Men and Apparitions Read online

  I started out in the field, I mean, got name recognition, presenting a paper at a conference: “We are The Picture People.” I began: “I name us Picture People because most special and obvious about the species is, our kind lives on and for pictures, lives as and for images, our species takes pictures, makes pix, thinks in pix. It exists if it’s a picture and can be pictured. Surface is depth, when nothing is superficial.”

  Brought down a shaky house.

  looking fills time

  Pictures demand mental space and time.

  In photographs, unguarded moments lend themselves to interpretation, and also to obliquity. An unwitting gesture doesn’t reveal the person. Maybe there’s more paradox to unposed moments, though; I hope to make something of those. But to pin down ambiguity, how weird is that. Ethnographers toil there, our milieu, especially those of us dedicated to thick description, where meaning exists in situ.

  It’s ineluctable. A picture describes, say, but never defines. An accidental pose can tell more, we often suppose, than a studied one; Freud made a lot of the unconscious of the accident, especially a word slip. But subjects in a candid shot, accidents—not the same. Think about “truth” or revelation in Warhol’s Screen Tests, his silent or oxymoronic still movies: he focused on a person for a three-minute 16mm roll, and dared the poser to drop the pose (like a fetus through the birth canal). He didn’t make posing easy, he wasn’t looking for poise. His subject must breathe, creating movement, though each sitter was challenged to perform stillness. Weird, as if each sitter might be an Empire State Building. A psychological experiment, sure. Doing this kind of film, Warhol invoked early photography that required posers to sit still for a long time. Neck guards were invented to hold the poser’s head straight, immobile. Warhol’s poser had no guards other than his or her guardedness.

  OK, the pose drops, but no essential truth is revealed. Unless one thinks that beneath the pose or the surface lies a greater truth. We’ve been led not to trust people’s appearances, because, it’s suggested, an essential truth about people can’t be seen at all or easily on the surface. A lie is different from an appearance. Conscious liars know they are lying. But everyone has an appearance, which can’t lie, even as appearances change and are chosen. They are not lies. A surface is not a lie.

  About a photograph: its surface is its depth; there can be no single, correct interpretation; its depth rests on the surface, and, when you recognize that it can’t be read absolutely, it opens up as its own thing. Not revealing anything but itself. Another paradox.

  G. E. Moore’s famous paradox: What can’t be said in the present tense—“It is raining, but I believe it is not raining”—

  can be said in the past tense—“It was raining, but I didn’t believe it was raining.” A photograph indexes the past, and is viewed in the present. This means it can be raining in the picture, and not raining when a viewer sees it. A photograph is a fact, an object; but the picture is an experience, not a fact, for a viewer.

  I’m no realist, but I live inside a reality, a world that isn’t completely mine or consistent, and I share aspects of it with other people. I can delude myself, and also, I like some illusions, they soften hard edges, soft-focus my days. Without illusion, life would be stripped of fantasy’s plenitude.

  Plus, I wouldn’t look at art if it held a mirror to life, especially my life. Kidding. Not.

  living in a glut of images is not

  the same as being a glutton

  A 1990s TV camera ad: “Life doesn’t stop for you to take a photograph.”

  One hundred years earlier, “Nabi” painter Pierre Bonnard photographed his lover/partner Marthe, family, and friends—including friend and Nabi painter Édouard Vuillard—in gardens and forests, at play, eating. His photographs of Marthe in her bathtub became studies for his paintings. (I heard that Marthe suffered from psoriasis; took baths for relief, so it has affected how I look at them.) Bonnard liked his figures in movement, to catch the moment as few photographers did then (though Muybridge would, famously). He used his still camera like a cell phone, and by the 1890s when he started photographing, always as an amateur, the shutter speed was there: In 1880, George Eastman had developed a camera whose pose time was 1/50th of a second. Life didn’t have to stop.

  An arm, leg, a glimpse of torso, Bonnard’s framing is unique. People danced across lawns, out of frame, they flew in the frame, two men wrestled in the air. Energy suffuses his pictures, or the dynamic called Life.

