Page 23 - Studio International - December 1971

III noisy and mechanical; or (in view of the ends to formally to human yearnings for ordered
A basic feature of the recent 'camp' fad, I take which the force and energy are generally put) energies and energized calms but also help to
it, is that by way of a good many of the older he opposes the heroic and romantic to the promote such yearnings. And not only that: the
works that are being revived one is able to sordidly mercantile; and either way he is almost transforming and shaping power of the
return to a relationship with the mechanical inevitably going to be opposing the past to the photographs themselves serves to recall that
that appears a simpler and happier one than is present. It seems to me that Atget's astonishing there are other ways in which those cravings
generally possible nowadays. I mean, at a time poise, his continual voracious interest, curiosity, can find expression and promotion. Let me
when the dominant image of the mechanical is wholly unsentimental love and respect for so now turn back to Atget's photographs of the
becoming that of something enclosing one many different forms of existence, his city.
—paradigmatically the control-room or Rembrandtesque ability to treat in exactly the Where more or less straightforward,
computer room, with its plethora of switches, same spirit the conventionally beautiful and untransposed pastoral and heroic forms (often
lights, and dials, its flatness, its seemingly conventionally sordid, issued from the fact intermixed) are concerned, one has a plethora
infinite complexity where the layman is that in his approach to the energies of the city of examples in Atget's work: classical faces and
concerned—it is a relief to turn back to works in he was able wholly to avoid these dichotomies. figures surmount windows and doorways,
which the machine is straightforwardly and A good starting-point is certain pictures in flowers intertwine in art-nouveau, rococo, and
picturesquely out there, a sharply delimited which he himself took explicit cognizance of even gothic ornamentation, horses rear up
object that one can set in motion and that will what may be called the pastoral and heroic magnificently above rococo circus façades, a
then behave interestingly. Batman, The Green ideals. deep military drum looms over the doorway of
Hornet, the mad-scientist movies of the thirties, A number of his photographs of the great a restaurant, a puppet-show holds children rapt
and so on, are all, whatever else they may be, formal gardens in and near Paris could in fact in the Tuileries gardens, and so on and so on.
works in which the gadget predominates and be cited (e.g. W38, W68, A31), but there is one It is noteworthy, too, how Atget at times calls
the machine becomes fun. And it is no that seems to me to epitomize almost all of our attention to straightforwardly rural forms
coincidence, I think, that there should be so them and to be one of Atget's most glorious persisting in the city (an automobile and
strong a current revival of interest in those masterpieces. It is of an elaborately carved urn motor-cycle emphasize by contrast the low-slung
reputedly golden years of the early 1900s, since at Versailles (C34), taken from slightly below rustic-looking architecture of a courtyard), or
it was in them that society passed decisively centre and from so close-up that the top curve dramatizes a rural object in such a way as to
out of the phase of industrialism in which the of the rim and the bottom curve of the base are lend it heroic proportions (wooden ploughs
machine was pre-eminently the factory machine, largely cut off. On the side towards the camera look like field-guns, a timber-waggon takes on
the locomotive, the steamship —in other words the face of a sun-god in strong bas-relief stares an ominously martial air), or shows more or
rather awesomely large and perhaps semi-hostile, out over our heads, framed by twined and leafy less straightforward yearnings for the rural in
in the sense that the economic forces required stone branches; his hair flames outwards, the city (a top-hatted cabby, brass-buttons on
to set it in motion were so vastly beyond the light-rays stream out beyond it, the face is his top-coat, trousers falling over incongruously
range of the ordinary man and often inimical to superhumanly pure, calmly certain of its heavy plebeian boots, pauses in front of a
him—and into the phase of smaller and more strength, slightly contemptuous, unpitying. On flower-stall). But interesting as a number of
easily manoeuvrable machines that were much the right side of the urn, in profile against a these pictures are collectively as testimonials
more within the grasp of individuals, at least in blank sky and somewhat below the god, is the both to the persistence in the city of certain
imagination. head of a ram or goat, with massive horns older forms and to the cravings of ordinary
Yet when one turns to Atget one realizes curving round in an almost complete circle; its people for reminders of the rural and for more
how little he was concerned with the sort of Semitic, slightly demonic, yet likewise wholly dramatic and artistic enlargements of their
`modern' aspects of city life that one comes self-assured and calm countenance hangs horizons, individually they seem to me among
across when flipping through the pages of broodingly over the out-of-focus blacks and Atget's less memorable ones esthetically. I
pre-1914 illustrated popular journals like the whites of a formal walk, a fountain basin, the suggest that it was when the forms had become
Strand Magazine or L' Illustration—and how end of a dense row of trees, all in dazzling the most thoroughly assimilated into and
wise he was in this, or at least what kinds of sunshine. To the left of the urn is the almost marked by ordinary lives that Atget's creative
oversimplifications he was avoiding. The total darkness of undifferentiated foliage. In its energies were the most fully aroused. And the
genuine drama of mechanical speed and force tension between Apollonian and Dionysiac resulting pictures, both singly and juxtaposed,
is brilliantly captured in the handful of pre-1914 energies, its celebration of light and its can take us a good deal further into Atget's
photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue; 22 it is reminder of no less natural darkness, its seizing handling of the commercial.
genuine, that is, in the sense that the drama is as on energies made all the stronger through art
much that of the glimpsed racing motorists and because embodied in cool and orderly forms, IV
motor-cyclists as of their vehicles. But the and its juxtaposition of, on the one hand, Let me describe, without comment for a
emptiness of a romantic concern with natural things (the trees, I mean) rearranged by moment, two of his finest pictures of this kind
mechanical speed and force by themselves, as art and then overwhelmed by the natural force —or, indeed, of any kind. The first is of a corner
demonstrated notoriously in the work of the of light, and, on the other, the symbolical of a petit-bourgeois or perhaps even working-class
Futurists, needs no underlining here; and the representations of natural things and forces room (A2).23 A small neat cooking-stove stands
way in which the general speeding-up of city that, in the crispness of the uneroded carvings, on the left, with a metal pot on it and other
rhythms could work on individuals in a fashion appear almost super-real, the picture seems to utensils hanging tidily from the front. To the
very much the reverse of creative and romantic me one of the most brilliant succinct right of it is a fireplace with a large mirror over
is recorded unforgettably in Mort a Credit, a elucidations that we have of what may be the thick slab-like mantelpiece and a curtain
work that can serve as a very salutary corrective called, loosely, the neo-classical ideal—an hanging down over the grate; and it is this
to tendencies to idealize the belle époque. aristocratic ideal in which the heroic and the right-hand part of the picture that chiefly
Furthermore, as soon as the city becomes pastoral are almost inseparably intermingled. interests me, though obviously it would be less
conceived of in terms of mechanical force and But more than merely something that is past is effective without the black and shiny
energy, anyone who attempts to reassert involved. The urn, the statuary and fountains functionalism of the stove to contrast with it.
`human' values is liable to fall into either or and ornamental trees in the other photographs, In the centre of the mantelpiece stands a
both of two inadequate antitheses. Either he and the great parks themselves, are available massive ornamental vase with a frieze of fruits
opposes the natural, simple, and pastoral to the still to the ordinary stroller, and not only testify running round it, and out of it is growing a plant
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