These posts are either "jump pages" for my weblog or posts-in-process that will eventually appear there. For what it's worth, here's an archive of these random bits. The picture to the left is by a famous comic book artist.
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A Bread-Crumb Trail to the Spirit of the Times
By ROBERTA SMITH
Connecting the dots formed by New York gallery exhibitions is a perpetual art world pastime. The process involves matching little details or broad stylistic trends, recognizing recurring themes and common materials, or sometimes just finding the shared thread in one's own seemingly unrelated reactions. And everybody comes up with a different diagram.
Right now there are interesting connections to be drawn from a handful of exhibitions spread around Manhattan, including some impressive solo debuts and a remarkable group show. Visiting them takes one through a progression of neighborhoods, architectural settings and ways of making and presenting art — to arrive, at least by my lights, at the suspicion that there is something new and exciting percolating beneath the surface of the art world of New York.
For one thing, there's something of a youthquake going on, with a rash of young artists interested, as most young people are, in the thrills and dilemmas of being young. For another, New York art is having a hands-on moment. While artists have always worked with their hands, right now those hands seem to be especially busy. Knitting, sewing and quilting have a raised profile; so do quirky, even craftlike ways of drawing and painting, and approaches to video that make the medium feel thoroughly worked over — touched, so to speak.
And the underground is everywhere. It is no longer the pride or bane of a few gentrification-ready neighborhoods. You can find new art on the Upper as well as the Lower East Side; in Chelsea, which is much less the homogenized blue-chip zone it is often thought to be, as well as in Harlem.
Of course, these developments are not entirely unrelated. They are, to stretch observation into metaphor, all signs of people taking things into their own hands, of a healthy autonomy. They have, for me, the atmosphere of 1970's pluralism and laissez-faire, but this time more fleshed out and purposeful. It is less a pervasive condition than a question of personal style, if not a philosophy. It may be perpetuated by artists' collectives or by individuals working in so many mediums that each artist could appear to be a one-person collective.
These artists are confidant, free of ideology and, despite being camera savvy and computer adept, transfixed by the physical possibilities of art-making. Using Photoshop doesn't mean you can't also knit. Taking up a video camera doesn't mean you can't wield it like a paintbrush, or edit with the precision of a jeweler. Several of these shows may remind you that the children of the original flower children are becoming artists.
After all, boiled down to its essence, craft is simply concentration and care made manifest. It is materialized love, which partly explains the sincerity found in much of the new art that's around today.
Craft is also an effective way for young artists to reclaim pop culture: a direct grass-roots effort to subvert and reshape the stuff they have been force-fed from an early age.
Kenny Schachter Contemporary
The place to begin this tour, because it provides the most undiluted glimpse of youth-crazed craft and love, is "Air Show," the tour-de-force debut of Misaki Kawai at Kenny Schachter Contemporary, a gallery on an old alley in the West Village that is straight out of "Gangs of New York."
Ms. Kawai, who is 24 and lives in Tokyo, gives new meaning to the word aircraft with a fleet of elaborately handmade airplanes, accompanied by puffy cotton jet trails and blue felt clouds. The latter are sewn to the angled steel-mesh walls of the gallery, whose intimist (read: tiny) industrial interior was designed by the Acconci Studio.
Suspended in midair, Ms. Kawai's fleet ranges from a large airliner to fighter jets and biplanes, all stitched together from assorted fabrics — underwear, baby blankets, flannel pajamas — that remind you that patchwork is among the oldest forms of appropriation. Ms. Kawai has the funky exquisiteness of the classic dollhouse vernacular down cold, from tiny pillows and emergency instructions to busy flight attendants and imaginatively attired, werewolf-wigged passengers (their faces are all photographs of Beatles) who are reading, tending computers and, in one case, drawing.
She may be indebted to that master of miniaturization Charles LeDray, but she could also be the 21st century's version of Ettie Stettheimer, the dollhouse-building sister of the self-taught painter Florine Stettheimer, who was also one of the great art salonistes of 1920's New York.
