The web that coheres the world
I watched Black White +Grey last night and was fascinated. It put a face on Sam Wagstaff that surprised me—I haven’t often considered collectors as thinkers. The root of aesthetics is pleasure, and Wagstaff is pleasure's poster-boy. The film makes it clear that he received great pleasure from photographs, and the short clip above defines that pleasure as private and non verbal—in exaggerated discomfort, he brands it onanistic.
The uncut interview was taken from a symposium at the Corcoran museum occasioned by the exhibition of selections from his collection in 1978, and the credits of the limited footage list a tantalizing line-up of commentators. Several sections of Wagstaff’s comments during this symposium fascinate me, not he least of which the profound separation between photography and A-R-T that is echoed and riffed upon by virtually every modern commentator after the photo secession. But I must save that for later; what interests me most for now is the relationship between photography and language.
Exploring the Sam Wagstaff papers online after the film unearthed a typescript titled “Pictorial Logic” from another speaker, photographer Fredrick Sommer that runs parallel to Wagstaff’s comments. It also deals with the relationship between words and pictures, deserving full transcription below the fold.
Helen Levitt, No-Nonsense New Yorker
The photographer Thomas Roma, a friend of hers for almost 25 years and one of her poker companions, recalls Levitt telling him about a visit from a woman researching a biography of Walker Evans. [Belinda Rathbone? J.W.]
“She wanted to know if I had ever had an affair with Evans,” said an indignant Levitt, who told the biographer, “of course not.”
Then Levitt looked back over her shoulder at Mr. Roma and smiled, “Of course I slept with him. But it’s not for me to say those sorts of things.”
WSJ, 4-01-2009 [Thanks Cheryl!]
House Calls is an excellent book, by the way—I’ve been binging on William Carlos Williams lately and this is yet another little moment where a person can only think that it’s a small world after all.
San Francisco (belated comments)
I saw several shows when I was in San Francisco several weeks ago. It was weird to go to a city during a conference (CCCC) and not attend, but there has been very little of interest to me at that conference for several years. I’ve presented there many times, and while it’s nice to see friends I just couldn’t justify paying the fees just for that. My days as a composition teacher, I’m afraid, are drawing to a close. I might dig into that a little at a later date, but for now I wanted to talk about some of the shows that really bothered me. First up, at San Francisco Camerawork there was a video installation that sent me wandering out of the room quickly during the first piece I saw. The description of “Test Patterns: Recent Video From South Africa” seems interesting enough:
Video is a distinctly post apartheid medium. Artists in the United States began working with video in the 1960s, but South Africans hadn’t even seen television until 1976. The government had banned it previously, fearing it would expose the country to the dangerous ideas of the non-apartheid world. And it was not until the 1980s that television was available in any language other than English or Afrikaans. South African national identity under apartheid, as it was portrayed on TV, belonged strictly to the whites.
The breakaway of video from its exclusive use as a television broadcast tool and into the hands of activists and artists is significant in South Africa. If television had been the preserve of white national identity, video became a way to develop diverse narratives about South Africa’s past and to recalibrate contemporary ideas of citizenship and belonging in the post apartheid era.
The exhibition will be presented in two parts. Part One explores ideas of memory and identity under colonialism and apartheid. Part Two surveys post apartheid South Africa as it struggles to define a new national identity amidst the significant challenges of skyrocketing unemployment, HIV/AIDS, corruption, instability, migration and xenophobia
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