Snapshot or Photograph

Photography has long created problems for taxonomists. Anyone mad for classifying might feel thwarted by the photograph's strange place between document, memento, scientific practice, and art. In the 1970's artists like Nicholas Nixon hung his carefully composed and exposed photographs-- photos that look at first blush like family snapshots-- on the hallowed the walls of art galleries... which before that time had welcomed still-life, landscape, dramatic scenes from history or myth, but not the 'lowbrow' categories family or news photographs.

Nixon began shooting an annual photograph of his wife, Bebe Brown, and her three sisters in 1975, and selected one photograph each year to represent them. Looking at a group these photographs allows the viewer to draw conclusions about the shifting dynamics between the four, about their psychology, their various beauties, their aging, and our own aging, and for many viewers, to find a connection between themselves and the four sisters.

Nicholas Nixon, The Brown Sisters, Dallas, 2008

Nixon and others working in a similar vein opened many questions about what is and is not art. Many feel like these photographs belong in family albums, no museums, while others see the questions that they open offer the sort of breadth and depth that we ask of great art, and add the precision of craftsmanship and attention to detail that much art has shown.

Work like Nixon's cracks open questions regarding another set of conventions. If Nixon can make photographs that look like family photographs into high art, and show them in the highest of ''highbrow' museums, do other venues that show provocative family photographs in ways that open subtle questions about us as humans, as families, as individuals-- 'lowbrow' sites and spaces, that is-- deserve consideration by 'highbrow' thinkers. In other words, the relationship between artist, gallery and viewer opens up to include alternative photography 'gallery' spaces like those you can find today online, like:

1. Dan Meinwald's essay "Memento Mori" from the popular and academic site at UCLA on end of life issues, which includes many Victorian post-Mortem photographs like the one pictured above, or

2. the archive site The Thanatos Project, which allows members to browse hundreds of post-mortem photographs,

Brothers

3. A compelling blog entry about American post-mortem photographs

and the playful sites 4. Awkward Family Photos and

Toga Party. hmmm.

and 5. My Parents were Awsome.

Ed and Laurie

Several projects work like Nicholas Nixon's to show the way time changes the human face.

Noah K video

6. Noah Kalina demonstrates a meaning of the word commitment in his project Noah K Everyday, wherein he took a picture of himself everyday for six years, posted them online and made them into a slideshow video that packs a strong punch in its depiction of the fleeting youth of folks the age of most of the people I teach.

7. Diego Goldberg's project The Arrow of Time seeks, on June 17th of every year, to freeze the projectile of time that on other days passes unnoticed.

Many similar projects exist, and add to traditional possibilities for finding and viewing art. You know some?

Eros + Thanatos= Narcissus?

Peter Aprahamian, Freud's Desk in London
Can you spot the Narcissus blossoms?

It troubled the beloved and detested Father of Psychoanalysis (and Butt of Jokes) Sigmund Freud that he witnessed his friends, family, and patients compelled to repeat thoughts or actions that gave them no pleasure, fulfilled no evident need, and sometimes gave them great pain. His earlier conception of the seesaw action of the pleasure principle-- whereby people seeks pleasure and avoid pain-- counterposed by the reality principle-- whereby people get their jobs done and floss their teeth-- did not explain why people would repeat, relive, or re-enact distressing or traumatic acts and events, often compulsively. Freud worked through the causes of these destructive behaviors (repeatedly) in his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, determining finally that the pleasure principle and reality principle did not in fact oppose but rather balanced each other, and he came to see them combined under a life drive or Eros, and conceptualized a separate drive that initiated destruction of others and self-destruction an avenue to return to an inanimate state that we might remember on a cellular level from before our physical conception. He referred to this drive as the death drive; after Freud many have labled it Thanatos, for the Greek personification of death.

Eros and Thanatos as conceived by the Greeks:

Eros Sleeping, Hellenistic Greek, 3rd century BC–early 1st century AD, marble and bronze, ~34" long
now at the Metropolitan in NYC

Thanatos on the right with his twin brother Hypnos/Sleep

Eros and Thanatos don't meet in battle in Greek myth, but they repeat, relive, and re-enact fights to the death in stories of love gone awry beginning at least with the Greeks, thousands of years before Freud put pen to paper to explore their battle within each of us in. Some examples: Orpheus and Eurydice, Echo and Narcissus, Pyramus and Thisbe, and of course Romeo and Juliet. The story of Narcissus has long captivated me; I remember him again each spring as the fragrance of his flower-namesake drifts across spring lawns and woodlands. Narcissus lost his life to love of self, gave his name to the many-faced flower that heralds spring, then gave his name again to name the psychosis distinguished by excessive self love: Narcissism. He gave his storied image, too, to many artists as inspiration.

