My brother and father were nuts about W. C. Fields. The
actor’s famous “Who put pineapple juice in my pineapple juice?” was on a
poster, book cover, something in my brother’s room when I was a kid in the sixties.
At five or seven or ten years old, I couldn’t figure out what the problem was.
If Fields had been drinking pineapple juice in the first place, what could be wrong
with adding more pineapple juice to the glass? But of course Fields was only
calling it pineapple juice—more recently I’ve learned that the well-lubricated actor
kept a flask of mixed martinis forever ready-to-hand—and by the time I made it
to high school, where I occasionally used to walk around the quad with something
like pineapple juice in an open can of soda, I understood what my brother and
father had seen in Fields’ remark.
The relationship between one thing and its other is crucial
in the history of photography, as everyone knows by now. The Pictorialists saw
painting as archetype and model, and the revolutionary Modernist Moholy-Nagy
made photographic images that closely resembled his paintings. Straight
photographers, the f64 group, and the New York school of street documentarians,
on the other hand, insisted upon a vision that was relentlessly photographic. Did
this push and pull between attraction and repulsion also work the other way
around? Painting’s early disdain for photography is well documented, but not
the immediate influence that photography obviously had on painting. Where did
the Impressionists get that contingent, cut-off-at-the-edge framing, just
decades after Fox Talbot, if not from the way a scene in the world must be squeezed
onto the unforgiving rectangle of a ground glass? In an interview once, Cartier-Bresson—who studied with the
painter André Lhote before picking up a Leica—reported seeing a small
reproduction of Caillebotte’s Paris
Street; Rainy Day and thinking for a moment that it was one of his own
photographs. Maybe somebody had put pineapple juice in the master’s pineapple
juice.
According to Howard Halle, in his essay “Photo-unrealism,” there
isn’t any reason left to make distinctions between the mediums. “If it hangs on
a wall and compels you to take a look, it’s painting,” he writes. Critics do
still talk about photography on the one hand, painting on the other, and they
do still tend to cast photography in relation to painting, and not the other
way around—saying, for example, that Jeff Wall makes photographs rivaling the
scale and scope of a canvas by David. This is only logical, since painting got
there first. But the premise of my blog is that we have reached a next stage,
where photography and painting now swirl around in the same flask together. I
am focusing here on new abstraction, where the correspondences between the
mediums seem the most rich and promising, and where a batch of young photographers
are now emerging onto the gallery scene. Recent developments in photography, regarding
both the formal issues of the works and the technologies with which those works
are made, have brought the mediums into increasingly close dialogue, to the extent
that it is almost beside the point to make a distinction between them, and to
the degree that a viewer can be forgiven if he or she can’t tell one from the
other at first glance. Chris Wiley, in the November/December 2011
Frieze (
here is the link), has pointed
out a couple of ways that contemporary photographers are exploring formal issues
that originiated in painting. I have used his discussion as a starting point for
this blog, though I hope to find correspondences that transcend form and move
into the area of intention and theme. We’ll have to see what the territory reveals
on that one.
In each of my posts thus far, I have paired a photographer
and a painter whose work invites formal comparison. I have juxtaposed Mariah
Robertson, whose photographs experiment with the demands of the physical
support—in other words, with how the images hang—and the painter Sam Gilliam, whose
unstretched canvases, like Robertson’s unbroken rolls of photographic imagery,
engage not only the gallery wall but also its ceiling and floor, dangling in
colorful loops and folds that seem to be carelessly and carefully placed by
turns. I have paired Josh Brand’s photograms with the paintings of Tomma Abts;
these artists share not only a dedication to anachronistically small scale, but
also an interest in the effect of analogous colors, in geometry, and in the old conflict
between flatness and depth. I’ve taken the liberty of including some of my own
photographic work, which I’ve placed in relation to the paintings of Iva Gueorguieva.
Beyond any formal resemblance that might exist between our images, I imagine that
Gueorguieva must share my fascination with the tension between chaos and order,
not only in a work of art, but as an aspect of the world at large.
In a realm of expanded fields, artistic plurality, and the
rejection of medium specificity, what will happen to the one and its other, to
photography and painting, on the grounds of abstraction? It will be the purpose
of this blog to provide an ongoing survey of the terrain.
