This title was digitized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA).
About Art papers. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1981-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 1, 1981)
Larry Fink and many others. Her name turns up in many other people’s biographies. Model and Arbus; Arbus and Model—the comparison is inevitable. A local art dealer with caustic wit said, “Arbus was motivated to take pictures of people even less attractive than she was...” A negative and unflattering generalization, yet revelatory of at least a grain of truth; Arbus was a savage with a killer in stinct rare in female photographers. A killer instinct carried to its literal con clusion by her own cold hand it would seem, after her 1970 suicide. But the point is that as much as Arbus is right ly praised as an aesthetic revolu tionary, her work was limited by her lack of empathy with her subject mat ter. Her attitude was ultimately very cold, expressing, “Here they are folks, just look at these freaks. Wonderfully horrible, aren’t they...” more than anything else. Elephant Man was a successful movie because we were forced to identify with a ter ribly deformed human. If Arbus viewed her subjects with any such sympathy or identification, then she carried that secret with her to her grave. Lisette Model, on the other hand, also photographs people who look funny, sometimes even a little freaky, but there is a warmth, a kind of sym pathy or empathy that one does not find in her deceased former student. It poses a curious question: if she is not really mocking them, then why is she so obsessed with funny-looking people anyway? One answer is of fered by Berenice Abbot when she comments, “We are very funny, and it is good that we can laugh at each other.” She also states that Model’s photographs are more like sculpture than photography, because they are so monumental. The oversized prints on the wall at the New Orleans Museum reveal a grainy, high con trast, textural approach to light. The images have a quality of spontaneous energy quick frozen into granite-like solidity, yet deceptively rendered in merely two dimensions. Model is an enigma. Difficult to speculate about, her motives are ex pressed in unequivocal terms. There is no confusion or hesitancy in her vision, yet her communication is so primally visual that verbal philos ophies fall short of summarizing her. Perhaps that is why she sticks to teaching, is reticent to exhibit, and even more reticent to encourage any sort of analysis of her work. Her creatures are vital, sometimes ludicrously alive. A museum gallery devoid of visitors would still pulsate with the chaotic energy of Model’s images. The style and energy of her vision seems somewhat Fellini-esque, but comparisons can only be super ficial in this context. Model’s use of the camera is a very direct extension of the eye, and the eye is a direct ex tension of a paradoxical but for midably well-defined vision. It pro bably cannot be explained or explain ed away; her vision is a purely visual cosmology that must be dealt with on its own terms. No schools, philosophies, or traditions are especially in evidence. Her style seems to be derived purely from a direct ap proach to people with a camera. Or as she has said, “Don’t shoot till the subject hits you in the pit of your stomach.” A very direct approach. Berenice Abbott puts it this way: “Concerned with art, the subject is lost. Concerned with the subject, art is found.” And in Lisette Model’s case, it rings true. This fifty year retrospective at the New Orleans Museum includes 120 of Model’s photographs, over half of which have never been exhibited or published. Some 200 photographs by ten American women photographers went on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art simultaneously with the Lisette Model retrospective. These “Ten Women of Photography” are Berenice Abbott, Barbara Morgan, Louise Dahl- Wolfe, Toni Fressell, Ruth Bernhard, Carlotta Corpron, Lotte Jacobi, Laura Gilpin, Nell Dorr, and Con- suelo Kananga. What is interesting about this group of pictures is how they differ from the Model exhibit in the adjacent museum space. Given the evidence at hand, one would assume there is such a thing as a “women’s school” of photography, that Model was some sort of maverick, and that the ten other women were card-carrying members. This effect is enhanced by the rather similar traits common to the ten artists in the “Recollections” exhibit. There are qualifications, of course. One might get the impression that one, perhaps Abbott, set some trends and possibly others were in fluenced, but there is a strange similarity in much of the work which even includes such themes as favorite portrait subjects. For instance, Edward Hopper and Alfred Steiglitz seem to keep reappearing in portraits by various of these women, and some Bauhaus-inspired montages by Morgan seem almost interchangeable with others by Corpron. A detailed analysis would require a complete investigation and might be a suitable theme for someone’s thesis. Virtually all the work in this show, which was produced in conjunction with a book by Margretta Mitchell en titled Recollections: Ten Women of Photography, is of uniformly high quality. Common themes