Forty-One False Starts (28 page)

Attired like any American in blue jeans and sneakers, he has the unassuming modesty of a simple man, which he likes to think he is, or a monk. Although he avoids unnecessary chatter, he is a preternaturally good listener . . . He is completely present and seems to have all the time in the world for you. This exquisite sensitivity is wedded to a highly analytical and decisive mind and a meticulous and unsparing professional demeanor . . . Beneath this public face is a supremely tender soul protected, like a younger brother, by an absolutist's will.

Even as I pick on Hambourg, I sympathize with her plight. Penn's nudes are slippery. They almost force one to talk about anything and everything but themselves. And this may be where their singularity lies. The photographs immediately raise questions about their making. One doesn't take them in and only later wonder how they came to look the way they do. These photographs (in most cases) have been meddled with—and meddled with in such striking ways that the image takes second place to the technique by which it was produced. Like the nudes of Weston's classic period, the Penn nudes are faceless fragments of the body that evoke the forms of modernist art. But where Weston delivered his modernism through ordinary photographic means, Penn released his images only after putting them through an extraordinary darkroom ordeal. Step one was to obliterate the image by overexposing the printing paper to such a degree that it turned completely black in the developer. Step two was to put the black paper into a bleach solution that turned it white. Step Three was to put the white paper into a solution that coaxed back the image, but only up to a point—the point where the earthly bodies exhibit an unearthly pallor and, in certain cases (such as the catalog cover picture), a flat abstractness that human bodies assume only in primitive and modernist art.

Another difference between Penn's nudes and Weston's lies in the type of body they depict and in the photographer's relationship with his models. Weston photographed lissome young women with whom he only rarely didn't sleep. Penn photographed heavy women (in the majority of cases) whom (in all cases, including a few slender women who posed for him in the early days of his project) he kept at a monkish distance. The women were strangers, hired artists' models. “The relationship between us was professional, without a hint of sexual response. Anything else would have made pictures like these impossible,” Penn reported in his book
Passage: A Work Record
(1991). That Weston slept with his models is an unsurprising but irrelevant piece of information—the photographs are completely realized works that raise no biographical questions. Penn's nudes, in contrast, have an unresolved and unnerving character—“experimental,” you could call them—and thus invite biographical speculation. To learn of Penn's lack of desire for his models causes a penny to drop in regard to the mercilessness of many of the images. The idea seems to be to make beautiful pictures of ugly bodies.

The series to which the cover picture of a standing figure belongs is the most extreme example of this tendency. The radical stylization Penn achieves with his darkroom hocus-pocus does not obscure, in fact augments, the ungainliness of the body, which is framed from the thighs to the waist and features a large belly that pours down over the pubic triangle. In other versions the framing moves up from the belly to include breasts that echo the stomach's stylized pendulousness.

Hambourg connects these radical images to a more conventional nude Penn made in 1947 (
Nude 1
in the catalog) and then connects
it
to a prehistoric sculpture of a fertility goddess, known as the Venus of Willendorf. (“Whether he had seen a reproduction of the little statuette in Vienna or not, he was in touch with the same instinct that called forth that Venus from her Neolithic sculptor—the recognition that the mysterious, procreative power of the female body is of such majesty that it has symbolized creativity since the dawn of art,” she writes of the nice man in blue jeans.) But the 1947 nude, though it bears a certain resemblance to the primitive sculpture in its monumental frontality, has an entirely different character from it—and from the nudes in the 1949–50 series.
Nude 1
harks back to the nineteenth century, to the dark, painterly images of the Photo-Secession, and only accentuates the decisiveness of the move into the twentieth century that Penn made two years later.