The sweet looking and sweet smelling narcissus in bloom.



Pompeiian wall painting Narcissus

Narcissus, so renowned for his beauty, spurned the love of any who wanted him, including the Nymph Echo (whom Hera had punished for her ceaseless talking by cursing her only to repeat what other's said). Told on his birth that he would only live a long life if he did not come to know himself, his parents kept him from catching sight of his image. Inevitably, he saw himself in a pool of water and fell hopelessly, desperately, in love. Starved by the impossibility of having himself, Narcissus wasted away. Echo, still in love, took sympathy and metamorphosed his dying body into a flower.

Caravaggio, Narcissus, 1598, Baroque

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio liked the story enough to paint it. His Narcissus glows with the light of his own beauty. As close to touching his reflection as he could come without destroying it, Caravaggio's narcissus embraces himself, framing the pool of darkness with a pale circle of arms. Yet those arms frame nothing but a pair of knees, moony almost-faces, frame the nothing that is this exclusive love of self.

Nicolas Poussin, Echo and Narcissus, 1660, Neoclassical

Of all the images of Narcissus I've seen, Poussin's does the least for me. The baby Eros/Cupid's arrow has the only vital direction; Echo has given up hope and Narcissus' body angles lifelessly across the shore, his hair transforming into flower roots and animating a wreath of flowers.

John Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1903, Pre-Raphaelite

Unlike their predecessors, the Realists, Impressionists, Symbolists and Expressionists, the Pre-Raphaelites had no fear of beautiful surfaces. Narcissus proved an irresistible image for John Waterhouse, whose red-draped, laurel-wreathed, writhing boy presses his nearly nude form into the hard rock with some ferocity, as if hoping to press through it into and onto himself. In Waterhouse foretells the end before it comes; the narcissus has sprung up already before the boy's eyes have closed.

Salvador Dali, Narcissus, 1937, surrealist

The story of Narcissus offered rich material to the paintbrush of the surrealist Salvador Dali: the impossibility of reflections, metamorphosis, birth, rebirth, exquisite closeness divided by a gulf of impossibility (If Narcissus touches his reflection in the water, it will fracture, ripple and echo away from him, so he can only gaze, but not have.) Dali borrow's the form of Caravaggio's Narcissus, but none of his boyish beauty, and Dali double's the boy's form into a stony, ancient, unbeautiful hand that holds the egg/seed from which his next form, the many-faced spring narcissus flower, will spring.

Salvador Dali, portrait with narcissus blossoms on his carefully manicured moustache.

What does Dali see when he looks in the pool, in the mirror? His carefully constructed image of himself as artist, his perennially performed life, must point out a powerful form of narcissism?

In His 1985 poem "Narcissus and Echo," Fred Chappell captures the nymph's longing for the impossible to touch Narcissus in his remarkably light-handed echo at each line's end; the poem splits and repeats into two-- an image and a fragile reflection: "Ember of airy longing/ ache of unbeing." Chappell leaves a flicker of hope that the reflection might actually have a being separate from the solid form.

Narcissus and Echo

Shall the water not remember Ember
my hand’s slow gesture, tracing above of
its mirror my half-imaginary airy
portrait? My only belonging longing;
is my beauty, which I take ache
away and then return, as love of
teasing playfully the one being unbeing.
whose gratitude I treasure Is your
moves me. I live apart heart
from myself, yet cannot not
live apart. In the water’s tone, stone?
that brilliant silence, a flower Hour,
whispers my name with such slight light:
moment, it seems filament of air, fare
the world becomes cloudswell. well

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1995

In Untitled (Perfect Lovers) from 1995, Felix Gonzales-Torres offers a different vision, not single minded like Narcissus' self-love, but self-reflexive none-the-less. Twin mirrors mounted flush with the wall invite the viewer to look at self, either self multiplied as the image here shows, or together with the partner who came with you to the show: your sister, perhaps; or lover of the same or different height, sex, coloring; your son; old friend, or new. Gazing into the mirror you see yourself altered by twinning and dividing, you see yourself as perfect lover to your self or the person standing next to you, you become the art and you become the perfect lover. Gonzoles-Torres explored sameness and difference love, love of looking and reflection far more gently than most artists who dealt more directly with Narcissus' petals, requiring the viewer to give title to his or her own experience of self- and other-love.

