Conceptual Art…in San Diego!?

During the fairly brief time that I lived in San Diego (only three years), I found it hard to get a handle on what sort of art scene was going on there.

I wasn’t a student at an art school and I wasn’t working for an arts institution, so I didn’t have any direct involvement with the arts community there…I was just a person interested in the arts (interested in what contemporary artists were doing there, not folk or genre artists). As far as I could figure out, there wasn’t a single gallery showing contemporary art. Was there a gallery district? I couldn’t really locate one.

There were the two branches of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum of Photographic Art and the art gallery at UCSD…but the history was elusive.

What history was there of artists’ activity, if any? I knew that John Baldessari had lived in National City, just south of San Diego, before lighting out for Cal Arts, but what more, if any, was there?

I guess I was looking for some sense of continuity, to understand what artists had lived and worked in San Diego over the years, what they’d accomplished.

Well, leave it to a Los Angeles art gallery — Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art — (no surprise that it’s not in San Diego) to fill in the historical gaps with their show titled “San Diego and the Origins of Conceptual Art in California.”

The show reports on the role that conceptual artists played teaching at the UCSD art department in the 60s, 70s and beyond (Allan Kaprow taught there from the mid-70s to the mid-90s). I was surprised and pleased to learn that Eleanor Antin photographed parts of her “100 Boots” project in Sorrento Valley, in Northern San Diego, now a solid block of telecom companies’ offices and suburban homes — a place where I’d spent many hours glued to my office chair and laptop screen, sorting out telecom industry stats.

If only I’d known that Antin had worked around there, somehow it would have made being there more interesting.

When I lived in San Diego I always had the weird feeling that those artists (and musicians, etc.) who did live there, would by and large take their talent elsewhere to exhibit, perform, discuss and so on. Maybe that description fits most smaller cities that have artists (primarily ensconced in schools and universities) but that lack a sizable audience to attend exhibitions and events, or collectors to buy work.

I guess that speaks to the need for public interest there to catch up with the interesting projects that the city’s artists are doing. That’s probably as good a definition of a vibrant, cultured city as any definition could be, a community of people actively engaged with the work that the community’s artists are creating.

What a strange situation: to have a core of artists doing such vibrant, cutting-edge work in a larger community for the most part oblivious or indifferent to what they were doing.

The LA Times arts blog Culture Monster provides a brief review.

“…All Around the Stores is a Big Parking Lot…”

With pundits predicting the imminent demise of the shopping mall, here’s a nostalgic look back, via the blog Franklin Avenue.

This 1960s era black and white film (entitled “Let’s Visit a Shopping Center”) takes absolutely nothing for granted. It starts from square one, so that even a visitor from the distant reaches of the Andromeda Galaxy would come away with a clear understanding of the American mall.

The producer of the film — Bernard Wilets — apparently made a number of educational films for children and young adults. That might explain the tone and pacing of the film…Although it’s hard to imagine why children would need to watch an introduction- to-shopping-malls educational film.

BTW, this particular shopping center looks like one I grew up near and spent quite a few hours visiting, in Sherman Oaks, California.

The Picture Snatcher

Anyone interested in how photographers are depicted in movies probably knows about “Rear Window,” Alfred Hitchcock’s film starring Jimmy Stewart as a sidelined Life magazine-esque photojournalist peeking at his neighbors…

Or “Blowup,” about a fashion photographer, styled after Richard Avedon, one of whose photos inadvertently captures a crime being committed.

Fewer people may have seen “Picture Snatcher,” a Warner Brothers “pre-code” movie (those great, racy films made in the earliest days of sound, before the censorship code caught up with them), starring James Cagney.

The story centers around an ex-convict who decides to go straight by becoming a tabloid photographer, of all things. How straight he actually goes is debatable (and provides a lot of the comedy here, too), because he relies upon many of the same sneaky tactics and contacts he used during his life of crime.

The dramatic highpoint of the story centers on the fictionalized retelling of how Thomas Howard photographed  the execution of Ruth Snyder in New York’s electric chair at Sing Sing. Howard surreptitiously strapped a miniature camera to his ankle and snapped a photo from the death chamber, just as the juice was applied.

The film has most of the familiar tropes we see about photographers. Cagney even says at one point that a camera is just like a gun, with a trigger and everything. It’s a lot of fun, and the photographer storyline is probably the least of it — It’s got car chases, gun molls, snappy dialogue, cops with outrageous Irish brogues, machine gun battles, Lower East Side scenes (via Warner’s back lot). The works!