While in the vicinity, some side excursions can provide further evidence of craft's current prominence and recent history in art: "Cheap," a group show at White Columns; Tom Sachs's miniature city at the Bohen Foundation; and, at Elizabeth Dee in lower Chelsea, Kevin Landers's latest excursion into handmade social commentary, which includes a plastic-putty-and-fabric re-creation of the wall of Nike sneakers made famous by Andreas Gursky's panoramic photograph.
John Connelly Presents
An equally significant stop is "K48: Teenage Rebel: The Bedroom Show," Scott Hug's ode to the chief laboratory of adolescent fantasy and subversiveness. John Connelly Presents, a young Chelsea gallery, occupies a small perch in a huge building that is an art-world microcosm. Tenants include galleries at all levels of economic viability, dozens of artist studios, the odd hip magazine (Index) and now a health club. A glance at the extensive lobby directory can induce social fatigue.
Mr. Hug's show is a delight. Packed into one room is a collage of works by a total of 70 artists, designers and collectives that is at once a finger-on-the-pulse survey and a personal manifesto, almost a solo show. A live-in environment where visitors can watch videos, listen to music and sift through bureau drawers, the show is, additionally, the walk-in equivalent of K48, the sharp-looking yet oddly homey magazine of art, fashion, music, design (and sex), now in its third issue, that Mr. Hug publishes.
The mix is beyond ecumenical. The displays include, for example, Claire Corey's Richter-esque digital abstraction as well as distinctive patchwork T-shirts by the collective Dearraindrop, whose members also contribute similarly bristling collage paintings, and the antic drawing-photocopy-cartoon collages of Billy Grant.
The feverish interaction of art, popular culture, craft, graphic design, film and music is everywhere apparent, and richly informative, both artistically and sociologically. But what makes it pop visually is Eli Sudbrack's wallpaper, mostly red, with its sweet, savvy fusion of psychedelic poster, Kate Greenaway and Renaissance tapestry.
And that Mr. Hug is living in the middle of all this makes his show the latest addition to the tradition of the fully furnished, mostly functional installations by Lucas Samaras, Ben, Chris Burden, Andrea Zittel, RirkritTiravanija and, most recently, Marina Abramovic.
While in the building, you can see more craft consciousness at Greene Naftali, in the abstract paintings of Sergej Jensen, a 29-year-old Danish artist living in Germany, who prefers glued-on pieces of denim and leather and occasional daubs of bleach to paint; and at Rush Arts, which is showing pieced-together garments by Gerald Jackson.
Daniel Reich
Another excellent visual adventure is "Life Is a Gift," Christian Holstad's first gallery show. The work centers on a plastic-enclosed bedroom that is a tribute to outsiderness in the form of a homage to David Vetter, the "bubble boy" whose defective immune system sentenced him to a brief, 12-year life of physical isolation in a germ-free plastic bubble. The show fills the small studio-apartment gallery of Daniel Reich, who sleeps in the piece each night (and is in the unusual position of not having to roll up his mattress each morning before he starts work).
Mr. Holstad is a one-artist collective, equally at ease with knitting, quilting, collage, drawing and sculpture; his work has a multimedia mix that mirrors Mr. Hug's effort at Connelly. But it also clarifies much that is merely glimpsed in the rich loam that Mr. Hug has brought together, especially the penchant for obsessive, half-invented techniques that often yield small-scale but concentrated results shot through with a fervent mysticism.
Everything in this show refers to the bubble boy, more or less directly. An exquisite color-pencil rendering of a garden includes a pair of big rubber gloves like the ones built into the bubble's interior to enable David's parents to hug him. Graphite-toned drawings made from newspaper photographs, which are erased and configured into little Symbolist dramas, touch repeatedly on the theme of freakishness and difference.
Perhaps the most characteristic of Mr. Holstad's odd fusions of innocence and subversiveness are pornographic collages whose coupled figures — "bubble boys" who have found each other — are layered with photographic patterns that turn out to be bits of hand-knit afghans cut from the pages of magazines.
