Photo Galleries
Yesterday, I talked to Kathy. We looked at images. And Kathy talked about how, after wandering through a few galleries, pieces started to look bad. We entered a room at Bergamont Station, which is a cluster of art galleries.
In the room: still lives of fruit, burning. And paintings of houses on tableted arches; an abundance of gold foil; little paintings on what looked like the ends of benches. Almost pueblo-style, it looked religious to me. Kathy shrugged. “It looks intentional,” she said. I noticed the gold foil. “It looks like religious icons,” I said, and then, “the benches are sort of pew-style benches,” and “like a pueblo-mission style, with images of Los Angeles,” and Kathy all of a sudden had an entry point to the work. Everyone else started to interpret. It was an entry point that made the work engaging.
We exited the gallery, walking toward another, through an empty parking lot. “I was talking to Agatha,” (who is a photography professor) Kathy said, “and images do not excite me anymore. She said that’s just a part of getting older,” and I said, “I thought the same thing. I almost sold all my camera gear. But the other day, I saw an artist, and his work made me fall in love with photography again.” Kathy said, “well it’s just a part of getting older.” And I wondered whether that was true.
In a class four years ago, I learned about novelty through meditation. Novelty, according to these meditation practitioners, was the first thing to let go of, while we sit and watch our thoughts. We’re attracted to surface, to shine, to chasing after glamour and what seems new to us (which is what photography is great at, especially as marketing). For art, it’s a chase after the original, the provocative, and the authentic. But, as part of this stage in meditation, we will be trapped in our own desire if we are continually drawn to these states of mind. Novelty, like this, is exhausting, keeping you trapped in your own desire—so they say.
We walked through the parking lot towards the fine art photo gallery, looking at pictures of dogs. John Divola on Display made me smile. “Look!” I said. “It’s Divola’s work—I love this.” Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert.
“I’m not familiar with him,” Kathy, the one no longer excited about images said, and I said, “oh he’s big, and I love the movement, and the attention to the chase.” Although so many others can take a photo of a blurry dog—I certainly have—there is a little joy in staring at these prints, with the energy of dogs running. They might not feel difficult nor original, but they have a good energy to them.
We exit to the next room, to the gallery I’ve been looking for. Bryan Schutmaat’s Sons of the Living. And Kathy said, “this looks like Ansel Adams,” and I said, “yeah, a big critique is that these medium/large format desert wanderers all look the same. It’s become a trend. So what differentiates an artist from their genre? How do you transcend the feeling of being just another photo in the same world that others also photograph?”
There is an answer to this, but no one I was with answered. I pointed to some formal decisions, of printing, tonality, and composition that make a work dynamic. The answer, I think, is to look at a work in its own particularity (this might look like Ansel Adams, but what makes it different?), breaking down its elements, and its presentation, and the choices an artist would have to make to present a work. “Look at the tension here,” I told someone, pointing to a light spot at the edge of the frame. “To the way it moves your eye, in contrast to the other edges; the way a fallen pear next to those standing works through repetition and release, adding movement to the frame.” You never graduate from looking at composition, even if it feels naïve to continually point it out. It would be like saying you graduate from language. You must see a work as a language and then it will hit.
We drove to an exhibition of William Eggleston’s dye prints. The images radiated color. And Kathy noted how the composition was technically “bad,” and I pointed to an image I had seen before as an example of what some call anti-composition.
“Everything is composed in one way or another,” I said. “It’s sort of a feature of photography to feel accidental; it’s difficult to do that, maintaining a sense of referentiality, with painting or sculpture.” We looked at an Eggleston print. “Just because an image might not feel balanced properly does not mean that it is not composed. Who determines what proper balance is?” Kathy, at the end, after taking another lap to look at the “formal elements” of the pictures, said, “I feel like I learned how to become a better photographer,” even though we all admitted that Eggleston’s prints felt like an early Instagram the 1970s. The photos transcended that sort of nomination.
I feel like I’m always too late to discovering photographers. Last week, I found Mark Mcknight’s photographs. I stared and stared on a computer screen, so I bought his monograph. I was excited.
I had been asking questions of “what counts as pornography.” I had been asking people about photography outside of the homogenizing image culture of Instagram; or photography outside of chiseled gay male bodies; image culture outside of the same trends I had seen across queer photography. I wondered what a post-Mapplethorpe provocation would be in photography. And I wondered where my own work, on a queer photo project, fit into the history of queer photography. I stumbled onto Mcknight with these questions wandering in my mind. The photos affected me.
A writer from the LA Times, according to Wikipedia, wrote “150 years of the medium at once embraced, absorbed, and reworked.” Which is a way of saying, Mcknight played within his genres, synthesizing and transcending it. No work exists outside history, and the best work embraces it.
To answer my question to Kathy from earlier: treat photography not as a surface to dazzle—that may come on its own—but as an attention to our own curiosity. Photography’s strength is its ability to reference a world (its sticky referential function!); if you are curious about a world, then photography, as a visual language, might articulate an answer.
At the end of the day, Kathy told me that I should get an MFA in art photography, if I choose to go to grad school. And I told her that I’d choose between religious studies and art history, trying to focus on how art shares a structure of religion. It’s a structure where we expect to turn our brain off and just be affected by a work, like walking into a religious service. That somehow art has a power to break beyond the discursive--or at least that’s what we expect from it (think Malevich; think abstract expressionism; think Sonia Delauny). But in reality, all this unmediation; all this desire to be affected (Mark Doty: we sometimes give up our own agency as viewers to try to allow a work to impress upon us) will only make us tired and lose our excitement. We bring an expectation of transcendence without language, and are continually disappointed.