George W. Bush, Photographed

Kottke.org links to this New York Times online piece by Errol Morris on photographs of George W. Bush (”Mirror, Mirror on the Wall”).

The photos were taken by presidential press core photgraphers. Although they don’t change my opinion about the quality of the job he did, they do certainly evoke sympathy…especially for the enormous effort it must take to appear alway on-point, in-control and self-assured in the face of cameras.

One of the striking things about this set of images is the range of visual effects on display.

“…shadows, reflections, the unexpected things that happen in an image — the president’s own shadow flanking the seal of the United Nations, the shadow that accompanies Bush and Barack Obama on a walk into the Rose Garden.”

Surely the oddest is a photograph of President Bush walking with President-elect Obama. Obama’s shadow — with an arm extended in a wave to someone off-camera — is visible on a wall behind the men. However, the shadow takes on a pranksterish life of its own…appearing to be waving good-bye to Bush.

Island of Many Hills

A book that I’m eagerly-awaiting (it’s being published this spring) is Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, by ecologist Eric Sanderson.

It describes — in words and images — how the island of Manhattan looked when Henry Hudson first saw it, 400 hundreds years ago (the 400th anniversary of his voyage is this month).

The book employs some great imaging techniques, like a split view looking north from Wall Street, showing the Westside as it was, all verdant forest, and the Eastside as it is now, all concrete and construction. I thought the Westside looked beautiful…then I felt a twinge of sadness at the thought of all the great architecture in the West Village not there.

Other than the Manhattan waterfront — and even that’s changed dramatically — there are few of the natural contours of the landscape remaining in New York City’s modern form.

Very different from the other cities I’ve lived in (Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego). Those cities were dramatically changed in development, too, but with buildings and roads nonetheless defined by the natural environment.

The book is profiled in today’s New York Times: “Henry Hudson’s View of New York: When Trees Tipped the Sky.”

The Works

When I was in college at Berkeley I remember hearing these guys (I’m sure they were in the engineering school) talk about how they had snuck into a BART tunnel and set up a table and ate a meal there in the tunnel, clearing out before a train came along.

I was reminded of them when I picked up a copy of a book called The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher (2005).

It’s an infrastructure nerd’s dream-come-true. It takes New York City as a model for explaining how traffic, communications, power, water and freight move through a city. For those of us living in New York, the book helps us understand so many of the inscrutable signs, symbols and objects we see as we walk, drive or subway along.

It does so with a minimum of text and an abundance of very nifty color illustrations, like for example, a timeline of street lamp designs, with the lamps silhouetted. Or, those street repair notes, drawn on the pavement in spray paint by repair crews. Or, an illustration of the underside of a street sweeping truck (a view I’d never like to see, except as an illutration in a book, BTW).

There’s a great page illustrating the most common types of trees in the five boroughs. How about what the most common subway system traffic light signals mean? You’ve got it here.

If you’re looking for a blueprint to help you set up a three-course meal in a subway tunnel, you probably won’t find it here (in any case, I want my three-course meals in a restaurant, not a tunnel). But if you’re looking for a book to help you understand the many things we walk around, over and through that help a city function, this is the book.

Office Space

I dropped by the Ford Foundation building earlier this week, inspired to pay a visit by a recent article in Metropolis magazine…and also by my own recent move to a new office in an office park in New Jersey.

Metropolis called the building a forgotten gem of Modernist architecture, and a fine example of green construction principles, too. It is a beauty, and if you worked there I bet it would almost have you getting up a little earlier each morning, just to get to work in such a beautiful office.

I only saw the lobby/atrium (I think the rest of the building is off-limits to people who don’t work there), but the sight of that alone is enough to win you over. The building is constructed from that iconic Modernist material Corten steel and glass. It’s the same steel used by Richard Serra for his sculptures.

The steel develops a rust patina over time and the glass transmits light and offers views of the surrounding buildings. The glass walls surrounding the atrium are ten stories high. The height of the atrium itself is the entire height of the building, with a skylight surrmounting the tropical garden at ground level.

Facing the atrium are a library, reception area, conference rooms and offices,  lit by warm light and offering views of the tropical garden. The entire project was a deliberate effort to avoid a problem with office construction in Midtown: constructing office buildings jammed right up against similar highrises, affording only views of the walls of buildings right adjacent to your own.

