August Sander and Sentimentality

August Sander: People of the Twentieth Century

Getty

Through September 14th

Jen Graves, who writes for Seattle’s The Stranger and runs Slog, wrote a line in a quick post several weeks ago that really affected me. After an open, loving description of an Alec Soth photograph using her own personal family history, she got defensive, saying, “If you think that's cheesy, let's just say this is also simply a terrific photograph, taken by someone who still believes in the power of an image to (relatively) unselfconsciously depict the world.” There is much to think about in this statement, not in a “Jen Graves on the couch” sort of way but in that this type of defense is often employed in the arts. People quickly backtrack and shy away from using their personal history in descriptions and reaction to artworks, qualifying their statements as if they have uttered a something false.

Let me begin by saying that I believe there is nothing to apologize for, that these reactions are completely valid and if played out to the full extent of their capability, extremely productive. Quick personal reactions usually start as nostalgia and sentimentality, but if you don’t risk nostalgia and sentimentality, you don’t really get anywhere with art.

Recently, I had an experience that has much in common with what happened to Graves. I was at the Getty, intending to go to see the Becher show and once again got caught up in the photographs of August Sander. I say once again because the only time I’ve been to the Met in New York, I spent about two hours with a small Sander exhibition and basically missed the rest.

One can see Sander’s photographs in many different ways. In one interpretation, what takes precedence is the idea of an archive. An archive is basically a collection of items that stand in for historical events – letters, photographs, videos, basically any form of documentation. Sander’s photographs attempt to capture the German people of a certain time period and the collection as a whole becomes an archive – the idea is that the meaning of the event is allowed to circulate within the archive and gets reinterpreted according to how the archive is put to use. The archive resists easy, totalizing readings of an event and therefore, they are handy in subverting restricting universals (if you believe that universals are always restricting – which I don’t).

Partially the archive and what the archive means leads to another way of viewing Sander, as the first of many German photographers like the Bechers and their students that push conceptual ideas forward in their practices rather than relying on a journalistic approach to the photograph. Basically all that means is that the meaning of photography projects as a whole or a set of photographs is put to use to find meaning rather than simply viewed as the container of the essence of an event. To use an example, Sander’s collections of artist photographs are meant to be compared with each other to come up with an idea of a “German Artist” rather than each individual photograph showing an artist “in their essence.”

Another way, and the way I cannot help but view Sander, is a cocktail of the first two interpretations mixed with a deeply personal, partially nostalgic, partially sentimental, partially critical approach. For the typical viewer, I think that if a photograph or archive ever can get someone actually thinking and reflecting on history, the viewer must take it personally. The experience must start with a least a little sentimentality and nostalgia, but the place the experience ends up is a different place, a critical place where one can think about history, interpret history, and hopefully use history as a lesson, a guide for their individual lives (if this is not the purpose of history, history has no point).

I take Sander’s portraits of the German people very personally. My own family left Germany and Austria in various waves between 1870 and 1920. Some stayed in Germany. As far as I can tell, none ever went back. I cannot view Sander’s photos without seeing my own present world fracturing into could have beens and conjecture, into T.S. Eliot’s Rose Garden where all of the possibilities of life collect dust, having the look of roses that are looked at. Would my family have starved during Weimar? Maybe some of us would have been disillusioned students, watching the rise of fascism from the coffee shop and dreaming of Marxism? Would I have been a person that signed on and became a Nazi? I can never know. Each time I encounter Sander, the photos shift and change and dance away like phantasms out of the corner of my eye. I keep going back to Sander now partially because of the sentiment and partially because I am interested in the project, the history, and what it means.

For instance, I dwell on Sander’s Earthbound Farmer, 1910, a farmer with his pate several shades paler than the stony grill he offers to the world. This man was used to wearing a hat and forever in one, only shedding the hat when indoors which is basically bedtime, church and posing for a photograph. Every man used to wear a hat. I thought of Sander’s photographs of businessmen, who are indoors enough to allow hair styles – unlike Farmers, their hair is used to being on view. By comparing the photographs, the habits and interests of the people in the photos, Sander’s world opens up, the world that followed Bismarck, made it through Weimar only to meet the horror of the Nazis. But to be honest, my initial interest in the famer image came from my own family photographs. I see that my great, great grandfather had that pale forehead. The desire to know more about this person in my past aided my entrance into the archive, it was an essential motivating factor – if I was fully detached and just in the world of ideas, I wouldn’t care about this stuff at all.