  One always talks about surrendering to nature. There is also such a thing as surrendering to the picture. —Pierre Bonnard, February 8, 1939

  My favorite picture is of Renée, a little girl, hugging a dog. She is bending down, over the dog, her head and face enveloped by a floppy straw bonnet. Three shapes dominate, all centrally framed—a little figure in a white or light-colored and loose smock-like dress; a big straw hat whose brim overwhelms the head and face; and a large, black dog whose head is cradled in one of Renée’s arms, the dog’s nose and face to the camera. Renée is wearing dark socks or stockings; one of her feet is lifted slightly off the pebbled ground, in movement. Her tiny foot moves the entire picture off the ground and into space.

  Bonnard’s photographs look as if his camera brushed the surface in fast, loose strokes. Some call them painterly. Bonnard courted flow, or energy, and this correlated to the way he saw in whichever form or genre he used. A broad and complex concept: how we see and what seeing is. It is a mystery, not biologically, but neurologically, culturally, and psychologically. The elements for sight—or vision—depend on culture and society, and remain mysterious because the outcomes are not the same for all people, even when produced within the same structures.

  Selective seeing is like selective memory: memory’s impositions, derogations, and biases (in favor of the rememberer) situate the psychological, social eye, and confound simple readings of reality: compelling variances of what is seen compete as “Truth.” The eye organized by culture, say, compels “seeing.” (I look at a dog or a cat and never see food. Rain to me looks like a drizzle or a downpour; other societies have many more words for rain.) People project, mostly unaware of the mechanism, and so reality’s constructions conform to already received ideas about it. Contemporary photographers work with that prejudiced, psychological, subjective eye, to play catch with, say, actuality and fiction.

  The desire to catch, as Bonnard hoped, the PASSING MOMENT is antithetical to being in the moment. The photographer is an observer to others’ moments.

  The Picture People have dedicated themselves to this paradox, and consign themselves on either side of the equation.

  family values what

  I was a boy who didn’t kill insects or torture small creatures, except Little Sister. She claimed I tortured her, tormented is closer to the truth.

  One summer morning I found ecstasy in the garden, our backyard. I was four, and a praying mantis appeared. I didn’t know what it was. The creature, I named him Mr. Petey, rocked my world. I watched its little head turning on its neck—the only insect on earth that turns its head. It’s a person, like me, I saw, but even littler. Praying mantises are like dinosaur-age humans. They have a face. They look you in the eyes. Their eyes are in the middle of their tiny heads, and they see the way we do. Totally cool. My PM noticed me and looked right back at me. At me, and I was face-to-face with a god or an alien. The PM got me, he communicated with sympathy and intelligence.

  I named him Mr. Petey and wanted him for a pet, a friend. (My parents wouldn’t let me bring him indoors.) I could talk to him—he could have been female—he listened to me, and pretty much every day I went into the backyard to find him. Mr. Petey usually showed up.

  You can’t kill a praying mantis, Mother said, they’re a protected species, and if you kill one, we’ll have to pay the government a lot of money.

  I wasn’t ever going to kill Mr. Petey, she was crazy, but I heard about the existence of a protected species, and this thrilled my kid-bra
in. I wondered if I was one, a special boy with special powers because I knew Mr. Petey. I reveled in talking with Mr. Petey, when I found him on a leaf.

  That took some effort. Camouflage is key to a PM’s survival, they have many enemies, including birds. (Sad, birds are cool.) Mr. Petey might fear predators but he was a fearsome predator, invisible on a branch.

  You can’t find a PM stuffed animal, so I made drawings, and Mother sewed me one. Mr. Petey’s head flops down after all these years, nearly decapitated.

  Mr. Petey—seen it all—Mr. Petey plural. I didn’t know then that he/she lives only a year. Still, a PM’s short life span fundamentally defies the value of human longevity, its evolutionary merit. The flaws of living long but not living large. Not kidding.

  I must’ve fooled myself—kids don’t fool themselves—when a new PM showed up, because their markings and colors vary. I don’t know what I actually thought, it’s all retro now. But a PM showed up in the spring and stayed through summer, I called him/her Mr. Petey, and one day he went for a vacation in the South. I figured that out for myself. But that was always Mr. Petey in the backyard until I left home.

