September 9 to October 11, 2008
37 West 57th Street, 3rd floor
New York City, 212 750 0949

Janet Malcolm, who is best known for her sober and incisive writerly persona, and who has had previous exhibitions of collages at Lori Bookstein and elsewhere, is currently showing a suite of photographs there of burdock leaves depicted in early stages of decay and decomposition. A book accompanies the exhibition. It reduces the images by around one half. There are no notations as to size, edition or photographic process and subsequently does not function like a catalogue so much as a picture book. An introductory essay about her work by the author also accompanies it.

Malcolm writes in the introduction that the photographic portraits of Richard Avedon particularly influenced her—which he “radically extended photography’s capacity for cruelty…the faces he photographed were mercilessly, sometimes gruesomely, recorded.” Malcolm chooses to photograph leaves of the burdock plant because of its lowly status in the plant world – as a common weed that grows “along roadsides…and around derelict buildings” – and because of its literary status. She notes that Chekhov and Hawthorne have referenced it in their fiction to denote “ruin and desolation” and explains that she prefers “older, flawed leaves to young, unblemished specimens — leaves to which something has happened.”

The Avedon portraits were largely of famous people, well known in the mass media. Like Malcolm’s statement about what the journalist does, Avedon, in some cases “preyed on their vanity.” The naïvely trusting Duke and Duchess of Windsor, for example, were reduced to pathos under Avedon’s lens, while more sophisticated sitters were willing collaborators in a new kind of celebrity portrait that exposed them in their ravaged glamour.

Avedon’s portrait photographs appeared at the very end of an era that saw photographic material as containing “truth”. Where we now understand that it is a kind of fiction. The photographer, Moyra Davey, in her recent, very exceptional book of writing on photography, “Long Life Cool White,” locates this moment of de-authenticity in 1981 when an essay appeared by Martha Rosler entitled “in, around and afterthoughts”. In the same essay in her book, Davey writes with great admiration for Malcolm, and discusses Malcolm on photography on a par with Sontag, Benjamin and Barthes.

Malcolm: “The camera’s bland inquisitiveness…[its] capacity for aimless vision…it is through photography that we first discover the existence of the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”

Davey also notes her appreciation for Malcolm’s odd personal revelations that crop up in her writing: “A small aside…will unexpectedly open up a window of emotional life onto what had otherwise been a fairly hermetic discursive field.” Any admiring reader of Malcolm brings a particular sense of expectation to the viewing of her photographs.

In the introductory essay Malcolm acknowledges how her leaf photographs have precedents in eighteenth and nineteenth century botanical illustration. She might also have mentioned leaf exposures performed by the nineteenth-century progenitors of the photographic medium.

All the leaves in the pictures have been popped up against a white wall with stem at bottom in a glass of water. Only one leaf picture in the exhibition, Burdock No. 24 (all 2005-07) exposes the neck of the water bottle, and only No. 12 does not maintain the entire image within its borders.

Most of the images are suspended in a slightly grainy atmosphere that is lost when reproduced in reduction in the book. The low luster of the paper stock in the book also robs the viewer of the Iris print quality which prints the image into the paper rather than suspending it in emulsion on top of it. The documented leaves all have individual personalities: No. 17 is “prim”, No. 21 is “busted”, and No. 18 is “plagued”. No. 4 is “like a tree”. No. 6, my favorite, contradicts the general run and is young, unfurling, like spring and forest blue green. No. 16 is broken in shreds and is a deep dark green. All the photographs have beautiful color and evidence high technical accomplishment.

An added aspect is their ability to trigger memory out of proportion to the apparent subject matter, which brings the viewer to their curious vacancy, that the leaves may be individuals but seem to be stock characters. My suspicion is that the exhibition might be best considered as an extended aria to the camera. Its “bland inquisitiveness” seems to hover in the room, a strange, delightful presence never isolated quite this way before.

The post Janet Malcolm: “Burdock” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art appeared first on artcritical.

October 9 to November 8, 2003

As a challenge to traditional painting, collage is one of Modernism’s lasting gifts. Argus-eyed, it endows its audience with a kaleidoscope of viewpoints along a scale from the personal and recondite to the purely formal. It is an art of association and surmise, its graphic symbols hinged to a range of experience that is as varied as the audience that looks at them.