My encounter with Sander was, all told, very nostalgic, full of fantasy, and overly romantic. However, all that emotional stuff allowed me entrance into Sander’s world and what Sander was doing. The point I am trying to make is that it is valid entrance point, an essential entrance point if someone is to become interested in an archive. Often with archive projects, the viewer has no entrance point. Sometimes the content is too overbearing (like an archive of photos directly depicting Vietnam or the horrors of the Killing Fields). Sometimes, an archive initially feels too much like work (you walk into a gallery with piles of papers, lists, and various rubbish that is supposed to have a meaning but instead of being curious, you just feel tired). An archive is a difficult thing to use in art and too often, they are just impossible and unlikeable.

All I am trying to do here is show the benefits of certain types of personal sentiment in viewing art, that they shouldn’t be apologized for or backtracked from in a conversation. We should be careful how much we police what we consider “sentimentality” – sentimentality is not the enemy, detachment is the enemy.

To close, I want to add this quote from Adam Gopnik from 2004 issue of Influence Magazine, published by the photographer Gil Blank in New York. I love this quote and I think it has something important to say:

“I think in some perverse way that we can benefit, if anything, from more sentimentality and more nostalgia, properly so called – that is, more feeling allowed its own range and prepared to speak for itself. Nostalgia in that way is essentially a vernacular form of history. It’s the common point of our social consciousness. The real enemy of art isn’t sentimentality; it is, and always will be, rhetoric. The fight against the rhetorical insistence on what we ought to say, rather than what we really feel, is as hard, and important, now as it has ever been.”

Drew Dominick

Drew Dominick: Snake Box

Sandroni Rey

Through August 30th

Let me tell you about Drew Dominick’s installation Snake Box. You walk into Sandroni Rey’s Project space, a large rectangular storage bin, and face two stacks of old televisions with images of snakes, snakelike objects or grainy screens of fuzz projecting in black and white. Next to the televisions, an aquarium with a motor emanates low, sustained hums into the dark space. You turn left then walk down the hot space of the project room (Everyone knows that the space is hot, very hot in the summer, but in this case, it adds to the work) until you get to a sort of vitrine/terrarium full of objects.

By the time you approach the box, you are prepared to see snakes whether or not you understand why. Probably depending on who you are, you may mistake bungee cords, hoses, and fake wooden snakes for real serpents and the real serpents (actually living in the box) are not revealed as themselves until they move. When they move, it is not only creepy but intense -- you feel as if something has happened to you, that you were tricked, that your handle on the world was short circuited just long enough that you doubt you had it to begin with. Great sculpture and installation is supposed to do something to you – Dominick’s installation is a great piece.

What happens in that moment of misrecognition, when real objects have uncertain or shifting meanings, when hoses appear live snakes? Certainly, the moment is a product of perception, the play between real objects and your senses, and certainly, the artist is at the reins producing the moment. Like a James Turrell piece where you slowly encounter a dissolving wall or light that has unlikely solid properties, Dominick’s piece shifts places, delays a full understanding of an environment, and interacts directly with a viewer.

However the effect of Dominick’s piece, in comparison to someone like Turrell, is a different exercise in object relations, something that plays not on the scientific adjustment of perception but the use of more intangible things like memory. Dominick is not grandiose like Turrell -- he plays with local things, familiar things. Furthermore, there is that creepy feeling, the feeling of being in the presence of something hidden and perhaps slightly unsafe. I, for one, found this moment very complicated to sort out and I still don’t have a handle on it. All I know is that what I thought it was wasn’t and what I think it might be is just as improbable.

My first stop was Mike Kelley’s text on the uncanny in art because the great essay has a passage that might apply to Dominick’s work. In the text, Kelley delineates situations where one might apply the word “uncanny,” which Freud described as “a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it.” One such moment, for Kelley, is the strange animation that movie props have when you encounter them in souvenir shops, a moment where they are “more” than objects, a moment where you get the sense that an object stares back. Kelley writes, “This hidden nature is part of their appeal as objects, for a lingering sense of their filmic reality lies behind their shabby or provisional appearance, soliciting our investment in the belief that they were once convincingly alive.”