Even the most (so to speak) conservative of the 1949–50 photographs, employing standard props of nineteenth-century photography—a black velvet robe and a velvet chair—reflect the urgency of the photographer's desire to take his place among the makers of modernist art and to distance himself from his photographic precursors. The stark whiteness and flatness of the body created by the bleaching solution is set off by the dark tactility of the velvet robe, which mysteriously withstood the insults of the darkroom and is draped around the waist and hips and thighs in such ways as to underscore their resemblance to forms that Matisse, Arp, and Schlemmer, among others, have put on the map of our associations. But Penn does not stop there. The originality of these images lies in their perversity. The desireless Penn avoids the poses developed by classical art to display the body's beauty; he is interested in poses that testify to the body's grotesquerie. In a number of the photographs with the velvet robe, for example, the model sits in such a way as to create an eccentric puckering of her stomach on one side. The sweeping curves of the white body, the abstract forms, the art references—all these recede before the anomalous bulge, which looks like a third breast and rivets the eye like a gravy stain on a white dress. Penn's gaze is not unfriendly. If the art school models do not arouse his lust, they do not invite his scorn, either. On the contrary, one can almost read a kind of gratitude into the photographs, a sort of salute to heavy bodies for the opportunity they have offered a young fashion photographer to break ranks—and to make art.

The show of Penn's nudes at the Whitney, called
Dancer
, is the product of four occasions in 1999 when a heavyset dancer with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company named Alexandra Beller came to Penn's studio and posed and danced for him naked. In her catalog essay, Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, where the show is also on view, can't resist a bit of curatorial one-upmanship. Comparing the dancer to her rivals at the Met, Tucker writes, “Beller is compact and muscular where the earlier models were flaccid and overflowingly fat.” But there is a more significant difference between the women at the Met and the woman at the Whitney; where the former were rendered as faceless fragments, the latter is photographed in her entirety.

For good reason, the classical works of twentieth-century nude photography—by Stieglitz, Weston, Callahan, Cunningham—are faceless. There does not seem to be any way that a naked person in front of a camera can fail to betray his or her sense of the, as the case may be, silliness or pathos of the situation. Whether the object of the exercise is art photography or pornography, the model does not know what to do with his or her face. Probably the most comic examples of facial at-a-lossness are to be found in photographs of men showing off erections, and, of course, the most pathetic in examples of child pornography. But the expressions on the faces of subjects of ambitious art photographs are no less problematic. The photographer cannot invent the expression on the face as the painter and sculptor can. The mystery of who scratched out the faces on some of E. J. Bellocq's nudes is easily solved in the light of this discussion. Bellocq himself must have made the savage marks when he saw his picture spoiled by the all-wrong expression on the face of the model. But in other cases, Bellocq made head-to-toe photographs of unclothed New Orleans prostitutes that entirely escape the problem of the face. As one scrutinizes these pictures, trying to account for Bellocq's strange success, one notices the smiles on the faces and receives a sense of the fun the photographer and the model are having. They are horsing around. The silliness of the situation, far from helplessly leaking out of the photograph, is acknowledged, is its subject. It is what gives these photographs their wonderful warmth and life.

The Penn nudes at the Whitney are another exception—face and body have no quarrel with each other—but Penn's dancer has nothing in common with Bellocq's larkily relaxed whores. With regard to this photographic encounter, it is only the viewer who has trouble keeping a straight face. As Beller, with lowered eyelids or averted gaze, strikes one absurdly theatrical attitude after another, Penn photographs her with an almost religious solemnity. In his book
Worlds in a Small Room
(1974), Penn remarks of the Moroccan village elders he has photographed, “They are simple people but their burnooses and turbans of white wool are spotless.” I felt a similar condescension—an unspoken “but”—waft out of Penn's ponderous pictures of this assertive, squat woman who is as alien to him as the amazingly tidy Arabs.

The last eight photographs, taken at a final session, have a different character from the preceding nineteen. They show the dancer in motion and have a mysterious blurred painterliness. They were taken at three-second-long exposures, and thus record the model's movements as ghostly afterimages. In one example, the model has acquired wings and two heads, as if she were a mythological creature in a symbolist painting. In another, where her head is thrust back and the motion of her body is recorded by the blurred doubling of her limbs, one receives a sense of ecstatic dance. These images evoke but by no means return to the nineteenth century; they shimmer with newness and strangeness. But they cannot change the show's overall daunting impression. When Penn showed the
Earthly Body
series to Alexander Liberman in 1950, Liberman was unimpressed, and so—when Liberman brought him the work to make sure he was right—was Edward Steichen. It took thirty years for Penn to dare to prove Liberman and Steichen wrong. But the Libermans and Steichens are not always wrong. Not all experimental work works, and sometimes rejection is a form of protection. The first nineteen images of
Dancer
illustrate the perils of renown. Someone should have dared to protect Penn.