You only need to step inside the Ford Foundation Building to see how well it succeeds.

—————-

When I got back to the office I work in, I was surprised to see many similarities with the Ford Foundation Building. They both have a landscaped atrium, both have offices facing the atrium, both have a central skylight…

Why does one succeed so beautifully, and the other not? In part, it’s the materials — The steel, glass and stone of the Ford Foundation are gorgeous. It’s also the proportions. The soaring height of the Ford Foundation adds to the beauty of it. In part it’s the abundance of natural light, which is limited in my own office. And then there are those great views of the surrounding buildings through the high glass walls.

The Ford Foundation, by the way, is adjacent to Tudor City and surrounding neighborhood. It’s a little pocket of a neighborhood at the far end of E. 42nd Street, with an exceptional view of the United Nations building,  one of those neighborhoods that you may never have seen, even if you’ve lived in New York for a long time.

Commuting is for the Birds

Sometimes I walk down Houston toward 1st Avenue, past the smell of corned beef at Katz’s Deli, on my morning walk to the subway. This particular morning I saw a photographer with one of those enormous, battleship gray telephoto lenses that seem to be used only for sports and for photographing birds.

I did hear a lot of birds singing as I walked by the photographer, although I didn’t see anything terribly exotic. Still, it’s good to know that, ornithologically, my commute has something to offer.

Robert Frank’s Portrait of America

From today’s New York Times — what will surely be one of the last interviews with photographer Robert Frank, now 84 years old.

“Photographers, critics and scholars have long since concluded that Mr. Frank liberated the photographic image from the compositional tidiness and emotional distance of his predecessors. The ordinary, incidental moments captured in his pictures — and their raw, informal look — paved the way for photographers like Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand a decade later…Critics considered the book an indictment of American society, and his pictures did strip away the veneer of breezy optimism reflected in magazines, movies and television programs of the period.”

I look forward to seeing the upcoming exhibit at the National Gallery of Art (Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans) which will feature all of Frank’s contact sheets from The Americans project.

Questions of Influence in Art Museum Sponsorship

The recent credit crisis has exposed financial weakness in many industries, including the world of art museums.

Here are links to reporting that look at how the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MOCA) and other art spaces, too, have financed recent exhibitions via support from the very galleries that represent the artists featured in museum shows.

For museumgoers, the issue raises questions concerning to what extent museum curators are curating shows that genuinely pursue independent scholarship, without being influenced by financial contributions by galleries that stand to benefit from seeing their artists’ work showcased in museums.

This issue, too, reveals a shift away from corporate and NEA support of museums, which have traditionally underwritten exhibitions, perhaps encouraging museums (especially those museums whose finances are shaky) to seek other donors whom they might not consider in a more stable environment.

• “Next in Line for a Bailout? A Major Art Museum”
• “Museums Solicit Dealers’ Largess”
• “MOCA Faces Serious Financial Problems”

Influence and Similarity in Photography

On James Danziger’s blog “The Year in Pictures” comes this discussion of photographic inspiration, emulation or outright copying…You decide. The discussion centers around Paul Fusco’s Robert F. Kennedy funeral train photos.

The comments following the blog entry are especially interesting.

Without a Car (by Choice) in Los Angeles

If I could manage it, I’d be bicoastal — live part of the year in New York, part of the year in LA.

Instead, I indulge myself by living virtually in LA…by visiting the blog Living in Los Angeles Without a Car (LILAWAC), among others

Recently, a list of times when it’s best not to ride your bike in Los Angeles.

Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman

Great photographer of mid-century modernist architecture in Los Angeles. A new film has been made about Julius Shulman that I’m intrigued to see. View the trailer.

The Weird Online World of Saul Alinsky (and some good information, too)

When I was in high school, and later on in college, I spent a lot of time rummaging through used bookstores and often I’d come across early ’70s era mass paperback copies of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals or Reveille for Radicals. (Both books are still in print, btw, from Vintage Books).

Fast forward through almost thirty years of trickle-down economics, conservative “wrecking crew” attacks on government, deregulation…to the upcoming inauguration of Barack Obama.

I wanted to find out more about Saul Alinsky after learning how community organizing strategies strengthened Barack Obama’s campaign and, it seems clear, were instrumental in his winning the election.

I started doing some searching online and, as so often happens online, things got very strange very quickly. Here’s what I mean:

If you do a quick Google search on “Saul Alinsky,” you get 226,000 hits. To show you how bizarre things can get, if you do the same search and exclude the word “satanist,” you get 206,000 hits (those numbers will inevitably change as soon as I publish this).