Other signs of Mr. Holstad's ecumenism include a quilt, a strange wool-knit tree branch that culminates in a skull made of rubber foam and a removable quilted deer's head, and a trompe l'oeil rag rug carefully pieced together from faux-carpet linoleum.
Oliver Kamm/Apartment 5-BE
A sign of the Chelsea underground is the gallery that Oliver Kamm, who formerly worked at Marianne Boesky and Paul Morris, has opened in his one-bedroom apartment on West 23rd Street. For his second show, he is presenting the New York debut of Colin McClain, a young artist from Tennessee who derives his motifs from Gray's Anatomy.
Mr. McClain's oil paintings of figures and torsos are the work of a developing artist. But his slightly skitterish drip technique, and his brash palette of pinks, greens and yellows, supposedly inspired by skateboard graphics, give the human form a neon vibrancy.
In many ways the blunt force and homogeneity of this show, and its images of totally exposed bodies, may be the perfect chaser to the air of haunted fragility and its wild range of emotions and materials that dominate Mr. Holstad's show.
Triple Candie
"Sugar & Cream," a modestly ravishing excursion into the recent history of quilts, banners, flags and embroideries, looks great in the big white space of Triple Candie, a scrappy Harlem alternative space. The show underscores that such techniques have been around for a while, even if exhibitions like "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" at the Whitney Museum of American Art have given them a new visibility. Nearly everything here points up the flexibility of so-called craft mediums.
The outer limits are defined by David Hammons's "African-American Flag," Dinh Q. Le's black-on-black embroidery, James Hyde's formalist webbing-paintings and Oliver Herring's 1993-94 "Curtain," an immense swath of knit transparent tape that is aging beautifully.
Honing closer to traditional craft are the the quilts and quasi-quilts of Tracey Emins, Rosie Lee Tompkins and Trenton Doyle Hancock, whose paint and felt "Torpedo Boy's Chest Mess" is especially good. Caught in the crossfire between these works is a kind of quilt ghost: Jim Hodges's big, fluttery "Here's Where We Shall Stay," a semi-transparent expanse of sewn-together chiffon head scarves.
This show should inspire a larger, more inclusive effort, which might also encompass Faith Ringgold, who has three new painting-quilts at the ACA Gallery in Chelsea; Mike Kelley, whose "All the Love Hours" at the Whitney is looking more and more like a generational touchstone; Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt with his cellophane-embellished altarpieces; and maybe even Lari Pittman, whose paintings bring suggestions of graphic design, illustration, embroidery and textile design into a fruitful alignment.
Down the street from Triple Candie, the Project is showing "Pink Slips and Golden Parachutes," a lively show of work by past and present employees of the gallery. It includes "We Are Left," a large mural-size expanse of embroidered organdy, by Jessica Rankin. While indebted to artists like Julie Mehretu and Matthew Ritchie, this work has a casual finesse and compositional intelligence all its own.
Salon 94
If anyone needed confirmation that the underground can bubble up anywhere, look no further than East 94th Street and Salon 94, perhaps the poshest project space ever to sashay into any art scene. Established by Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, a partner in the Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, on Fifth Avenue just off 57th Street, Salon 94 is a semiprivate showcase for young artists.
Its setting is the ground floor of a former orphanage between Madison and Fifth Avenues that has been extensively redesigned by Rafael Viñoly with a curving glass wall and burl staircase, and stylishly decorated by his wife, Diana Viñoly. It could position Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn, who lives on the building's upper floors with her family, as a contemporary Peggy Guggenheim, a collector and dealer of means with an eagle eye for the latest thing.
The gallery's outstanding inaugural show manages to withstand all the built-in glamour. It introduces the percussive, narratively complex videos of Aida Ruilova, which are fraught with an air of slightly muffled domestic hysteria. As it happens, Ms. Ruilova also has an ultrarefined drawing of wolf-eyed figures in Mr. Hug's show at Connelly, and that rendering is consistent with the needle-sharp precision she brings to video editing.