  I was a dreamy kid, I’m a dreamy older dude, but in a totally different way.

  My dreaminess gets called “an obstacle to reality.”

  Looking, observing, I’m never bored. People who get bored are boring, people who don’t get bored may not be boring but could be arrogant assholes. I’m not a voyeur, not clinically, according to the tests, but in a way, everyone who’s awake is looking somewhat voyeuristically, or voyeur-ing. And, also, what can tests measure except a society’s preconceived values, already tainted by its goals. If I am, I’m a pretty passive voyeur.

  Landscapes flying by train windows make me sick.

  Soberly, I examined objects, close and distant, a star in the sky, Mr. Petey, Mother’s face; but I noticed: the elements that seem close may really be distant, your father, your best friend, and what feels distant or remote may be closer than you expect, and sneak up and rock your world. It’s facile to say: the terrorist living next door, the serial killer—such a nice guy.

  art, images, death

  Commercial photography sped up with the advent of the U.S. Civil War: the tech was there, and people could have pictures of the men who left for war, often to die or be maimed. Before, there weren’t remedial visuals or visual transitional objects to survive them. (See D. W. Winnicott.) Hair, nails, other physical remnants and traces were collected and framed, glued in lockets. Fingernail pieces. (Disgusting, sorry.) A rare few had painted portraits on mantelpieces.

  First cousins married until after the Civil War, when the Feds made it illegal. In the age of Darwin, Americans worried about their purity, and the government worried about social degeneracy, the birth of idiots. First cousins not marrying doesn’t stop that, but may amplify occurrences.

  People relied on memory, and also developed mnemonic devices, ever since the Greeks and Romans. The “method of loci” (places) routes memory through visualizations (images), situates a person in a place who then records the site in the mind/brain. Later, the person walks through it mentally, sees everything, and what needs to be remembered appears.

  Contemporary artists don’t “reflect” objects; artists are IN life, making not “imitating” it, and they also can see objects not as separate from their own lives. Artist Laurie Simmons, in her series The Love Doll, photographed a Japanese sex doll, or surrogate female, in domestic scenes, where the Love Doll sits on the living room couch, for instance. Simmons’s work pictures social attitudes, sexual fantasies, the regulated poses of femininity. “Attitudinals,” I call them.

  Artist Rachel Harrison: “People see what they want to see. My art is always loaded. There is too much, on purpose, because I’m not going to give you the thing you want.”

  What is that “thing”?

  A claim was once made: artists make art from chaos. People who say this know nothing about art or chaos.

  (1)Chaotic people make chaos, and can’t unmake it.

  (2)Chaos is not an object.

  You’re alive, dead. Can people be that different now from when bodies lay dead in front rooms? Consciousness: is it the same process always, and only its contents changed?

  Virginia Woolf: “The look of things has a great power over me.”

  I get comfort from artists’ representations of mortality—entrails of the day, autopsies of consumer goods, chunks, slices or mind sets, present-tense approaches.

  Where did all the “history paintings” go? Depends on what you think they are. Barbara Kruger’s images, words, vertiginous, on walls and floors, remaking space and received ideas. Cindy Sherman’s buried phantasms of degradation and decadence; Peter Hujar’s black-and-white photographs of catacombs; Renée Green’s Partially Buried, an unearthing of a Robert Smithson piece and the Kent State killings; Zoe Leonard’s ten-year Analogue piece, photographs of NYC shop windows, signs, a project of capture; Stephen Prina’s reconfiguration of art exhibitions, or the past as an installation; Judith Barry’s Cairo Stories, film portraits based on interviews with Egyptian women, their histories entwined with their country’s; Walid Raad’s preservation through images of Lebanon’s civil wars; Glenn Ligon’s “A Feast of Scraps,” in part vernacular photographs of African Americans, an image-history of black America; Jim Hodges’s A Diary of Flowers, a history of sentiment; An-My Lê’s photographs of Vietnam War reenactments staged in North Carolina.

