June 20 to September 13, 2015
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, 310 443 7000

“Perfect Likeness,” organized by veteran curator Russell Ferguson, is an intentioned and poignant show, with moments of profound tenderness. It was without question the best exhibition I’ve seen this year. It charts a renewed interest in photographic composition beginning in the 1970s, focusing in particular on the prolific photographers of Europe, Canada and the US working between the 1990s and 2000s. The works flow beautifully without the conventional curatorial buttresses of chronology or conspicuous thematic groupings. Ferguson’s deft arrangement sparkles with the subtle lyricism of a photographer’s series, allowing for moments of affection, irony, and fascination to unfold in front of the viewer.

Ferguson’s introductory wall text presses upon our current condition of image saturation, a point which interested me less than the mid-century break he posits between pictorialism and more candid, even journalistic, photography. The return to the “inauthentic” or arranged image is where “Perfect Likeness” finds its genesis. A gorgeous Robert Mapplethorpe work, Orchid (1982), could have opened the exhibition — it nearly perfectly characterizes the pictorial shift for which Ferguson argues. It was in 1982 that Mapplethorpe found his muse in female body builder Lisa Lyon, and his evocative image of a drooping orchid is anthropomorphized on film, displaying the same elegance, grace and emotion as his expertly staged corporeal forms. While Ferguson could have just as easily chosen a nude to mark Mapplethorpe’s predilection for choreographed imagery, I appreciate the fact that the flower, itself a site of sexual reproduction, was chosen. Roe Ethridge’s work Peas and Pickles (2014) shares a wall with the Mapplethorpe, and serves as both a formal counterpart and self-aware double entendre.

Christopher Williams’ Department of Water and Power General Office Building (Dedicated on June 1, 1965), from 1994, consists of two images taken at slightly different angles in the morning and evening. The subtle change produces vastly different effects: in the first, the building’s vertical lines are emphasized, while in the second it appears wider and more horizontal. One of the aims of “Perfect Likeness” seems to be the unification of painterly technique with that of photography. In Department, Williams draws upon the tradition of Monet, who depicted Rouen Cathedral dozens of times as a means of indicating the subtle distinctions in perception caused by shifting light and shadows.

This understanding of the photographic subject as malleable speaks to the issue of authenticity, a question which photographer Jeff Wall has spent a career examining (and debunking). Wall’s 2011 work, Boxing, features two white teenage boys sparring in what appears to be their childhood home — an elegant high-rise apartment with a Joseph Albers painting hung in the background. The art historian Michael Fried has made much of the quality of absorption present in Wall’s subjects; many times they perform a task or mundane action that suggests they are oblivious to the fact that they are being photographed. This absorptive quality squares with Wall’s pictorial aims: to create an image that appears candid but is in fact painstakingly composed. While two of Wall’s major large-format works are featured in the exhibition, it was his more diminutive 1993 piece Diagonal Composition that was the standout. The quotidian image of a kitchen sink glows with the help of a light box and was so perfect, so complete, and so personal, that I was nearly moved to tears.

Lucas Blalock’s Broken Composition, from 2011, consists of a double image of a broken light bulb. The wall text equates Blalock’s visible method of technical composition to the painter’s brushstroke. Here, both the picture and its subject are broken, adding another layer of ambiguity between the photo’s “truth” and inauthenticity. Stan Douglas’ Hastings Park was another standout in the show, a composite of a photo taken in 1955 and edited using Photoshop in 2008. For the photo, Douglas restages the 1955 scene at a Vancouver horse track using models in period clothing, creating an image composed of 30 separate snapshots.

Sharon Lockhart’s evocative 1997 series The Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team makes manifest a century-long photographic cliché: with her carefully arranged images Lockhart raises a mundane scene to the level of magnificence. By omitting the ball from the frame, the players appear to gaze up hopefully towards a higher power above. Thomas Ruff’s glossy portraits from the 1980s take up an equal amount of the exhibition’s real estate, though they’re nowhere near as compelling as Lockahart’s scenes. Ruff’s sitters look directly at the camera blankly, as though posing for an identification card. While the enormous format of these images is in itself seductive, they lose their visual punch when displayed in a series. In contrast, Elad Lassry’s Chocolate bars, Eggs, Milk (2013) is deliberately diminutive; apparently his subject of glossy chocolate and smooth eggs is plenty seductive, even at such a small scale.

The poignancy of the images on display is what left me thinking about “Perfect Likeness” weeks later. Catherine Opie’s 2012 portrait of the artist Lawrence Weiner raises him to the level of an old master, equal parts Rembrandt and Hans Holbein. However, Weiner’s soft body and gentle face lay bare a degree of tenderness on Opie’s part — she doesn’t revere Weiner, but cares for him. Equally affectionate were Gillian Wearing’s self portraits dressed as her mother and father from 2003. In these blown-up images, Wearing’s wig, glue, and mask are made visible, though not pronounced. This evidence of the characters’ construction points to the mother and father themselves as constructed figures, reproduced and reimagined in our own memories, often tainted with shades of nostalgia. Rather than recognizing “Perfect Likeness” on a register as broad as the shared human condition (as the wall text suggests), I understand it as a touching time capsule — one that, in my opinion, will mark the set of issues facing photographers today.