Working with tapes of friends as they creep about decaying houses, peer through windows, hang from rafters and dart up staircases, Ms. Ruilova slices and dices their gestures and sounds with a D.J.'s sense of economy and rhythm, creating a cast of young shut-ins, stuttering eccentrics and assorted sociopaths. Shown at intervals on small screens or monitors, the videos' sounds play off one another to eerie effect.
In "Come Here," the title is repeatedly hissed by a young man in the shade of a large potted plant who seems to be summoning a zombie version of himself. "Almost" is the strangled message from a disheveled girl who crawls up (or down?) a rickety staircase and picks at a crumbling plaster wall. A sense of gothic foreboding and obsession that doesn't preclude comedy infuses the images, which recall some of Anna Gaskell's photographs. Their haunting snippets of sound and image force an extraordinary concentration; they remain mysterious even while they are drummed into the mind.
Maccarone
If Ms. Ruilova patches together videotape with a jeweler's sensitivity to nuance and facets, the young California artist Anthony Burdin, who is making his debut at Maccarone on the Lower East Side, begins by wielding the camera like a trowel. And while Ms. Ruilova's single drawing at Connelly has a silverpoint fineness, Mr. Burdin's works on paper, with titles like "Witchy Forecast" and "Legendary Ghost Scrawl," vibrate with a jittery paranoia to the verge of disintegration. Their out-of-focus, speaking-in-tongues wildness brings to mind H. C. Westermann, or the lettering on a goth teenager's notebook. They would be even more at home in Mr. Hug's installation.
Mr. Burdin's extraordinary show liberates youthful reverie from the bedroom and takes it on the road. With the camera and a boombox as his constant companions, he seems to spend a great deal of time creating raw material. This means playing rock on the boombox (for the videos in this show, it was all Blue Oyster Cult all the time) while waving the camera all over the place, sometimes singing along with the music as he goes.
He assumes two personas. As Voodoo Vocal, he views Los Angeles from behind the wheel of his ancient funky car, which functions as both a sound studio on wheels and a private performance stage. As Desert Mix, he beomes a kind of rogue D.J., dragging the boombox through fields of brush and wildflowers, muttering, growling and drooling from behind the camera.
Once these tapes are made, Mr. Burdin assiduously reworks them in the computer. Unlike Ms. Ruilova's work, his involves no cutting, just distortions and manipulations of sound and image until he achieves a satisfactory degree of hallucinatory spookiness or semiabstractness. The country videos, with their off-camera portrait of the artist as shaman or Abominable Snowman, are less effective: they have the feeling of a "Saturday Night Live" skit with no punch line.
But in the Voodoo Vocal tapes, magic happens. The street lamps and traffic lights are transformed into swarms of hovering diamond-shaped spaceships, rain on the windshield can resemble fields of diamonds, and the sound pulses around us. Melding imagination, lived experience and video into a fresh combination, Mr. Burdin leaves no doubt about his hands-on involvement with his medium. He is in tune with his time.
Last page of Paul Berman Salon interview (where he disses Chomsky and calls antiwar movement appeasers):
I'm sure this one line in your book will infuriate some and surprise others -- especially Europeans. You wrote: "In this country, we are all Noam Chomsky." What do you mean by that?
Chomsky is a man who thinks the entire world operates on simple and rational principles. The reason he's able to crank out these thousands of pages a year on all subjects is because he has an extremely simple analysis: Evil American corporations are acting in their own self-interest and trying to increase and spread their exploitation around the world. The American government is in their hands and is acting to expand its nefarious control over the world. The press has been corrupted by the wealth and power of corporations and spreads the propaganda messages required by the corporations. American claims to ever do any good around the world are merely hypocritical mendacities uttered for the purpose of advancing the larger cause of exploitation and oppression. And the response of other people in the world is that of resistance as inspired by an instinct for human freedom, even if the resistance sometimes takes a perverse and unfortunate form. Therefore, from Chomsky's point of view, all events are rationally explicable according to one or two tiny little factors: the self-interest of American corporations and the urge to resist the American corporations.
