Author: JH

Returning from a trip to the great capital of this great nation, I intend to share a wild mix of observations, brooding, and adventure with anyone who cares to read this (three major deaths mark the weekend, but here’s more news). First, on true dedication, which I think I have seen but twice in my life: (1) On the face of each and every one of dozens of female customers during the fall sale in the Bergdorf Goodman shoe department. And (2) last night, at 4:40 a.m., in front of a Starbucks in Washington, DC. At 4:30 the hotel fire alarm had gone off, and it was for real. We were ordered to evacuate the building immediately. Several hundred people, almost all philosophers (I’ve been, well, sort of stranded at a philosophy conference during the past three days) found themselves in their pajamas in front of the hotel in a mild and foggy December night. Many, within minutes, started to discuss philosophical problems. Two of them sat down at an empty table in front of a closed Starbucks and while I cruised the premises to get some information on what was going on (flames roaring in the 7th floor, my room was on 9th), they kept sitting there, highly engaged in the exchange of philosophical ideas. Nearby, water poured down the elevator shafts into the hotel lobby, firemen walked by schlepping their heavy gear, while other guests, draped in white sheets, some without shoes, anxiously awaited news on what to do next. But almost two hours later, when most of us were allowed back into our rooms to get our belongings, the two philosophers still sat there, lecturing away about their latest research…

But here is what I actually wanted to say about Washington. Yesterday, to take a break from the philosophers, I went to the East Wing of the National Art Gallery. Apart from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the East Wing is the place to go in Washington. I find the building by I. M. Pei thoroughly brilliant, a modern design that really works both as pure architecture and with the art in it. My pleasure was tainted by this question though: I am aware that Pollock had several shows in the Manhattan Gallery scene before his work made it into the museums, and so did Warhol. But it seems obvious (at least to me) that in the Chelsea galleries of today, you cannot find anything that remotely touches these works. Why is this? Because today’s art is so much duller? Because the gallery owners are? Because the good stuff is somewhere, but not in Chelsea? Or because it takes time to filter it out, and the display in a place like the National Art Gallery makes strong work shine even more? What I don’t get is why the current Chelsea crowd, especially when it comes to photography, seems so hopelessly oblivious of what happened in the past century, or at least, not even remotely living up to it (only if you ask me, of course…). It is as if Romanticism had never ended. Or as if people miss it, perhaps despite of themselves. (I apparently don’t miss it, even though, in theory, I might want to be the kind of 19th century person involved in it, but only if it really was the 19th century, and only if there still was the internet.) Even the low level Beuys imitators somehow seem to sneak in a trace of kitsch, and an overdose of “meaning”… (Not, of course, that I would live up to my own standards.)

Anyway – back to Manhattan now, regardless.

Ok, it took me a week or two to recover from that post on categorizing photography over there at the Alec Soth blog. Not that I don’t have other things to recover from. I have listed his blog here (to your right), considering it, generally, very worthwhile reading. And now this. I thought that, almost twenty years after the movie Dead Poets Society, nobody could possibly come up with some sort of a *chart* (the kind of thing you know from math, or some sociological study, with an axis) that is supposed to give you a formula for evaluating or categorizing art. Soth juxtaposes “scientific” and “poetic” and “even toyed around with charting different photographers on this spectrum.”

The basic question of Dead Poets Society, a movie on events unfolding in a New England poetry class taught by a somewhat rebellious teacher (played by Robin Williams), is to ask whether people should apply textbook formulas or think for themselves (guess what!). Let me remind you of some bits of the story. Early on in the movie the teacher lets one of the students read the introduction of a Poetry Anthology that will serve the class as their textbook throughout the year. That introduction is based on a spectrum strikingly similar to Alec Soth’s. So the teacher asks the question “What do you think of this introduction?”, only to give the answer himself: “Here is what I think: […] Rip these pages out of your books.” He asks each member of the class to learn using his (it is a boy school) own intellect and imagination to appreciate something as infinitely subtle and complex as poetry. The students, somewhat dumbfounded, rip out the pages, and this for them marks the beginning of a potentially life changing and, in one case, life ending class.

Soth’s attempt at helping us understand pictures (is this a descriptive picture? please, I need a chart to find out) seems heartbreakingly naive. Or is it repulsive? It buys into the thinking of the worst enemies of anything original in photography: the mindless, large agency, low level creative who could just as well work at your local post office. Time and again, some of these people come up with an earth shattering pseudo scientific view, defining with oh so many words e.g. “cutting edge” photography. Or, of course, they pay a marketing agency which exhibits their expertise by conducting a “study”, coming up with mind bashing insights like “today’s women feel beautiful when they are pregnant” – oh yes, I can give you the links to websites where you can learn such facts, but I’m not going to; these are among the things that take me time to recover from.

Why not end on a grand note: One wonders if “artists in a lens based medium” should cut both the “deep” statements and the ad hoc philosophy. Art talk sure is nice, it is a “salient feature of our culture” particularly amongst some of the fancier gallery owners (recommended reading: “On Bullshit”, Harry G. Frankfurt, Cambridge University Press). But after all, let’s leave questions on the epistemology of art to those who know about that stuff. No offense. Come back for more.

I sometimes wonder who reads artist statements. For those of us who, for better or worse, have already arrived in the current century, a look back on what happens when, well, Tiefenpsychologie goes a little too deep may be fun. The following excerpt from Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation Of Dreams” seemed like a perfect fit for my ongoing “What It Is Like To Be A Traffic Cone” series:

“A fragment from the dream of a young woman who suffered from agoraphobia as the result of her fear of temptation:

I am walking in the street in summer; I am wearing a straw hat of peculiar shape, the middle piece of which is bent upwards, while the side pieces hang downwards (here the description hesitates), and in such a fashion that one hangs lower than the other. I am cheerful and in a confident mood, and as I pass a number of young officers I think to myself: You can’t do anything to me.

As she could produce no associations to the hat, I said to her: “The hat is really a male genital organ, with its raised middle piece and the two downward-hanging side pieces.” It is perhaps peculiar that her hat should be supposed to be a man, but after all one says: Unter die Haube kommen (to get under the cap) when we mean: to get married. I intentionally refrained from interpreting the details concerning the unequal dependence of the two side pieces, although the determination of just such details must point the way to the interpretation. I went on to say that if, therefore, she had a husband with such splendid genitals she would not have to fear the officers; that is, she would have nothing to wish from them, for it was essentially her temptation-phantasies which prevented her from going about unprotected and unaccompanied. This last explanation of her anxiety I had already been able to give her repeatedly on the basis of other material.”

Do not miss my movie “Traffic Cone Envy” on this subject, with an admirable performance of the song “Do It Again” by the ingenious Marilyn Monroe.