In other words, there are 20,000 web pages out there that make reference to Alinsky in some connection with Satanism. Exclude the word “devil” from your search, too, and you’re really starting to get somewhere — You’ve whittled down the hits by about 11,000 more (he’s been called a lot of other unkind names, too, by the way: “communist fellow travel,” “communist guru,” and worse).

Where does all this Beelzebub hub bub come from?

As far as I can tell, these references stem from a literary allusion that Alinsky made to Lucifer in an interview he did for Playboy in 1972.

Truly, as Hunter S. Thompson once said: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

* * *

Alinsky’s polemical style can trip people up because it’s so vivid and provocative. Then, too, he had a prankster’s sensibility that probably influenced everybody from New Leftists to Republican strategists like Lee Atwater.

It doesn’t take much Google searching to see that conservatives spend a lot more time thinking about Saul Alinsky than liberals do — or, at any rate, spend a lot more time blogging about him; In fact, if it weren’t for conservatives kvetching about Alinsky there would be much less online content out there.

Well, all this fringe content made me hunger for some accurate, level-headed information and commentary about this Chicago-born-and-bred community organizer who has been dead for almost forty years. Where could I find that?

You’ve got to do an awful lot of scrolling to find good information, but here are some suggestions:

• His 1972 interview in “Playboy” – great intro to his life story and persona, as well as his ideas
• A 2007 NPR interview with Alinsky biographer Sanford Horwitt (Let Them Call me ‘Rebel’)
• Info about a biographical film on Alinsky (“The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and his Legacy”)
• Web site of the Industrial Areas Foundation (the community organizing group he founded)
• Wikipedia biography

Unforseen Consequences of an Unforseen Crisis

The New York Times reports on a strange link between the subprime mortgage crisis and the West Nile virus:

An aerial survey (of Bakersfield, California) suggested the connection: foreclosures and abandoned homes produced a landscape dotted with untended swimming pools, Jacuzzis and ponds. From the air, they appeared green and were probably producing swarms of mosquitoes…

Wait List

The New York Public Library owns 17 copies of David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest. As of today, every copy is either checked out, on hold or lost.

And I’m number 92 of 92 on the waiting list.

Urban Hike: Vernon Boulevard, Queens, New York

Catching the last days and weeks of warm weather before fall and winter start, I decided to take some urban hikes –

A brief visit to see the huge high rises that went up so incredibly quickly on the Hunter’s Point waterfront inspired me to explore further along the Long Island City shoreline. I chose Vernon Boulevard as my pathway.

Vernon Boulevard runs North/South and basically parallels the Manhattan east side waterfront, from the East 40s to the 80s. It passes through industrial and residential neighborhoods both, running through Long Island City and Astoria, has spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline, goes directly under the Queensboro bridge, has a Victorian-era architectural surprise in store, and includes several art venues, too.

The fact that it parallels the waterfront was a big draw for me — There are several parks along the Queens waterfront (some were created as far back as the 1930s) that actually make the water more accessible to people here than large sections of Manhattan have been (at least until recently, with the improvements along the west side waterfront).

The boulevard begins near the approach to the Queens Midtown Tunnel — I didn’t start my walk there, but instead at 44th Drive, a bit above Hunter’s Point, where there’s a nice little village of shops and restaurants along Vernon Boulevard.

Except for that brief stretch in Hunter’s Point, it’s a very car-centric street, as is much of Queens. Cars and trucks pretty much rule the road. A bike path was added recently, though.

Vernon Boulevard takes on a more industrial character around where I picked it up, the kind of industrial activity that you don’t see much in Manhattan anymore, with food cart storage businesses, taxi and limo garages, brick yards, lumber yards and manufacturing — It’s weird to see a small junkyard or lumber yard possessed of a spectacular Manhattan view, but there are many here. A lot of the streets intersecting Vernon sight along a view of the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building and others.

One of the taxi shops I saw, Taxidepot, has a film props department, renting out classic cars like a checker cab I spotted parked out front.

Just before you reach the Intersection of Queens Plaza, there’s a a castle-like Victorian era brick building, a ghostly mirage from the late 19th century. It’s the last remaining structure from a terracotta tile manufacturing business that went bankrupt in 1928 –The New York Architectural Terra-Cotta Works. One source I looked at said that the building was the showroom and offices of the company. The building was used for a variety of purposes after 1928, but has stood empty since the 1960s. Amazingly, it survived, achieving landmark status in 1982. The New York Times told its story in 1987.