It's a very simpleminded view in which nothing inexplicable ever occurs. And yet although Chomsky is regarded by some people as the great anti-American, this kind of thought is entirely typical of America itself, of people across the political spectrum in America. People tend to think that everybody around the world is acting on some rational calculation, that the mad and pathological movements I describe that have emerged from the First World War really can't exist, that surely everybody is acting in some way in their own self-interest in a fashion that could be calculated and addressed. Finally, even the FBI and the CIA have obviously thought along these lines because it never crossed these people's minds -- not seriously anyway -- that somebody was going to be so mad to attack the United States directly. Sept. 11 revealed many shocking things and the most shocking was that the Pentagon had no plan to defend the Pentagon. In that sense, everybody in the United States, even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, everybody is a simpleminded fool.
All this is part of your belief that good people can end up supporting horrible movements if we're not vigilant.
People ought to think coldly about it. There really is a long history of excellent people with the best of hearts and the best of intentions ending up inadvertently collaborating with the worst of totalitarians. There's a long history of this. To look into your own heart and ask yourself if you're good and honest and to examine yourself to see if your own analyses are moral and well-intended is not enough. You may have the best of intentions and the purest of hearts and the warmest of feelings of solidarity for other people and yet be led by some failure of imagination to end up more or less aligned with the baddest of bad guys.
Example?
There's a long history of this kind of thing. The simplest history is of the fellow travelers of Stalin. But there's even more grotesque examples of it -- that of the French socialists in the 1930s. They wanted to avoid a new outbreak of the First World War; they refused to believe that millions of people in Germany had gone out of their minds and supported the Nazi movement. They didn't want to believe that a mass pathological movement had taken power in Germany, they wanted to be open-minded to what the Germans were saying and to the German grievances of the First World War. And the French socialists, in their open-minded, warm-hearted effort to avoid seeing anything like the First World War occur again, went out of their way to try and find what was reasonable and plausible in the arguments of Hitler. They really did end up thinking that the greatest danger to world peace was not posed by Hitler but by the hawks in their own society, in France. These people were the antiwar socialists of France, they were good people. Yet one thing led to another, they opposed France's army against Hitler, and many of them ended up supporting the Vichy regime and they ended up fascists!
Where's the parallel to today?
It's not impossible to see something like that today. People want to avoid a war in the Middle East, they say they're not for Saddam but yet they don't really want to do anything against Saddam. They see Iraqi liberals and Kurdish democrats struggling against Saddam, and they really don't want to help these people. They see pathological movements in Palestine and elsewhere engaging in acts of random murder for the purest of irrational reasons and these people, the warmhearted, good-souled antiwar socialists of the Western countries, fall all over themselves in finding ways to justify the terrible things that are happening elsewhere and find ways to prevent themselves from showing solidarity with the victims.
We do see some of the same things. With the French socialists of the 1930s, there was even a slippage into outright anti-Semitism, and no one can doubt that some of that has been occurring in the antiwar movement in the United States and above all in Europe. Of course most people in the antiwar movement are against that. But signs of it exist and it would be foolish to close your eyes to that.
So what should the left's position be today? If your argument is that we are facing a totalitarian threat similar to those of the first part of the 20th century, what do you suggest?
The true model of what the left should be doing here is shown by the other wing of French socialism, that of Léon Blum, an antifascist who was willing to fight and did fight. This ought to be the real goal of the left in the Western countries -- to be antifascist, to be in favor of liberating the people who are suffering under these regimes which are threats not only to their own citizens but to us.
Instead, we have the Bush administration's "realist" approach, which is propelling us to war.