Janet Malcolm handles the medium with the same attention to nuance, the same passion for exactitude that informs her writing. What becomes apparent in this exhibition is that a writer’s eye for telling details is quickened by the same nerve that excites pictorial intelligence. The aim of both is to get it right. Malcolm’s journalism career began with articles on interior decoration, design and photography. The visual preceded–and, throughout her working life, informed–everything.

This is beautiful and serious work, poised in a solitude all its own. It comes after twenty years of engaging papier collé‚ for her own pleasure. On view are thirty-three collages. Some originate in the rigor and self-effacement of Russian avant garde sensibility. Others, more fluid in form, depend on the graphic power of objets trouvés, a quarry of fragments mined for visual and associative effect. There is a Surrealist edge to certain ones that is carried off with great aplomb. The ensemble orbits around Malcolm’s long-held attachments to literature, psychology and art.

Her reservoir of objets trouv‚s leans toward the familial: the paper trail of a family history and its intellectual life. But biography is not the subject of this exhibition. Every artist reaches, psychologically or in fact, for those things closest at hand. In the end, what matters is not the artist’s experiences but her capacity to transmute private responses into forms that speak to strangers. Malcolm’s work speaks eloquently of the life of the mind and its capacity to civilize, order and interpret the confusion of the lived life.

Vladimir Tatlin, heady with art’s appointed mission in 1920, declared his distrust of the eye. But Malcolm, an attentive student of Kurt Schwitter’s genius, is careful to give the eye its due. Her attraction to hallmark Constructivist designs seems true to her own temper which, on the evidence here, is both reserved and austere. There is a structural composure-a calm-to these compositions that calls to mind that other acolyte of Kurt Schwitters, the lovely Anne Ryan.

Malcolm, like Ryan, chooses her floating fragments with a keen eye for texture and color. The works of each woman are on an intimate scale and convey an illusion of confidentiality. They suggest something sequestered, revealed behind closed doors to just the two of us. This is particularly true of Malcolm’s inclusion of old handwritten items. We respond to these stimuli in quite personal ways. They are catalysts of memory, her remembrances triggering our own. Acknowledgements of a human presence, they have the impact of letters from the dead.

Typography, where it appears, is chosen as much for its architecture–the weight , balance and magic of alphabets–as for signal value. Ryan jumped the boundaries of language, thoroughly subordinating the connotative aspect of printed stuffs to her palette. Malcolm, by contrast, has spent a life time using language as an instrument. She naturally retains and exploits verbal associations. Her selections mean what they say. An entry ticket to Cezanne’s atelier is intended to a be recognized for what it is. A scrap of a letter typed on an old manual typewriter serves its design purposes while it remains a sly but deliberate reference to Schwitters.

The floated faceting of these collages is subtle, elegant, many of them witty. But one particular image, titled Son, chilled me. A photo of an old crib hovers, weightless and off-axis, over a splayed black ground. The metal crib, on casters, is institutional, shorn of bedding or any suggestion of nurture and comfort. It stands empty in a space barren as any barracks. Here is an image of cold containment, pragmatic, unyielding, more suited to prison than the nursery. A cage. Given the time frame suggested by the age of the crib and the black and red Constructivist surround, it is impossible not to see it as an icon of detention and deprivation. The image is freighted with a weight that has not lifted since the 1930’s.

Malcolm’s artistry is consistent with the restraint, discipline and regard for object, rather than process, which characterized early Constructivist work. Her temperament respects control. And control slips only once.

The oversized America 1950 is predictable feminist kitsch. A catalogue of male portraits smile at us from annual reports circa late 40’s. The single female face is shrouded, as if in purdah, by a piece of vellum. The whine is almost audible: women are exiles in a man’s world. Coming from Janet Malcolm–no outsider, she–it seems disingenuous. The piece indulges in the reflexive, approved disdain of a politicized present. Besides, Malcolm’s Dadaist models took aim at their contemporaries. Anybody can kick a decade long finished.

But false notes have their uses, if only as reminders that art is measured by what it rejects as much as by what it embraces. There is an elegiac quality to this work that extends beyond the personal. Without necessarily intending to, it bears witness to the illusional character of its antecedents. Art’s contra mundum stance in the opening decade of the twentieth century has not brought down the house. In art, radical breaks heal over and yesterday’s daring become today’s decor.

There is a lesson in Malcolm’s gravitation toward Constructivist design principles that extends beyond their approriateness to family history. The formal achievements of a previous age remain alive and enlivening to those who respond to them. It is the dead hand of the present that has to be feared.

The post Janet Malcolm appeared first on artcritical.