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The art world has everything a social historian could desire- glamour, money, and power. I grant that fashion models are more glamorous than art dealers; hedge fund managers, much richer; and politicians, infinitely more powerful. But commerce in visual art raises some great questions. Why do collectors desire artifacts that serve no practical functions? It is easy to understand the desire for grand houses and yachts. But because for several decades, there has been so much anti-aesthetic art, it is a little surprising that this relationship between visual art and money has, if anything, become more intimate. Those academic scholars, who produce the elaborate theorizing accompanying this art, are not the right people to discuss these issues. But Michael Cunningham and Steve Martin are, for their novels provide subtle dissections of the social worlds of art dealing.

Most art world people come from the middle classes, and so for us these luxuries are an acquired taste.  Lacey Yeager, Martin’s anti-heroine is a middle class girl who is aggressive, manipulative and promiscuous. Working at Sotheby’s, she soon finds the contrast between her impoverished everyday life on the Lower East Side and uptown intolerable. Yeager is a quick study. Very good at networking, she discovers not just the power of her good looks—plenty of men want to bed her (and some do)—and the banal economic realities of auction house business, but something more interesting. Lust, she learns, makes men, especially art collectors, controllable. Recognizing her sexual powers, she sees herself in one of Willem de Kooning’s famous images of savage women. In An Object of Beauty, it’s the art that is erotic. When Lacey has sex while looking at a Matisse, that picture, not her lover, is what arouses her.

Reviewers praise Martin for his knowledge of the art world, but although he drops names of critics, dealers and restaurants (and his book is illustrated with  various paintings and sculptures), any intelligent writer could pick up this much information in a long weekend or two. What, however, is miraculously suggestive is Martin’s account of collecting. Lacey’s great transfiguring moment comes when storing a fine painting (a Milton Avery) in her apartment changes her life. Suddenly, she sees, all of her other possessions look tawdry. Once she is aroused by the Avery, Lacey’s career takes off. She leaves Sotheby’s, works for a private dealer, and soon accumulates (in part by devious means) the capital needed to open her own Chelsea gallery. Lacey moves downtown at the moment when the market in contemporary art takes off. In an exploding market, it’s hard for a smart dealer to go wrong, at least until our present recession catches up with her. Many people fall in love with paintings in museums. But Lacey only falls in love with beauty when she temporarily possesses a work of art. Indeed she is far more stimulated by visual art than by the men who fuck her. One of them rapes her, an experience she does not find disturbing. Pinned to her desk, using the occasion to read the mail, she admires this man because he doesn’t care about her feelings, any more than she cares about the feelings of the men who desire her.

Martin develops his plot as effortlessly as a shrewd detective writer. Cunningham, a great aesthetic writer, comes from a different world.  By Nightfall is about a middle aged, mid-level art dealer. Sheltered by his money from the tough street world, a privileged man who worries so much about relatively minor personal troubles that he barely has time left to deal with his business, Peter Harris is well-prepared for a midlife crisis. It comes when his wife’s brother Ethan, a beautiful young drug abuser, come to stay with them. Ethan wants to do something in the arts, but has no actual job. Looking into the shower, seeing Ethan and momentarily confusing this boy with his wife, Harris recalls an earlier experience.  When young, he was charmed by the gorgeous girl his brother was dating, feeling not exactly lust, but the power of beauty as divine presence. But built into that experience also was homoerotic incestuous desire for that gifted brother.

Cunningham, a gay man, does marvelous descriptions of straight sex that feel real in a way that Martin’s strangely dispassionate accounts aren’t. But Harris’s beautifully presented narcissism is wearing, and the self-made Yeager is a more interesting person.  An Object of Beauty draws the connection drawn between aesthetic pleasure and erotic desire, and By Nightfall suggests that selling art involves desires that are not so different in kind from banal sexual desire. Both novels motivate analysis of the intimate links between erotic pleasure and visual art by taking us from uptown dealing in late modernism to Chelsea’s contemporary art. And although neither book gives art writers more than cameo roles, both toy with the equation, familiar from Laura Mulvey’s famous essay on the male gaze, that there is some deep similarity between a desiring male looking at a pretty girl and viewing a work of art.

By focusing on art marketing in these novels, Cunningham and Martin bring a useful practical perspective to our understanding of contemporary art. And yet, for all of the subtlety of their narratives, what is missing is some sense of why art matters.  Lacey and Peter are concerned, in their very different ways, with the way that desire defines personal identity. And that, of course, is a central theme of a great deal of that contemporary art they sell. But they go about their lives as if totally unaware that there might be some intimate connection between their everyday lives and the commodities that they display. My dissatisfactions with these books came to a head after I happened to read Patti Smith’s Just Kids, her recent memoir. Smith and her lover Robert Mapplethorpe really lived for their art. It’s only thanks to kids like them of all ages that we have a commercial art world.

Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall .  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN-10: 0374299080, 256pp. $25

Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010, ISBN-10: 0446573647, 304 pp. $26.99

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