Page 28 - Studio International - April 1971

Bochner exemplify it in different ways. But our progressive discovery of it that its history word is spoken, our alternating, if not simultaneous,
Beckett's distillate has all the nightmare and lies.' imaginings of joy and despair—all this makes our
torment of his writing behind it; Bochner's is at It now takes only a few years or decades for a attention towards the beloved too tremulous to
once too cerebral and too easy. new technical innovation to become a big obtain from her a clean image. Perhaps also this
Verbally, however, Bochner is articulate and industry. But the effect of new media on the activity of all the senses at once—which tries to
here I find his work more congenial. I should sensibility is apparently much more gradual and ascertain, with looks alone, what is beyond them—
guess that he is a good teacher, and his ten elusive. Turner is said to have exclaimed on is too indulgent to the thousand forms, to all the
`working hypotheses' sound as if they were being shown a daguerrotype, 'This is the end of savours and movements of the living person whom
formulated in the classroom. Some are witty Art. I am glad I have had my day'; and the normally, when we are not in love, we immobilize.
Whereas, the model that we cherish moves; and
Lewis W. Hine
Joan of the Mill 1909 one never has anything but failed photographs of
Photograph her . . .Not being able to see this well-loved face
Coll: George Eastman again, whatever effort I made to remember it I
House, Rochester, New
York was irritated to find, outlined in my memory with
a definitive exactness, the useless and emphatic
faces of the merry-go-round man and the woman
who sold barley-sugar ! 2
Proust's delicate metaphor, playing on the ideas
of motion and 'emotion', takes the setting-up
of a camera as an analogue not of human vision,
but of human attention. Unsteadiness of the
device, or excessive sensitivity of film, both lead
to a blurred picture. The human brain does seem
to have, as Proust's last sentence implies, a faculty
for routine identification and recognition of
faces, and among the chief social applications of
photography are those which extend this
faculty : for instance, the stimulating of choices
and memorable, for instance 'Measurement history of the interactions between photography and loyalties in advertising and propaganda,
measures measuring methods' — an allusion to and high art is well told in Scharf's Art and and the monitoring of stigmatized individuals
the standard weights and measures that are Photography. But the issue is not a dead one. On like foreigners and criminals.3 It would be
maintained at a constant humidity and the one hand, the great classic photographers wrong to deduce that photography was limited
temperature in various institutional vaults, and are still widely regarded as practitioners of a to this menial function. Not only is the medium
surely a more effective statement than the minor art. And Bochner told me that he well capable of expressing deep human
elaborate measuring of some actual gallery ? considers the studies of animal locomotion by involvement in its subject, but also the 'failed
Others are 'Description does not flatten' and 'Art the experimental photographer Muybridge to be photographs' of the nineteenth century—dogs
is not the illustration of ideas' —both to my mind among the greatest art of the nineteenth with many tails, and ghostly presences—
good hypotheses. century (I think the case is quite strong). On influenced painters (during the lifetime of
To me, his most interesting work is the other hand, it has been possible for artists as Proust) to find new expressive idioms, and these
Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography), recently as the 196os to use photographs in ways were later to be reabsorbed by photography.
which is published by Multiples Inc. but seems that are, as far as I know, new: for instance, We are far from understanding photography.
more a kind of cubistic tutorial than an artwork. Richard Hamilton in his Whitley Bay paintings, With the younger media such as film and TV,
This consists of nine quotations reproduced onto and Antonioni in Blow-up. full understanding is out of the question since
cards. All nine embody misunderstandings Szarkowski believes that there are two ways there are continuous innovations like moon
about photography; but three of the nine are of approaching photography, either as art—a TV, or the synthesis of home movies with
fake quotations, and we are not told which. It is coherent, controlled, measured personal serious movies4, or the expected growth of the
a genuinely economical way of stimulating statement—or as a 'great anonymous beast' which video-tape market. The newest media of all,
thought about the medium. has modified our sensibility and our aesthetics. like computer graphics and holography, are
The three fake quotations are, I think, those The most interesting individual photographers, more impenetrable still.
from Mao, Proust and Merleau-Ponty. I am not for him, are those who have it both ways, whose Artists like Mel Bochner seem torn between
particularly keen on highbrow quizzes of this photos are 'so uncompromisingly like photos a desire to explore the complexities of their
kind. But we are left with two nuggets, from that one could approach them as if they were not environment, and a refusal to be bullied by the
Zola (` In my opinion, you cannot say you have art at all'. A full theory of photography would constraints of technology. The retreat from
thoroughly seen anything until you have a thus have to relate 'high photography' to the articulation which such a dilemma often leads
photograph of it') and Duchamp CI would like sociology of the medium as a hobby, ritual, folk to is deplorable; but Bochner's work as a whole
to see photography make people despise painting art and industry. must command respect. q
until something else will make photography The literature of the period since 1840 may JONATHAN BENTHALL
unbearable'), and four others. The last card is a have much to reveal about the subtler
photograph of Mel Bochner's own outstretched implications of photography.' Just as an
forearm and hand, symbolizing the last example, here is a characteristically complex 1John Szarkowski (director of the MOMA's excellent
photographic department) quotes illuminatingly from
misunderstanding of the series, the 'death of the metaphor from Proust, about what it is like to be Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, whose
hand in art'. in love: hero is a daguerrotypist, in The Photographer's Eye
The truest message of Misunderstandings is `...I could not even remember [Gilberte' s] face. (New York 1966).
2 Marcel Proust, A ''Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleur
that we have no theory of photography. Yet the The searching, anxious, exacting way we have of (1918), Pléiade edition vol. I, p 489-90 (translated).
key discoveries of photography were made over looking at a person that we love, our waiting for 3Cf. photographs in Pop art, especially Warhol's
13o years ago! John Szarkowski writes, 'Like an the word which will give to us or remove the hope Most Wanted Men.
4As described by Paul Morrissey, Studio International
organism, photography was born whole. It is in of a rendezvous for the next day, and, until that February 1971.
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