Yes, it's the so-called realist policies of the American conservatives that ultimately got us into this situation. We, the United States, have followed the most cynical policies in the Middle East. We've aligned with reactionary feudal monarchies of the worst sort, backing the most horrendous right-wing tyrants and dictators, thinking that liberal values ought to play no role at all in formulating American policy. All this has especially been the doctrine of American conservatism. It's what I call the Nixonian tradition. It was certainly the policy of Bush the elder and it was the original instinct of the present Bush, although now he appears to be confused.
This has simply been catastrophic for people in the Middle East and ultimately for ourselves. What we need is a politics as I describe in my book, a new radicalism which is going to be against the cynical so-called realism of American conservatism and traditional American policy, in which liberal ideas are considered irrelevant to foreign policy. And also against the head-in-the-sand blindness of a large part of the American left, which can only think that all problems around the world are caused by American imperialism and there's nothing else to worry about.
What we need is a third alternative -- a politics of liberal solidarity, of anti-fascism, a politics that's willing to be interventionist when tyrants or political movements really do threaten us and the people in their own countries, a politics that's going to be aggressive in spreading and promoting liberal ideas and values in regions of the world where people who hold those values are persecuted. A politics of active solidarity, not just expressions of solidarity, but actions of solidarity with liberal-minded people in other parts of the world.
It's scandalous to me that large parts of the political spectrum aren't acting on this now. Where are all the universities and human rights foundations and trade unions and all the other civic associations in the United States? Where are those groups now? Why aren't those groups acting now to establish links of solidarity with people of the Middle East and Muslim world? To try to foment movements, or even revolutions, on behalf of liberal ideals?
But it seems impossible to work for such ideals under the current administration.
We don't need Bush to lead us to do that, we can do that without him. Even if Bush does the wrong thing, which he's bound to do, we can act on those ideas ourselves. The notion that we, the high-minded people of the left, ought to confine ourselves to marching against Bush is a very foolish idea. There's much that we can do.
That's what I call for. It's vastly needed in Europe too. Why aren't the Germans doing this? The Germans are pacifist-minded, they don't want to participate in the war, but there's a lot Germany could do. They should have people all over the Middle East promoting liberal ideas, they should be spending billions of dollars to engage in solidarity with the liberal movements in those countries. They are not doing that. All they appear to be doing is opposing Bush but not taking on a very large role themselves, though they do have peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan and Kosovo. But there's much more that Germany and France could be doing.
Even people who think that Bush is making a blunder with his military approach can try to undo that blunder themselves in some way by going ahead and doing the things that ought to be done -- promoting liberal ideas. Promoting liberal ideas, finally, is the only real way to oppose the totalitarian movements that threaten us and threaten people in the Arab and Muslim worlds, whether they're Baathist or Islamist.
I want to be clear on something. Do you support this military invasion?
I can certainly imagine how the whole thing can be done better. Bush is probably the most inept president we've ever had in regard to maintaining foreign alliances and presenting the American case and convincing the world. He's failed in every possible way. The defeat and overthrow of Saddam Hussein is in the interest of nearly the entire world and although it is in the interest of nearly the entire world, nearly the entire world is against Bush. That situation is the consequence of Bush's ineptness.
At the same time, I think that getting rid of Saddam is in our interest and in the interest of Iraq and in the interest of the Arab world. Saddam is a mad tyrant.
So I wish Bush had gone about it differently. But now that the thing is getting under way, I fervently hope it goes well. And I think that the attitude of everyone with the best of motives who have opposed the war, should now shift dramatically. The people who have demanded that Bush refrain from action should now demand that the action be more thorough. The danger now is that we will go in and go out too quickly and leave the job half-done. The position of the antiwar movement and of liberals should be that the United States fulfill entirely its obligations to replace Saddam with a decent or even admirable system. We've done this in Afghanistan but only in most halfhearted way. We should now do more in Afghanistan and do a lot in Iraq. The people who've opposed the war should now demand that Bush do more.
Are you apprehensive?
I'm scared out of my mind! Only a lunatic could be calm and confident at such a moment.