What a wonderful description and one that works well with Dominick’s piece, pointing out how moving images can map onto the objects contained in their lens, how the objects, subsequently removed from the context of film or video, can retain the strange animation. The title of the exhibition Snake Box, coupled with the animated images on the screen, intensified by the sounds of the aquarium, then dramatized by knowledge that a terrarium may contain living creatures, leads and manipulates the viewer into the full expectation that they are going to see real snakes -- the expectation is so intense that the viewer not only expects to see snakes but they actually see snakes in the form of inanimate objects, they create the fantasy of the snake. I also love Kelley’s phrase “shabby or provisional appearance.” Living things and inanimate objects have full presence or weighty, non-provisional status in the world. The state in between living and inanimate is created by us and somehow less real, it is a “shabby and provisional appearance.” I have a feeling that the “shabby or provisional appearance” has to be art itself.

But with Dominick’s piece, is it the “uncanny” or something else we are experiencing, and if it is something else, what is it? To be honest, I have trouble applying the word uncanny to Dominick’s piece without many qualifications. For one thing, Dominick’s props (the wooden snakes and bungee cords) do not retain their creepy charge – unlike a doll or a movie props which do sustain the charge. A hose does not have a “hidden nature” and the hidden nature is not part of its appeal as an object. When you understand what is going on with Dominick’s piece (depending on your fear level of snakes) all is right in the world -- like the Turrell, you get it.

Second, when real snakes are involved in the piece, there are elements which are not something repressed coming to the surface but instead animated in real time. The hidden nature of the snakes does not come forward out of your memory but out of the real darkness, the snakes are actually in the room. Dominick’s is not a fear out view and hidden but a real situation intensified and exploited.

Finally, among the many terms in the arts that need retooling, the word “uncanny” is one of the most desperately wanting – Freud does not have the market cornered on the uncanny and has been revised to death, splintered into a thousand pieces, and is not to be trusted at best and just plain wrong at worst. Why do we still use the term and then justify it only according to Freud’s vision of the human self?

So though Kelley’s description helps me discover some of the conditions of Dominick’s piece, we probably need to go into something like theater or the construction of haunted houses to understand where the effects are coming from. That said, I immediately turn to artists that depended on theater for effect, artists like Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden. There is a taste of Nauman’s corridor works in Dominick’s installation and also a little of Burden’s Shout Piece, 1971. Dominick’s installation takes a stance in relation to the viewer that is not unlike these works, a bit aggressive and a bit shocking, like you’d imagine the Theater of Cruelty to have been (thank God I never actually experienced it).

However, these direct comparisons fail ultimately because we have not explained that creepy feeling – Dominick is not directly confrontational, the installation is creepy not scary. So, in my mind, there must be some nostalgic, memory induced object relations going on here, though we can only use the word uncanny shakily and cautiously.

I bet the creepy feeling has something to do with the nostalgia effect of technology and empty menageries. Old televisions give off the troubled vibe of an old prophet, they show the present and sometimes projections of the future while being firmly in the past as an object (think of the dead talking head in 1001 Arabian Nights, it’s dead but it concerns itself with things no longer its own). Empty cages and houses are also creepy because they retain the touches and lived in feel of their inhabitants. The inhabitants still exist there partially, the space somehow their concern though they are gone. Dominick’s aquarium and old televisions impose these creepy conditions onto a situation of theater to guide the viewer into a moment of confusion and then recognition. Dominick’s props can invent snakes before they exist and then show you the real thing all in real time.

As for me, I looked at the little garden snake in the box and said, “That little thing, that little thing scared me!” Then, I immediately didn’t believe it.

Vishal Jugdeo in ArtReview

Vishal Jugdeo
LAXART

I'm thinking about video installation again along with split narratives and sculpture's capacity for comedy. In the July/August issue of ArtReview, I invite you to read my piece on Vishal Judgeo's new video Surplus Room, unfortunately already de-installed at LAXART. This is a link to the article online. Thanks for reading.