SPECIAL COLLECTIONS: THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ORDER FROM POP TO NOW
The 62 members of the Mickey Mouse Club in 1955, with its powerful juxtaposition of alienation from a world formed by mass-produced images with an almost nostalgic desire to recover a more direct connection to actual human lives, combines the two contrasting themes that characterize the best works in this show. One group of works, most of which use images borrowed from the mass media, articulates the ways in which our image-filled world alienates the individual from objects, suggesting that the relationships between us and our surroundings are inevitably mediated by media, secondhand. The other group of works, all of which use photographs made by the artists, seek to recover a sense of direct contact with the things of the world.
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The most influential of the artists in the first group is Andy Warhol, represented by Crowd (1963), a photo-silkscreen of a black-and-white newspaper photo (itself possibly a composite) of a crowd, repeated four times in a two-by-two grid. The repetition and Warhol’s “sloppy” silkscreening (the repetitions are not identical, and smudges and ink stains are prominent) emphasize how removed the viewer is from the original subject. Warhol’s eye for surface texture is evident in the way the details almost vibrate, but in directing attention to the surfaces Warhol is further separating the viewer from the things depicted.
Robert Heinecken’s T.V. Newswomen (1986) explores a similar theme but ties it to the requirements of television. Twelve prints are presented in a six-by-two grid, each a frontal image of a TV set displaying the color image of one of two different anchorwomen wearing various expressions. These women look somewhat alike–both have generically pretty faces–and similar expressions of theirs are mounted side by side. Heinecken’s point seems to be that media personalities’ images are so malleable that there’s less difference between two people than between the various poses each is compelled to assume.
Conceptualist Douglas Huebler has stated his intention to “photographically document, to the extent of [my] capacity, the existence of everyone alive in order to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled in that manner.” One work from this project, Variable Piece no. 70 (In Process) Global 81 (1973), contains a large photo Huebler took of a column of soldiers in Rome. Above it is a six-by-eight grid of smaller images: half the rows consist of fuzzy enlargements of the helmeted soldiers’ faces, with few details visible; the alternating rows consist of Huebler’s small color acrylic sketches of how each soldier’s face might look without his helmet. In these sketches individual features are much more clearly visible than in the photos; the sketches even convey some sense of individual psychology in the manner of traditional portraits. While these small sketches are not aesthetically powerful in themselves, in the work as a whole they make a strong statement about the anonymity of military service and about the artist’s desire to recover each person’s individuality.
While most of this exhibit’s works take as their subject either the human figure or human-produced objects, two artists’ images are drawn from nature. Susan Eder’s Flower Value Scale (Price Pyramid) (1989) and Fish Value Scale (Price Pyramid) (1991) arrange lush, brightly colored photos of flowers and fish in a pyramid, with the rarest and most expensive specimen at the top and the less expensive ones lower down; the lowest fish, for example, are guppies. These works display the kind of carefully balanced contradictions common to many works in the show; the artist’s self-conscious, critical, modernist intellect that categorizes and even judges the things shown contrasts with a more “primitive” desire to celebrate the glory of the thing itself. Eder’s photos, which have the stunning slickness of commercial nature photography, encourage the viewer to notice that the cheapest things are every bit as interesting and varied as the most expensive, making the work’s statement about the futility of human ordering schemes clear.
