6 September 2008
get lost
It turns out it’s not that easy to get lost in the middle of Paris. I left for a purposely vague walk in the direction of the Pompidou yesterday, but found I almost always ended up on some large thoroughfare with signs and directions to the landmarks. I suppose at some point one would always run into the Seine anyway… I kept having to take wide wrong turns to discover another small street on the way to the museum, but I made it there pretty quickly despite myself.
I was pretty disappointed in the Pompidou’s collection, as displayed throughout the 4th floor. So much of it seemed like second-tier work, unless I just really don’t get the French sensibility. I mean, where else outside of Austria would you see so much of the Viennese Actionists? (And, really, aren’t 10 Schwarzkoglers way more than enough…?) What I hated most was the layout of work – like gathered with like, to the point where everything became equal and invisible in a sea of similar form. Here were all the drippy paintings, here the inflatables, here some big faces, here all the hanging things…
There was a beautiful Joseph Beuys I’d never seen before – an elephantine felt-wrapped piano and, nearby, its skin – but only poor examples of artists I usually expect to see and enjoy, like Twombly, Basquiat or Anselm Keifer. (In a typical juxtaposition, the poor Kiefer was hung directly across from a really awful Gerard Garouste that just made me want to move on quickly…) There was a nice Antoni Tàpies, one of those artists I loved as a teenager but rarely see these days. The context should have had me look for other Europeans I miss, like Jannis Kounellis, but I was really just here to see Miroslav Tichy.
The Tichy show was not what I feared – some small rescue-mission of the few pieces I’d already seen online – but a rather exhaustive survey of almost 100 photographs, with a few artifacts (including cameras) and a half-hour documentary, too. The pieces were gorgeous to see in person, but more for their physical aura than for any reason photographic in nature. And here’s the problem – and the joy – with Tichy’s work: it’s really just about the objects, and the whiff of Outsider Authenticity that makes art-lovers (and collectors) drool.
I can’t say I’m all that different; it’s not really about the images for me either. (Heck even Roberta Smith would rather look at the cameras.) Tichy’s process certainly is fascinating, as he used a variety of cameras made from scraps and paper and cardboard, with plexiglass lenses that he cut with a knife and polished with toothpaste and cigarette ash… His darkroom work seems to be much the same, and his prints were left strewn about to be stained and creased over time. Many have handmade cardboard mats or frames, with penned-in outlines. Some prints are scratched or drawn-on to enhance the image. If you have any love for the found-object (as I sure as hell do), you would find these objects gorgeous, too.
The problem, of course, is the pictures. There just really aren’t many that are all that interesting in the usual formal way, and one is quickly overwhelmed by the force of Tichy’s, well, creepiness... Photo after photo is of a woman (or women or, in fact, girls) taken from behind. He seems to be trying to catch them unawares and as undressed as possible. He is stalking them. Many are taken at the local pool in Kyjov, where one man who grew up there recalls Tichy hanging about and scaring the kids. As this guy (now a curator) says in the documentary, many kids thought the picture-taking was fake, a ruse. There are few direct portraits, and even those seem taken under duress. There are even some nudes, but at least one is off a television screen. And the Still Life pictures are mostly bras…
The show does seem a rescue mission after all, for the beatification of an almost “lost” artist. The story is half the art here, and it’s a funny game being played. He is extolled as much for being the “primitive” as he is for being a deliberate genius, producing work "not for others, but solely for himself without any regard for exhibiting or selling the work to others" (that, according to one of his galleries…) At the same time, his art and technique are called out as a specific attempt to be original. He has been quoted as saying, “If you want to be famous, you have to be worse at something than everyone else in the world.” He can’t be too savvy or he wouldn’t be authentic, but he can’t be too naive to be a genius. In the documentary, the curators are even asking themselves, “Where is the chance, and where is the artistic intent?”
Still, it’s hard not to come away seeing Tichy as just a dirty old man. (In a very literal sense: Roman Buxbaum, the documentarian who grew up in Kyjov, mentions in the catalogue how children were told to wash their hands or they’d end up like Miroslav Tichy…) However, I can’t help but see in his work one more very important distillation of Photography: Voyeurism, and Tichy’s is the ultimate case*. If I am to look for the beginnings or foundations of Photography, even beyond the Salt Prints and handmade cameras, I have to look at Looking. It can be argued that that’s what makes Photography different from the other Arts. In every other case, the image is indirect, transferred via the Artist’s mind and hand. Despite what we know (more than ever) about the lies and limits of the camera image, Something is captured “automatically” by Light, no matter how much manipulation goes on before or after the Photographic Act. To some degree, it was there. Without that small degree of physical action on a light sensitive material, we just have… Drawing.
There is just so much to think about here (even that old chestnut, “What is Art?” ...more on that later.) With a head full of ideas, I left the Pompidou towards home, and even, this time, managed to get a little lost.