But you do think we're doing the right thing this week?
You're trying to pin me down. I'm not going to endorse Bush's policy. I'm saying that he went about it in the wrong way but I want the U.S. to do it thoroughly. No goodhearted person should imagine that it would be a bad thing to overthrow Saddam Hussein. But we have to do it well.
Have you been watching the war coverage on the news?
A little bit. I can say that there was something truly pathetic in seeing antiwar demonstrations denounce the war at one moment and then in another moment seeing grateful Iraqis welcome their British and American liberators. If I were a member of the antiwar movement, I would have felt a moral shudder at that experience.
But we can imagine the devastation in Baghdad as well.
We have no idea what it is. Like anybody I'm hoping for the least amount of suffering. The war could certainly end up achieving the opposite of what its goals should be. History offers more than one example of that.
By which you mean? Is this campaign what you expected, for the most part? War is war?
Well, no. If it turns out that out bombs have ended up slaughtering masses of Iraqi civilians, that would be a horror. But we don't know what's happened. We won't know for a while.
So what's particularly struck you has been some of the protests.
Yes, because the role of the left ought to be to express solidarity with the Iraqi people, to hope for the defeat of the fascist tyrant and to see their freedom and our own self-defense. This in fact became visible today, when some Iraqis at least, celebrated their liberation.
Kodachrome Moment: How William Eggleston's revolutionary exhibition changed everything.
By Jim Lewis
Posted Monday, February 10, 2003, at 9:38 AM PT on Slate.
Late last year a revolution was commemorated, and hardly anyone noticed—a telling sign of the utter transformation it brought about. In October, the Museum of Modern Art reprinted an exhibition catalog that, in its original incarnation, had sold out quickly and then disappeared into legend, to be hawked by rare-book dealers for $500 or $600 and seen by those of us with shallower pockets rarely, if at all.
The book was called William Eggleston's Guide. Its creator was a somewhat eccentric Memphis native in his mid-30s who had come up to MoMA with a box full of slides [in 1967, according to a "Brilliant Careers" profile in Salon] and managed to convince that august and deliberate institution to grant him [nine years later] their very first one-man exhibition of color photography.
The show was a milestone, an annunciation of the coming of color; thereafter, black and white would come to seem slightly quaint and precious—evocative, as it is in, say, Cindy Sherman's film stills, of a distant past. New art photography would be almost all chromatic: Nan Goldin, Mitch Epstein, Richard Prince, and Andreas Gursky all owe the ready acceptance of their work—though not their work itself—to Eggleston's breakthrough.
Now, I'll ask you to guess what year all this happened—and bear in mind that color movies became common in the '30s and color television was first broadcast in 1955. So the first one-man show of color photographs at the high temple of modern vanguard photography was … ?
1976.
This is astounding, if you think about it. By 1976 color was everywhere—on every magazine cover, in movie houses, and on televisions. Warhol's commercial-colored Campbell's soup paintings had appeared in 1965. Dan Flavin was putting colored neon light sculptures in galleries as far back as 1966. But photography was still almost all black-and-white, guided by aphorisms like Walker Evans' declaration that color was "vulgar" [recanted by the '70s, when Evans was using a Polaroid SX-70] and Robert Frank's insistence that "black and white are the colors of photography."
It's difficult, in retrospect, to understand just what was so contemptible about Kodachrome up until the mid-'70s. Part of it, I suspect, was simply the anxiety, attendant upon photography since its inception, that the medium wasn't really an art form at all but a quasi-scientific technique. In this regard, the unreality of black and white was reassuring, as if it provided an aesthetic guarantee by removing the colors of the world. Part of it was simply that color images were a tacky bit of business, associated with magazines and billboards and the snapshots that ordinary people took of their vacations and weddings. The medium seemed almost inherently superficial: Where black-and-white photos revealed essential forms arranged in uninflected space, color caught all the surfaces and, therefore, required an entirely different approach to composition.