Jenny Tattersall and Jarek Cemerek in Cathy Marston's Echo and Narcissus, 2001

Here the lovers defy the classic tale, finally, and defy Thanatos, at least for one dance. Narcissus and Echo meet to blossom together and against each other, doubled in the extraordinary reflective black pool of a stage they dance on.

Paleolithic Art-- Cave Painting and Graffiti

I have always lived life close to animals. When I was two years old, my dad's boss went bankrupt, and perhaps to unload some of his burden of guilt, but more likely to unload some extra expenses, he unloaded two worthless ponies on my dad. Not a great moment for the family finances, but a dream come true for my little girl self, and an extraordinary golden ticket to independence. Mom and Dad sent my first dog, Pepper, 'to live on a farm,' because he kept jumping the fence of our suburban back yard and making every manner of trouble for the neighbors, but he was followed rapidly by Fritzl, Josh, Wallis, Molly, Titus and now Zillie.

Some of the canines befriended the family felines, some warred with them. Now I also have fish, a backyard turtle-- except I think he escaped last week-- and two birds.

So, it should come as no surprise that I also fill my studio with a menagerie of ceramic animals. And it may not surprise you that prehistoric artists made most of their work about animals, either. It did not surprise me-- just as it doesn't surprise me that people from all eras of the past who lived their lives far, far closer animals of all kinds than I live envisioned that endowed animals with special powers, connected them to particular gods, and embraced them as symbols of particular ideas and attitudes. As John Berger writes, before the 19th century, "animals constituted the first circle of what surrounded man. Perhaps that already suggests too great a distance. They were with man at the centre of his world." (from "Why Look at Animals," from About Looking, 1977).

In prehistoric times, artists, most of them young men, descended into dark and dangerous places to leave their marks on wall.

A young man from 30,000 years ago waves to us from a spray painted image from Chauvet Cave in modern-day France. He would have let the cave with a red hand.

animals stampede, freeze, attack in a mural painted by generations of paleolithic wall painters

The overwhelming majority of these young men painted animals-- bulls, cave lions, cave bears, deer, horses leading the pack. The fact that young men made most of these images, that they painted their marks over one another's work for thousands of years running, that they used spraypaint, that they painted in dark and at least moderately dangerous conditions, that they painted images without the rigid outline of rectangular picture planes that most formally-trained artists rely on.... all these features tie cave painters from 30-10,000 years ago to street artists of the postmodern era.

Swoon, untitled, wheatpaste, 14th St. NYC, 2005

To make the point, I show a picture by Swoon, who breaks a few of the stereotypes of street art. For one thing, she's a she-- but the fact that that is worth remarking on shows how exceptional it is. For another, she trained as a painter in an art school before adopting the practices of street artists. Now she plays in (at least) two worlds-- in the gallery and on the streets.

Swoon, untitled, detail. wheatpaste, 14th St. NYC, 2005

like paleolithic European cave paintings, Swoon offers a simple first layer for quick interpretation-- a graceful but rough around the edges female figure gazes at us directly over a wrought iron fence. Closer inspection reveals far more: the asian script of the newspaper she paints and pastes up, the tie to European woodblock printing most recognizable from propaganda posters, birds fleeing the scene darkly, a city of types inhabits the folds of her dress.

Perhaps the most famous street artist working today, Banksy, made the tie between his work and cave painting explicit beyond doubt. In his work, which one blogsite captioned: "The law of savages: Destroy what you don't understand," Banksy showed a public worker cleaning up 20,000 year old graffiti.

Banksy Cave Painting Graffiti removal, Cans Festival

This post may just add up to another instance of me standing on my soapbox saying: "Think, learn, ask questions, but never think you know the answers. Here's a question: Why have humans painted on cave walls for 30,000 years? Why do humans represent animals? Why does looking at, thinking about, and representing animals teach us about humans?