*
Mary Lutyens,
Millais and the Ruskins
(Vanguard, 1967), p. 156.

†
Young Mrs. Ruskin in Venice
, edited by Mary Lutyens (Vanguard, 1965), p. 21.

A GIRL OF THE ZEITGEIST

1986

Rosalind Krauss's loft, on Greene Street, is one of the most beautiful living places in New York. Its beauty has a dark, forceful, willful character. Each piece of furniture and every object of use or decoration has evidently had to pass a severe test before being admitted into this disdainfully interesting room—a long, mildly begloomed rectangle with tall windows at either end, a
sachlich
white kitchen area in the center, a study, and a sleeping balcony. A geometric arrangement of dark-blue armchairs around a coffee table forms the loft's sitting room, also furnished with, among other rarities, an antique armchair on splayed carved feet and upholstered in a dark William Morris fabric; an assertive all-black minimalist shaped-felt piece; a strange black-and-white photograph of ocean water; and a gold owl-shaped art deco table clock. But perhaps even stronger than the room's aura of commanding originality is its sense of absences, its evocation of all the things that have been excluded, have been found wanting, have failed to capture the interest of Rosalind Krauss—which are most of the things in the world, the things of “good taste” and fashion and consumerism, the things we see in stores and in one another's houses. No one can leave this loft without feeling a little rebuked: one's own house suddenly seems cluttered, inchoate, banal. Similarly, Rosalind Krauss's personality—she is quick, sharp, cross, tense, bracingly derisive, fearlessly uncharitable—makes one's own “niceness” seem somehow dreary and anachronistic. She infuses fresh life and meaning into the old phrase about not suffering fools gladly.

I have come to her loft to talk with her about the history of the magazine
Artforum
. I am preparing an article about the magazine's present editor, Ingrid Sischy, and have been speaking with some of the old guard—the people who were at the magazine in the early seventies, when it was such a formidable critical force in the art world as to give rise to the expression “
Artforum
Mafia.” The editor then was Philip Leider, followed by John Coplans, and the editorial board included, along with Krauss, Annette Michelson, Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff, Barbara Rose, Peter Plagens, Robert Pincus-Witten, and Joseph Masheck. In 1975, Krauss and Michelson left
Artforum
to found
October
, a taut, Eurotropic intellectual journal, which they have coedited since then. In addition, Krauss has been a professor of art history at Hunter College since 1975 and has written vanguard art criticism since the sixties. Her writing has a hard-edged, dense opacity; it gives no quarter, it is utterly indifferent to the reader's contemptible little cries for help. (Another art critic, Carter Ratcliff, told me, “I remember one of the writers at
Artforum
in the old days—I think it was Annette Michelson—saying, with a kind of pride, that
Artforum
was the only American journal that seemed to be translated from the German.”) I am therefore surprised by the plain, entertaining way in which Rosalind Krauss speaks as she sits in the Morris chair with the gold clock beside her on a little table—a Minerva with her owl. She is a handsome, dark-haired, elegant woman in her mid-forties, reminiscing, with a sort of peevish relish, about the bad feeling that existed among the contributing editors of
Artforum
in the seventies: “Lawrence Alloway was forever sneering at me and Annette for being formalists and elitists and not understanding the social mission of art. There was also a quite unpleasant quality emanating from Max Kozloff. He was always very busy being superior—I could never understand why. He, too, had this attitude that the rest of us were not aware of art's high social function. Neither Annette nor I would buy into this simplistic opposition that they set up between formal invention and the social mission of art. Our position was that the social destiny, responsibility—whatever—of art is not necessarily at war with some kind of formal intelligence through which art might operate, and that to set up that kind of opposition is profitless. It's dumb. I remember having all these stupid arguments with Lawrence, saying things like ‘Why are you interested in art in the first place?' and pointing out that presumably one gets involved with this rather particular, rather esoteric form of expression because one has had some kind of powerful experience with it—and that presumably this powerful experience then makes you want to go on and think about it and learn about it and write about it. But you must have at some point been ravished, been seduced, been taken in. And it's this experience that is probably what one calls an aesthetic experience. And it probably doesn't have very much to do with the message.”