As you stand directly under the bridge and look away from the water, you’ll see the Silvercup Studio sign. I saw it and the bridge silhouetted against the bright sky.

As you continue North, Queensbridge Park is to your left, with baseball diamonds facing the bridge and views of the UN building and midtown. It was quiet and empty on the Friday afternoon that I visited, but I thought of all those center fielders who played there over the years, and the views of midtown they had.

Away from the bridge, closer to the side walk, is a structure looking like a mid-century modernist home (with its louvers and smooth concrete) in need of some TLC. Actually, though, it’s a ventilating tower for the subway tunnel that goes under the river.

* * * *

The only sour note on my walk happened as I went past Keyspan’s Ravenswood Generating Station, a huge power plant situated between the river and Vernon Boulevard. It probably takes a good ten minutes to walk the length of it.

As I was walking, I was questioned by a private security guard who stopped his car in front of me and told me I couldn’t take photographs of the plant (I hadn’t been taking any pictures). In response to my question about whether I could photograph while I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the station, the guard said: “Let me put it this way…If I can see you, you can’t photograph.” Creepy. Creepy And wrong, too.

I’d heard about photographers being told they couldn’t take pictures from where they were standing on public property in New York, but this was the first time it had happened to me. To be clear about it: a photographer has the right to photograph private property IF that private property is visible to the photographer WHEN HE IS STANDING on PUBLIC PROPERTY, such as a CITY SIDEWALK.

Here is a good starting point for more information.

I’d suggest having a “photograph-in” on the sidewalk in front of this plant. A hundred or so photographers gathering in front to assert their right to take pictures in public.

Detailed information has been published about this plant, including photographs, by the way, in a community newspaper serving the people who live on Roosevelt Island (the plant appears prominently in their view) a well as in other sources openly available and legitimately published. I guess the security guard didn’t know that.

* * * *

After that experience, it was a relief to arrive at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria. The park, opened in 1986, has a scruffy, DIY look that I find to be very appealing. It’s a people’s park/community garden, world’s away in look and attitude from the Gantry Plaza Park several block’ down the waterfront in Hunters Point, that, while nice, is almost a front yard for the luxury condos nearby.

One piece at Socrates Sculpture Park that I enjoyed in particular was simply a set of aluminum-framed sliding doors you’d find in a Walmart store. Instead of opening into a retail cornucopia, though, they stood silent, closed — we could only look through the glass toward the buildings of Manhattan and the other sculptures in the park.

The perimeter of the park is surrounded by a short wall made up of stones and masonry gathered from building discards (I spotted a piece of brownstone in there). Interspersed among the stones were several with large, single letters (a “D,” an “F,” etc.) carved in them. It’s a cool discovery finding those letters.

There are more waterfront parks along Vernon Boulevard that I hadn’t even heard of — Rainey Park, Hallets Cove…

As I walked, in at least two places I saw signs that said “Walk New York” adorned with an illustration of a dress shoe stepping sprightly along, together with listings of different arts venues and their distance in fractions of miles from the spot where the sign was. Couldn’t find out anything about who or when they were placed there, unfortunately.

Well, regardless who placed them, Vernon Boulevard does make a good path for an urban hike.

Flickring On

After college, in the late 1980s, I toyed with the idea of becoming a photojournalist. I never really pursued it as a practical goal, though, because it seemed like an impossible fantasy, so impractical that it didn’t make sense to pursue it.

Certainly, there were photojournalists working then, as now, but to me the era of photojournalism was in the past. A heroic past, one that I was fascinated by and whose heroes I admired, but nonetheless the past. Not that one couldn’t pursue photography projects; but it seemed to me that the only option was to do it as an artist or independent documentary photographer, as a self-financed labor of love or grant-funded project.

Of course, I took the practice of photography itself seriously. I taught myself darkroom skills, studied the work of great photographers by visiting museums (I lived near the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and its great photo collection), reading photo books and magazines, visiting photo exhibits in galleries like Camerawork.

I spent most of my free time photographing (street photography was my main interest), leaving my office job early to do so, and spending my weekends shooting and printing.

I got into a photography studio art program so that I could totally involve myself in the medium and be with like-minded people that I could have conversations with and learn from. The program I got into took me to New York where I had a second education visiting the many galleries and museums showing photography. It was affiliated with the International Center of Photography, and that affiliation bolstered my efforts.

