30 THE ART NEWSPAPER SECTION 2 Number 284, November 2016
Exhibitions United States
ARBUS: DIANE ARBUS/THE ESTATE OF DIANE ARBUSWHITFORD FINE ART
6 Duke Street St. James’s
London SW1Y 6BN+44 (0)20 7930 9332
[email protected]
http://www.whitfordfineart.comFRANK AVRAY WILSON: British Tachist
Works from the 50s
21 Oct – 25 Nov 2016
It’s about time
An exhibition of Diane Arbus’s early work at the
Met Breuer shows how time, not her subjects,
became the artist’s major concern. By Shelley Rice
PHOTOGRAPHY
New York. The exhibition Diane Arbus:
In the Beginning, on view at the Met
Breuer in New York, begins with a single
and surprising photograph. A newspa-
per seems to float near the centre of a
dark horizontal field, its pages blurred,
its headlines barely perceptible. Left on
the pavement to blow in the wind, the
small, battered white object is engulfed,
almost consumed, by the blackness
surrounding it. There is no person in
this picture, no one to return the pho-
tographer’s gaze. The sharp, immobile
social encounters we associate with
Arbus—as with her photograph of two
small twin girls staring sceptically at the
viewer—here dissolve into a not-quite-
still life that reflects the unmooring of
life by post-war winds of change. Capti-
vating, unsettling, and entirely unchar-
acteristic of what we think we know of
Arbus, Windblown Headline on a Dark
Pavement, NYC, 1956 (1956) throws the
viewer of guard, and signals that they
are entering unfamiliar territory.
Ease and spontaneity
Arbus’s early works see America, and
especially New York City and its envi-
rons, through a glass, darkly. Both famil-
iar and eerily diferent, the photographs
in the exhibition, all from 1956 to 1962,
were taken with fast 35mm cameras,
allowing for ease and flexibility on the
street. The resulting pictures—almost
two-thirds of which have never before
been exhibited or published—are tech-
nically diferent from the sharp, square
images we know best, taken when
Arbus switched to a wide-angle Rollei-
flex camera in 1962.
Most of the prints now at the Met
Breuer were consigned to a box in the
basement of her darkroom after the
artist adopted her new format and began
to consistently emphasise formality over
spontaneity. Found years after Arbus’s
death by her daughters, the photos are
ripe for assimilation into the canon that
Arbus helped to define when she chose
ten of her favorite pictures, all of them
taken in 1962 or after, for inclusion in a
portfolio a few years before her death.
The early photographs must now find
their place in her oeuvre, but in fact their
existence busts wide open our assump-
tions about Arbus’s development. In the
usual art-historical evolutionary tale,
an artist’s early works are moving with
purpose toward the crowning achieve-
ment of his or her mature period, so
these prints should mark out a clear tra-
jectory that culminates in 1962. But that
is not what happens, for several reasons.
The first reason is curatorial, and is
embodied in the format of the exhibi-
tion. There is no white box, nor long
walls lined with pictures; the show’s
organisers have rejected all juxtapo-
sitions of images, which tend to build
clear narratives for the viewer. Instead,
the curator Jef Rosenheim divided the
exhibition space into a dense series
of pillars, like a forest of trees. Each
pillar has a photograph on the front
and another on the back, and the view-
er’s movement is open and undefined.
Making his or her own path through
the maze, each spectator creates their
own narrative, their own history, of
Arbus’s world from 1956 to 1962. This
exhibition presents its audience with a
never-ending story, an unfolding set of
possibilities that both deconstruct the
mythology of the artist and encourage
emerging reconstructions.Second, the photographs themselves
subvert our assumptions about the infe-
riority and incompleteness of “early
works”. These pictures are so powerful
that they are impossible to relegate to
second-class citizenship within Arbus’s
oeuvre. This artist found her subject
matter early and definitively. By the
1950s, they are all there on display: strip-
pers, pool players, female impersonators,
circus performers and “freaks” share the
stage with regular people on the streets,
lonely diners, beach bathers and bour-
geois matrons. Dramas unfold on tele-
visions, in theatres, in parks and in the
kitchens of “little people”, in a unified
and complete artistic universe that
emerged almost full-blown. As Rosen-
heim writes in the catalogue, this is less
“early work” than it is Act One in a career
that had two equally accomplished acts.
Diane Arbus: In the Beginning makesclear that this photographer’s “evolu-
tion” had less to do with content than
with time. Act One is about flux and
uncertainty, made possible by the speed,
size and flexibility of the cameras she
used. Her subjects wander, almost float-
ing, isolated and alone; they make their
way through streets or interior spaces
as they glance at the photographer,
just barely piercing the dark obscurity
within which they exist.The missing third act
This expressive posture ends with
Arbus’s change of format in 1962. The
adoption of larger, sharper and slower
cameras signalled the beginning of
Arbus Act Two. The exigencies of this
new technology slowed things down,
and altered the nature of the encounter
between the photographer and her sub-
jects. Posed, aware and sharply clarified,
her sitters began to cut through obscu-
rity by returning Arbus’s penetrating
gaze, and the camera immobilised the
intensity of their engagement. WhenThrough a glass darkly: Diane Arbus’s
Windblown Headline on a Dark
Pavement, NYC, 1956 (1956)Act Two arrived, it was announced not
by new content, but by a change to a dif-
ferent kind of camera—and with that, a
temporal change in Arbus’s relationship
to her already established subjects.
According to Arbus’s biographer,
Arthur Lubow, there was another act
in the making when she committed
suicide in 1971. She had decided to
change cameras again, this time taking
up a Pentax 6x7. Clunky and diicult to
manage, the Pentax still allowed her to
work with agility. “What it could do,”
Lubow quotes her as saying, “is make
the pictures more narrative and tempo-
ral, less fixed and simple and complete
and isolated, more dynamics, more
things happening.” There was to have
been an Act Three, it seems, and when
the artist described it, she saw it once
again as a change in her relationship not
with her subjects, but with time.- Shelley Rice is an arts professor at New
York University - Diane Arbus: In the Beginning, Met
Breuer, New York, until 27 November
Review