to do w/ the excesses of mercantilism which were to follow.

Chelsea followed, like any urban sprawl, further out & bigger, better. Huge galleries became bigger. Some of the area was quite abject & the development of the area included the closure of the 2 leather bars in the city - The Spike & The Eagle, otherwise louche destinations facing the West Side Highway & the Hudson river. One could be edified rather than hit on. The distance from the subway & the distance from most other things are both a hindrance in terms of getting there conveniently & a mark of exclusivity.

W/ a few day off this past week I went to a few shows in Chelsea. The most interesting one was the Thomas Hirschhorn installation "Universal Gym" at the Barbara Gladstone gallery on 21st st. In his customary use of mass-produced generic materials, corrugated cardbord & packing tape, Hirschhorn made the gallery a sick simulacrum of a gym - mirrors, weights, machines - a factory of bodies, fitness, health, sociability. This is quite dark & critical. I also admire Hirschhorn for using thoroughly temporal materials - this is a conservator's nightmare yet o so vivid. I can't help but make a correlation between Hirschhorn's materials & the Wanda Jackson song "The Box It Came Home In" which will be "all satin-lined" - this is about death in life, a pre-purchased lot of nothingness, mass-produced. Existence as nullification.

At Andrew Kreps, a group photo show, w/ a lousy premise/statement, nevertheless had 2 bodies of work which stood out. 1) a print by Liz Deschenes - Liz is one of the great artists working today & her photographs, which confront photographic technologies & visual culture, have so much to say about our interactions with images & the experiences, both physical & historical, & how that occurs. Somewhere I recall reading a statement by Susan Sontag to the effect that the essence of thinking is the word "but" - which is what I think of when I see Liz's photographs. To describe her images does not address their visceral quality - their presence.

The other curious body of work in the show is by Annette Kelm, a triptych of Herbert Tobias album covers. This brings to mind an essay by the late Herve Guibert about record album covers, their tactility & resonance as sensuous objects & their primacy as aethetic experiences. Herbert Tobias was a great German gay photographer in the 1950s & 1960s. His commercial work for Deutsche Grammophon is both kitsch & trendy & meant to be ephemeral, a kind of post-WWII modernism - the subjective photography of Otto Steinert, applied in a commercial field. Kelm's use of the images invokes a historical recovery in seemingly trivial work to reveal a worldview of myth, culture & longing.

Male: From the Collection of Vince Aletti

Male: From The Collection Of Vince Aletticould be seen as a catalog accompaniment to a show of Vince Aletti's collection shown earlier at White Columns. The book can be viewed independently, as well, & along with an essay by Collier Schorr, it is a fascinating inquiry into the art of collecting.

The collection is distinguished by a general theme, masculinity as a site of desire, as well as what could be described as eclectic, "catholic" taste. Categories of quality or an established canon are second fiddle to a desiring eye which can collect great artist=photographers such as Peter Hujar, Bill Jacobson & Gary Schneider, as well as photographers whose work would be classified as outside an artistic precis, such as the documentarian Danny Lyon or the anthropologist Pierre Verger. The rule of thumb for the collection is a desire that is not necessarily explicit but exists through the eye of the collector. If there is anything to learn it is the anarchy of desire in terms of looking at images. Coexistent w/ any fine art images there is also panoply of beefcake photography - Bob Mizer's Athletic Model Guild, Don Whitman's Western Photography Guild, Bruce of Los Angeles - as well as anonymous porn, amateur snaps, boxing images, an amazing image of Lew Alcinder - I don't want to list any more as there are hundreds of sources.

I find most collections have a death-like aspect in trying to define a subject & contain it. Vince Aletti's collection has a much more dynamic aspect. Is it because it is both older work & contemporary too? High & low subjects? There is something radical & unfinished about the collection which gives it a vibrancy beyond conventional connoisseurship.