Diane Arbus Revelations

....the more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
--Diane Arbus

I spend a lot of time these days thinking about how to make art. Not just the craftsmanship of it, but the transubstantiation of it; not just the way creators channel information from the heart and from the zeitgeist and fashion it into some other artifact, but the way the greatest creators invest that artifact with meaning beyond the personal and beyond the present.

It turns out that the transformation is only partially a matter of magic, incantation, and trance. The rest results from conceptual rigor--an obsessive devotion to the development of the idea behind the artifact--and from achieving a unique, artistic, state of grace--a fearful, fearless self-abdicating egotism. You need to have an iron hand to make something out of nothing, and you need to have a fearless heart to presume that some other person might care not only about what you make but also about the meaning of what you've made.

The process is brilliantly on display in Diane Arbus Revelations, a profound and moving retrospective exhibit first mounted by SF MOMA and now on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibit includes not only Arbus' most famous images but also photographs she never printed, contact sheets, pages from the photographer's personal notebooks, and other objects. It leaves little doubt that Arbus was a major voice in American visual arts of the 20th century.

Like Robert Frank before her, Arbus staked out an aesthetic that became a defining American one. Shooting principally from 1957-1970, Arbus caught a nation in transition from a time when white gloved teen-aged girls met boys in suits for dates at Lowe's Paradise while they kept suppressed something true and essential to a time of exhibitionist, physical, public America life where the construction a self-conscious presentation of oneself is de rigour, and where the plastic, invented exterior that seems so naked in fact hides something true and essential. It's fascinating now--in our era of reality television, gonzo porn, and plastic surgery--to look at Arbus's most famous photos of transvestites, strippers, body builders, female impersonators, elderly nudist camp couples, Mae West, people whose very bodies are like inter-dimensional gates between public and private identity.

Of course, many of Arbus' best known photos were of people who had no choice about their physical appearance--performing midgets, sideshow freaks, giants, the developmentally disabled. To her critics--and there were many, particularly towards the end of her life--these photos were callow and exploitative.

But looking at the work it's hard to fathom the criticism.  The photographs seem neither exploitative nor empathetic but merely true, trustworthy, meaningful. More than that, they say something. They speak to the deeper, shared experience of inner secrets, of identities we can't or won't share or accept, of an internal struggle between inside and out.

A photograph, she said, was a secret about a secret.

What is most fascinating about the exhibit, though, is the revelation of just how much work went into the creation of Arbus' aesthetic. Before seeing the exhibit I thought of Arbus' work principally as a matter of collecting found objects--The Backwards Man in his hotel room, NYC 1961; A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, NYC 1966; Dominatrix embracing her client, NYC 1970; Mexican dwarf in his hotel room, NYC 1970. But the exhibit makes clear the shoe leather reportorial effort and the aesthetic wood-shedding that went into the cultivation of these images. More than that, the exhibit reveals Arbus as a kind of psychological anthropologist, finding photographic subjects in a park and becoming engaged in a deeply personal manner, spending hours in conversation, inviting herself back into their rooms, then after hours--and sometimes years--of engagement capturing something deeply essential in half an hour of photography.

But in the end, however, the one thing missing from Arbus' work is Arbus herself. Perhaps it's true that Arbus was a woman with a personal identity crisis whose images--fraught as they were with identity conflict--reflect that. Her life did, after all, end with a particularly gruesome suicide at 48 in her loft home in an Greenwich Village artist's colony. But on its face so little of the work connects with Arbus herself--granddaughter of a successful Jewish fur merchant, married at 18, successful commercial photographer in team with a husband she left, but only technically, to pursue her art. That's why for me the most striking, indelible, and tender image in the entire exhibit is the 1945 self portrait, part of a series of photos the pregnant, nascent art photographer made and sent to her husband serving overseas.

"A photograph," she said, "is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know."

If you can't get to the exhibit, its companion book Diane Arbus Revelations  is spectacular

Comments

[jackson]

Nice post. I know of Frank from the Exile thing, but I'll have to check out the Arbus at the Met.

[chervokas]

Frank's 1955 book, The Americans, basically created the post WPA Americana visual iconography, I think.

Do check out Arbus at the Met. As in her life, the work inspires very different reactions. I liked Arbus before, but seeing the exhibit I was moved and engaged and blown away. My Dad, who liked Arbus before, came away disenchanted.

[Melanie Stephan]

HI, interesting art work. This is an important message, please read and pass it along. God has made contact. The message is about Revelation. The message is from God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost respectively. It was sent in the Spring of 2006. It is about the meaning of First is Last and Last is First. The message is this: In the morning I go to Heaven. In the afternoon I live my life. In the evening I die, death. What does this mean? In other words this means Birth is Last and Last is Birth. To understand this don’t think from point A to point B. Think of this as a continous circle of life. Birth is First, Life, Death, Birth is Last, completing the circle. God also said that Judgment will be before Birth in Heaven. As birth on Earth is painful so will birth in Heaven. It is possible that this message was delivered by one of God’s Angels in the Spring of 2006. Yes, God has made contact and he sent a messenger. Spread this message along, just like a chain letter. Tell two people. OH, one more thing I thought was interesting. Did you know that Mike Douglas died on his birthday. Melanie Stephan

[Melanie Stephan]

You can read more of what God said to Melanie on this website Non-Prophet, Are you going to Hell? She also gives proof that God talked to her in the story of 3 famous people, Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin and Nancy Reagan. I hope you get it. God went to a lot of trouble to get his message out.