As it happened, the faculty in my department discouraged the kind of street photography I’d been doing — This was actually good. It gave me an expanded understanding of the medium and (I hope) discouraged me from simply imitating the most obvious cliches of the approach to photography that had interested me so much.

Financial responsibilities led me to seek work outside of photography and I largely stopped taking pictures seriously right at the end of the film era and the beginning of the digital era in the late 1990s.

I didn’t buy a digital camera until around 2004 and didn’t use Flickr until 2006. I used to think of digital photography as not really photography at all, but rather as a sort of still video fake version, masquerading as film photography. But, about six months ago, I bought a slightly better digital camera and started to get back into taking pictures regularly again.

I’ve probably re-told this chronology to myself hundreds of time, but I started thinking about it again today after reading Alissa Quart’s essay “Flickring Out” in the August issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. The essay raises concerns about the future of the profession of photojournalism in an era where amateurs are taking more photos than ever (sometimes of significant events such as the London bus bombings) and making them available online.

Predictably, the difficulties faced by photojournalists stem from news organizations cutting budgets and corners, not really from the greater availability of amateur photography online. Being a good photojournalist requires skills and a commitment that few people have. It takes a lot more to make an informative image of a developing news story, or create a photo essay, than merely a digital camera, cell phone camera, and Flickr account.

I think what’s missing in this very good article is the understanding that there are many more good photographers out there than can be supported financially in their efforts. That’s why they’re amateurs. Subtract all the photos of birthday parties and new cars and summer vacations on Flickr, and you’ll find the work of many people who have a real passion for (and a high degree of competence in) photography.

No, they’re not professional photojournalists, but then again they can bring fresh perspectives outside of the profession of photojournalism, which certainly isn’t immune from cliches itself (this point, btw, was driven home to me on a recent visit to a major museum that was showing a photo essay by a prominent photojournalist. Stock phrases and platitudes can surface just as easily in photos as in writing).

Maybe there should be a wider market for serious amateur photographers to publish their work in the same way that serious (non-journalist) writers publish their writing. Maybe there’s a need to recognize more than just two types of photographers: photojournalists and “everybody else.”

* * * * * *

When you do digital photography, you’re “connected.” Do film photography, on the other hand, and you’re living off-the-grid. It’s a huge difference. When I think back to the late 1980s when I first started doing photography, I remember how how difficult it was to get work seen.

Beyond your own circle of friends, you could enter photos in contests, try to get event photos published in newspapers, try to get work shown in galleries, try to get your work critiqued by curators or gallery owners…None easy to do.

My work was almost never seen beyond my circle of friends. Compare that with Flickr today. Huge difference. If you do compelling work and write intelligent titles and tags, your work will be seen. It’s an exciting difference compared with the old days, and it’s gotten me excited about doing photography again.

The Pittsburgh Project: W. Eugene Smith’s Magnum Opus

“One morning looking out of a window, I wondered what the hell I was doing in Pittsburgh.”

The words are photographer W. Eugene Smith’s, commenting on his obsessive project photographing the city in the mid-1950s.

They’re quoted in an exhibition catalog I picked up after a recent visit to Pittsburgh. Smith made the remark after finding himself mired in a predicament that he could see no easy way through: “the greatest of the impossible,” a magnum opus he hoped would raise the bar for photojournalism above what it had ever accomplished before.

Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project (Center for Documentary Studies/W.W. Norton, 2002, published to accompany an exhibit organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art) relates the photographer’s efforts to accomplish what started as a brief, three-week assignment to provide illustrations for a book commemorating Pittsburgh’s bicentennial in 1955.

The catalog takes you right into the heart of the Pittsburgh Project, with hundreds of images, the photo layout as first published, curatorial comments, and Smith’s own writings on the topic.

“Smith’s imagination was ignited by what he saw in Pittsburgh. The city’s three rivers cut deep valleys…providing what he called ‘vistas of melancholy.’ In one glance Smith could see the city’s monolithic factories, fiery steel mills and skyscrapers…surrounded by the dense, humble neighborhoods of Irish, Dutch, Polish, Slovak, Greek, Russian, Italian, Hungarian, Syrian, German, and African American people…Like the smokestacks, belfries and spires in each neighborhood reached upward, rising above narrow, winding streets and wood-planked row houses. Hillsides were adorned with inclined trolleys or five-hundred-step metal staircases…”

But the project spun wildly out of control, with Smith turning a routine assignment into a quest to transcend all his previous efforts in photojournalism (and, incidentally, get back at his Life magazine editors). He spent a year photographing, producing almost 17,000 images, with return visits over the next two years and many subsequent hours printing.