include celebrities, still lifes, landscapes and montages. Abbott, Morgan, Dahl- Wolfe and Frissell were very visible from the 1930’s through the 1950’s, as their work was much published in the leading magazines of the day. This may, to some extent, explain the strangely interrelated quality of the work on view. But the real questions here have much to do with the perogative of artists to make their own statements rather than to follow already cleared paths. In this regard, the evidence of the “Recollections” show is that Berenice Abbott and perhaps Ruth Bernhard were perhaps somewhat more willing to follow their own inner light. As for questions such as why and what does it all mean, one might raise issues such as the traditional female attitudes toward taking or not taking risks, but in this case the evidence may be circumstantial. Despite the overall high quality, any conclusions drawn from the “Recollections” show would tend to be either patronizing or chauvinistic in tone, and in any event would tend to be greatly at variance with the fiercely single-minded spirit of Model in the adjacent chambers. —D. Eric Bookhardt D. Eric Bookhardt, a photographer and writer in New Orleans, is a regular contributor to Art Papers. Roger Dorset, Shrine, mixed media on wood, 1980 (photo: courtesy of the artist). Roger Dorset Atlanta Art Workers Coalition Gallery Atlanta, Georgia June 5-27 Image South Gallery Atlanta, Georgia June 6 - July 6 The simultaneous showing of Roger Dorset’s Icons at the AAWC Gallery and Image South in June afforded an opportunity to view thematic progression and continuity within a large body of his work. Dorset’s icons evolve out of decora tive compulsion and take shape in a range of textures, materials, symbols and painterly techniques amplifying the obsessive quality of work which runs the gamut from cartoons that read like cultural maps to single image paintings, from cluttered collaged canvases to boxes invested with pre ciousness and mystery. His icons are attempts to channel energy. This sen sibility is conveyed in recurrent images of spirals, crosses, efflorescent forms and pyramid shapes and em phasized by linear embellishments which suggest radiation, heat and combustion. Flames engulf narrative tableaux, the application of paint suggests movement, and frenzy is sus tained by repetitive use of patterned fields. In his varied work, Dorset establishes a progression from cul tural to personal memory, from exter nal perception of the object as gestalt to a penetrating examination of its materiality. Issues of containment and conceal ment are raised: boxes are locked and houses have no entrance. Forms are opened only to reveal the insubstan tial. In spite of fluorescent color and elements of play, there is a sinister ingenuity which induces macabre undertones, intensified by surreal combinations of materials and tex tures. Religious devotion is tempered with undercurrents of fetishism, sac rifice and violence, ultimately con firming a desire for confession and a passion for keeping secrets. Dorset’s icons, charged with mixtures of nos talgia, reverence and dark humor, struggle between sensuality and spirituality, striving to join the physical with the metaphysical, to make tangible the intangible existence which they address. Six Diagrams for a Spirit, a series of laminated drawings, dazzled at the entrance of the AAWC Gallery. These diagrams represent a con densed expression of the themes and symbols repeated throughout the two exhibitions. Dorset depicts a dime store variety of religious personages and iconography, creating a comic book Inferno with elements of play underscored by the erotic and myste rious. A voluptuous blue angel and virile yellow devil with wide-eyed va cant expressions cavort with a large green dog-frog creature in this satanic re-make of ‘Barbie and Ken on Vaca tion.’ With forceful, crudely drawn lines the erotic stylization of this pair immediately recalls taboo grammar school drawings. The images which are casually strewn about like so much debris have an extraordinary range in content. Little rubber stamped hands point to crosses with silver sizzles, glittery heat waves emphasize doorways, rhythm vibrates in swaying palm trees and busy zebra striped fields could easily be swimming spermatozoa. The clash of loud patterns, stripes and brazen prints is littered with symbols of transformation—spirals, swastikas, triangles, pyramids. These images, in themselves signs of mystery and of secret knowledge, suggest pulsating energy. Dorset looks to memory wherein all symbols, real, relished and imagined, have the same intensity. In these narrative tableaux, ancient sym bols are contradicted by their rela tionship to common vernacular form: one could easily expect to find a one- eyed, one-horned flying purple peo ple eater sharing the stage alongside Leonardo’s “Man.” Despite the playful childlike quality of these works, the humor of their being laminated like I.D. cards, and the grand comic decadence of this Wild West mise-en-scene, images of con tainment are persistent. Mazes are messy and confused;. two phalluses are boxed, crossed out and washed with murky mauve. In contrast to the freedom and movement of the devil 15 Art Papers September-October 1981
