Tag: richard avedon

Richard Avedon – Andy Warhol and Members of The Factory, New York (October 30, 1969)

If I were more ambitious/less of a lazy layabout, this is the sort of work that I would summon David Foster Wallace-esque footnoted footnote levels of ‘scholarly’ exegesis. However, I’m in a an unusually clearheaded place today–I’ve absconded to a more temperate clime where spring is very much in the air + it’s having a restorative effect.

Thus the only things I want to address related specifically and concretely to a direct interpretation of this large format triptych are as follows:

I tend to be resistant to spending time with the work of iconclastic. This is actually the height of irony–given my own iron clad anti-authoritarian bent. But I do possess strong enough of post-left anarchist pretenses that I rankle in the presents of efforts to make outsiderness a sort of new status quo.

As such I’ve been a late subscribe to folks like Robert Frank–if you want to be a photographer of any consequential merit you absolutely need to know The Americans like the back of your hand. (Yes, it is actually that crucial a work.)

I’ve only recently began flirting with Avedon’s oeurve–largely due to how smitten I am with his portrait of Sandra Bennett from In the American West.

I’m still on the fence when it comes to Warhol–although I am intrigued by The Factory (more on that in a bit).

I think of how the first panel is obviously riffing on art historical depictions of Adam and Eve–except with the implication of queerness in the pair of two men with a trans woman. The way the center panel captures a sort of sex, drugs and rock and roll vibe that subsequently transitions into a sort of art star as cultural gatekeeper/philosopher king trope. (And conceptually, everything that is read before you reach Warhol, essentially emerged from his efforts.)

I also think about how this is one of the earliest examples I can call to mind of fostering the illusion of a panorama across multiple frames. (And  here I would be remiss if I didn’t take the chance to point you in the direction of folks who’ve continued in that tradition, a la:  David Hilliard, Accra Shepp and Tom Spianti.)

Yet, just as how the progenitor of all that precedes is the last thing you encounter, these observations are really the last things that come to mind for me when I look at this triptych. What I’m really thinking about is a sort of melange of thoughts and impressions.

I guess first off I think about a chat I had with a close friend where she mentioned that although she is not queer, her understanding of queer experience is that you feel a profound sense of not belonging from a young age. And as someone who identifies as queer, my own experience is not so clear cut. I did feel I was different but growing up in an Evangelical milieu, I viewed that as an advantage for many years. I had no desire to be like those who surrounded me/to fit in. In my late teens this bearing became and increasingly dissonant point. I craved love and acceptance from someone/anyone and I was surrounded by people who insisted that I accept their general framework to receive love and affection. So what I wanted/need stood at cross purposes with what I knew to be my own personal truth; I learned to a large extent you have to play a part and/or lie to get what you want. I’ve never been able to manage that feat. (For someone who can at times be a pathological liar, I am honest to a fault.)

Honestly, art is the only thing in my life that has ever even tried to meet me halfway. (Actually, that’s not entirely true. My 30s have been a super mixed bag but increasingly there have been folks with whom I’ve shared + continue to share a mutually cultivated middle ground.)

However, in that there is a danger of building a monument to outsider-ness, an echo chamber. I’m reminded of one of the best things Brain Pickings has ever posted: The Paradox of Active Surrender: Jeanette Winterson on How Learning to Understand Art Transforms Us.

One passage in particular resonates with me:

There are no Commandments in art and no easy axioms for
art appreciation. “Do I like this?” is the question anyone should ask
themselves at the moment of confrontation with the picture. But if
“yes,” why “yes”? and if “no,” why “no”? The obvious direct emotional
response is never simple, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the
“yes” or “no” has nothing at all to do with the picture in its own
right.

“I don’t understand this poem”
“I never listen to classical music”
“I don’t like this picture”
are common enough statements but not ones that tell us anything about
books, painting, or music. They are statements that tell us something
about the speaker. That should be obvious, but in fact, such statements
are offered as criticisms of art, as evidence against, not least because
the ignorant, the lazy, or the plain confused are not likely to want to
admit themselves as such. We hear a lot about the arrogance of the
artist but nothing about the arrogance of the audience. The audience,
who have not done the work, who have not taken any risks, whose life and
livelihood are not bound up at every moment with what they are making,
who have given no thought to the medium or the method, will glance up,
flick through, chatter over the opening chords, then snap their fingers
and walk away like some monstrous Roman tyrant.

As much as I’m intellectually against dismissing something without thought, I’m not super good at practicing what I preach. I tend to develop intractable opinions on the merit of certain work vs. other work I deem to be less meritorious. It’s not that I don’t think about these decisions, it’s that I maybe don’t think enough about them before dismissing them.

That’s one thing I adore about Tumblr–and too all the folks claiming this forum is dying, I see you and feel you, it’s not what it was (that’s for sure). But I keep being confronted with things independent of any prejudice to whether I’ve made up my mind about them yet. It’s why my opinion on Avedon has changed from I don’t care for his work to an awareness that I haven’t really explored it in enough depth to have an informed opinion on it. Also, I’m excited by the prospect of engaging with his work. This wouldn’t have happened if I were part of an ostensible community that insists upon work I would otherwise ignore.

And that’s the other side of things, the community that Tumblr provides not only causes me to reconsider my own assumptions on established artists and canonical art, it also introduces me to stuff I wouldn’t otherwise have encountered.

I’m thinking here of one of my favorite posts of all time on this blog: a documentary still from FeminismoPornoPunk’s staging of a porn variation of the experimental theater piece Public Domain.

And I feel like that’s something Warhol got right with The Factory. It wasn’t sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll for the sake of excess–although that was almost certainly a byproduct. Instead, it was about the potential in that milieu to construct a sort of interpersonal space/a ad hoc community of lived experience as informative and educational and evolutionary. A catalyst for exploration whether that exploration was transgressing boundaries or creating art. (I don’t think it’s an accident that so many art world luminaries emerged from this scene, actually.)

And I guess that’s what I am grappling with how to achieve: making this blog a sort of space not unlike The Factory. Except I don’t want to be the Warhol figure. I’d rather be just another faceless participant.