“The infinite mistake of Pittsburgh does not take from the fact that the set of photographs is my finest set. The toll and the toil, for miracles.”

While working on the project, Smith wrestled with personal demons (he had a history of psychological troubles, his marriage and family relationships were rocky, and his financial situation was precarious). The photos never appeared in print as he envisioned them, and he deemed the project a failure in most respects.

It’s a classic tale of photography at its most heroic, one of the culminating moments before the medium moved on to a new phase, characterized by ironic, personal, or interior visions, more likely to appear on gallery or museum walls than in the pages of mainstream magazines.

Looking back over the entire effort from a vantage point of fifty years, it’s clear that Smith was pushing against boundaries that he couldn’t overcome – limitations concerning what photographers were supposed to be about, how they were supposed to do their work, how to portray their subjects, and how the work should appear in print.  He had matured professionally in a field whose limitations he rebelled against, but he nonetheless remained within the profession and largely worked within
the boundaries as defined.

Smith saw himself as a journalist and he viewed more idiosyncratic practices such as those of his colleague Robert Frank as diverging from the goal of “keeping true” to the subject. He was aware of Frank’s groundbreaking book project The Americans, but viewed the effort as straying from Smith’s own allegiance to journalistic truth.

It’s tempting to wonder how the Pittsburgh Project might have been different if Smith had embraced some of the more advanced documentary strategies pursued by artists, photographers and filmmakers through the 1950s and into the 60s and beyond. The way that he arranged and rearranged (and rearranged again) photo layout mock-ups on bulletin boards hints at the direction it might have gone.

No single one of those layouts (which we glimpse in the Dream Street catalog), but rather the entire flow of them taken together, suggest the cinematic scope of Smith’s vision. If only he had found a way to channel that vision into a working method, he might have moved beyond the limitations imposed by his profession, the publishing world and the editorial establishment at the time.

Is Quiet Enjoyment of Art the One Thing You Can’t Have in Art Museums?

I visited the Museum of Modern Art recently and my experience there got me thinking about something I’d never really thought about before…

What’s the model for a museum? Should the museum be like a library, a space set aside for quiet work or study? Or should it function differently, embracing a more crowded, boisterous environment in line with a mandate to be popular, relevant and accessible to a broad base of people?

Looking around the galleries at MOMA, you’ll see an odd disconnect between two types of visitors. On the one hand, you’ll see children spinning in the center of gallery rooms, tourists posing for snapshots in front of art works, people chatting, mostly not about art; on the other, visitors wanting to seriously consider the work on view. It’s really kind of an odd sight to see: two classes of museum visitors with two very different sets of attitudes and agendas.

Over the years that I’ve visited museums, I’ve been both types, sometimes visiting by myself and wanting to concentrate on the art, sometimes going with friends and talking (about art, but about other things, too).

I’d suggest a friendly challenge to curators and staff at the larger, more heavily-visited museums: visit your museum’s galleries on a typically busy day and try to focus on the art amidst the activity around you.

Of course, it’s clear that museum administrators have made a lot of efforts to make musuems more of a spectacle type of environment for the purpose of increasing attendance. With some musuems, the strategy seems to be extremely successful. MOMA, for example.

Given the success of this strategy, you have to wonder whether there’s any room left for the art museum’s ostensible mission: allowing space for people to reflect on the art on display.

I don’t mean to single out MOMA…You’ll find quite noisy, crowded and somewhat chaotic circumstances at any large museum that attracts a lot of tourists, families and visitors who come primarily to socialize. The Metropolitan Museum qualifies, too, as does the Getty in Los Angeles. It’s really only in the smaller museums with specialized collections and fewer visitors that you’ll find an environment more conducive to looking seriously at the art.

Clearly, MOMA, and all of the great art museums, make exceptional efforts to curate shows that are intelligent, serious and thought-provoking. To me, the issue here is less one of curatorial decisions than it is space planning, traffic flow, etiquette and related administrative issues.

Would it work for museums to establish a quiet time? Not every museum needs to do this (some are quiet and uncrowded enough as is), but some museums should absolutely consider doing so.