Then, too, using color halved photographers' control over their art. Since very few people had the expertise (or could afford the equipment) to develop and print their own color work, the artist was transformed into little more than a shutterbug—dependent upon technicians in commercial labs to fashion the works that their public would actually see.
And part of it, to be fair, was simply that color film hadn't reached the technical level of its black-and-white counterpart; it wasn't anywhere near as sensitive to light, for example, or as sharp, which meant that pictures had to be taken outdoors or under strong artificial light. [Also, color wasn't and still isn't, lighfast, because it relies on quickly fading dyes. That's probably the single biggest reason that collectors (including museums) avoided it for so long. Now there's a conspiracy to call a color photo a "c-print" and just ignore the longevity problem.]
Against this roiling mass of resentment, hidebound dismissal, and genuine technical inadequacy, Eggleston made his singular way, emerging out the other end as the Father of Color Photography. In truth, to grant him such a title is to foreshorten history a little: Paul Outerbridge and Eliot Porter had worked in color, and so had Eggleston's contemporary, Stephen Shore. But Eggleston, more than anyone, legitimized the medium, for what he did was to take color's perceived vices and, by pushing them a little farther along the axis of their failings, turn them into virtues, thereby liberating the process to work on its own terms.
And so the pictures seem to be as casually framed as snapshots, their elements arranged in odd spirals, achieving an unlikely balance that seems more fortuitous than planned. The subject matter is often as banal as can be, pictures of folks who mean nothing to you unless you know them, engaged in activities as meaningless as possible. They're not even those archetypes of humanity—the staring poor, the rushing urbanite, the glamour wannabes—that occupied photographers of the past. Here, instead, we have the irreducibly singular, as if what the camera caught had never happened before and will never happen again in precisely the same way: a young boy lying on the floor of a garage, a woman strolling down the side of a road, a pink-tongued dog drinking from a puddle.
And yet some of the images are positively lurid, as if the artist were declaring, "Take that"—and then producing a photo of a furnace-red brick building, a sordidly green-tiled shower stall, an elderly woman whose garishly patterned dress clashes with the equally garish daybed on which she's sitting. A photograph of a tree at night is washed out by the photographer's flash, leaving only a distant red stop sign to keep the entire composition from being almost insufferably unbalanced and shot through with glare. Nowadays, when it's not unusual to see manifest grain, or light flaring uncontrollably off a glass surface, or even red-eye in pictures on gallery and museum walls, you might think that what Eggleston did seems rather tame. But many of these images—see, for example, the infamous Red Ceiling—still have the power to shock.
Certainly, they were shocking at the time; in 1976, when the Guide was first exhibited, it received notoriously nasty reviews. (Hilton Kramer—then, as now, absolutely wrong about absolutely everything—called the show "Perfectly banal … Perfectly boring.") In retrospect, the show was both necessary and beautiful, and with the catalog's reprinting, it can and should be seen by everyone.
In a way, Eggleston did for color photography what the Dutch Masters of genre did for painting in the 16th and 17th centuries: He took it out of the hands of the wealthy institutions that had sponsored it (fashion magazines and advertising agencies in the one case, the church in the other) and turned it into an expression of the everyday. [Oh, come on! As if every American didn't own a color camera in 1976. The problem was that curators thought color was too everyday--a point Lewis makes earlier in the essay. What's with this "wealthy institutions" stuff? This is a strained art historical metaphor.] It is not so far, after all, from the vulgar to the vernacular: Eggleston bridged the gap, and in doing so delivered color back into the hands of art. [Surely Eastman Kodak, if anyone, took color from wealthy institutions and put it into the hands of ordinary people. What Eggleston did, supposedly, was then legitimize that banal enterprise as capital-A art. Except he didn't really--his printing, scale, and attention to detail made it a different level of activity than snapshots dropped off at the drugstore. Also, "bridging the gap between the vulgar and the vernacular" is about as meaningful as "bridging the gap between the naked and the nude."]