  How is the past installed, whose and which history, for public view.

  Ilya Kabakov’s room-sized installations, Soviet Union dioramas, and fictional picture books of invented characters; Moyra Davey’s photograph of dust on a phonograph needle, history as residue; Song Dong’s color-coded installation Waste Not, 10,000 objects from his hoarder mother’s Beijing apartment, nothing could be thrown away; Silvia Kolbowski’s “An Inadequate History of Conceptual Art,” including photographs of artists’ hands, as they talked about an art form that avoided the hand; Adam Pendleton’s black-and-white photographs, collages of protest, text, and pictures; Christopher Williams’s pictures that question what photography (pro)poses; and Barbara Probst’s point-of-view photographs that include her camera, the eye’s prothesis, and tripod. The apparatus on show, though no transparency through transparency.

  blame empiricism

  Toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, there had been rumors of photography, in the days when science and art were near-inseparable, spreading among the elite—educated men and a few women, scientists of all stripes, creatures of the Enlightenment. They heard about the progress of various scientific trials, experiments toward image fixing that had begun in the late eighteenth century: camera obscuras, and attempts to plant ephemeral images on a surface through the effects of light and chemicals.

  Photography emerged out of positivism, photo historian Geoffrey Batchen has theorized; photography is like a symptom of positivism, an obsession about proof, for documenting existence. It trusts empirical evidence, it is empirical evidence. Photography’s origins can slide into an incessant hope for proof—of anything. It becomes a force in itself, as making images makes us.

  Our species needed to fix an image of a house or bridge onto a plate. It did this before finding a way to eliminate the excruciating pain of surgery, say, tooth-pulling. The drive for anesthesia was not higher on the scale of need or wish: to impress a bridge on a plate or piece of paper, that happened first. OK, anesthesia emerged pretty soon after photography, in 1846, when a dentist demonstrated his experiment to physicians who’d sort of given up. Why give up? BECAUSE people believed our species’ fate was to suffer, to experience pain, like women in childbirth.

  We are all Job; but my biblical namesake Ezekiel was all about curing with herbs, etc.

  Attitudes affect revelations, what gets invented, and doesn’t, the way society has evolved and continues.

  What’s important to humans is less important t
han why.

  Empiricism fails, what we see isn’t what we get. Love can’t be proved. No science to it, no proof in repetitions of it. Certain acts seem, indubitably, love: a mother throwing herself on her child to save its life. Love, instinct, or something else. Fear of future guilt or ostracism from the tribe? Instincts that appear altruistic may not be: the mother’s done her reproductive work. Let’s move on.

  anon family album throwaway pix

  I hold these pictures in my hands—faces and bodies, dogs and cats flip from one to the other. Pictures, pictures.

  Families are tribes, tribes keep relics, pass them on, relics represent ancestral traditions and “purpose the future” (my term). Our relics, these valued objects, “hold” a family, tribe, a people’s continuity. “High art”—relics of a kind—creates continuity in value and taste, which is essentially what museums do: hold values continuous. While most of us know, well, some of us, that life is whimsical, temporary, in flux, random and discontinuous, museums, churches, “culture’s placeholders,” my term, forge constancy, and though criticized for their many lacks, these institutionalize traditions, give tribes places to go to venerate the past and present, together. How else would people know on what to base their values? Why is the archive so important? Think about it. The twentieth century is GONE, so gone, as never to have happened. Buh-bye.

  Or the Velvet Underground’s “bye-bye.”

  Societies, without histories, have no value. People without history, also. Values thrive in relation to the excluded, to the much greater number of objects called obsolete, or unnecessary, ugly, second-rate, third-rate. How else would people, societies, know themselves?

  In my hands, I hold these picture-relics, to be family-evident.

  In Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, Geoffrey Batchen studied a picture At Rest (dated 1890, he thinks) of a dead young woman, wax flowers around its frame. The flowers add poignancy and sentimentality. He asks: “Who was this woman? What was her life like? What possible relationship could I, as a viewer of this picture today, have to do with her?”