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a short essay on a couple of photographs
Nov. 8th, 2007 08:38 amLawyers in Life, Not Necessarily in Love: Reflections on Two News Photographs
Having recently wept and winced my way through a movie that had my seatmates and most of the audience rolling in the aisles with laughter (and it was meant to evoke both reactions), I was left reflecting that one’s reactions to such things was probably a good indicator of how one would cast one’s ballot in the general elections. But as always, it was too simple a reaction.
What I am more certain about is that there is a spectrum of mutually uncomprehending reactions to anomalies that ride the cusp between laughter and tears. Some people cry, some giggle, and some do both. Some people do neither, and we change the subject or say we need to go get another drink.
I would love to pursue the thread of thought, starting from the images I selected from the eBay auction, that leads to why I share a (guilty) pleasure in Arthur Rackham (or edgier practitioners of his genre) and the illustrations for Oswald Croll but not in Alex Grey or in Charles Vess’s lesser imitators. But I can’t.
I’ve only gotten as far as the source of the pleasure I got out of imagining what Donald Barthelme would have done with the strange illustration of how seventeenth century soldiers besieged cities, or with the very peculiar architecture of the Pavilion of Catholic Life in the 1935 Brussels World’s Fair, both of which I reproduced a few posts back. (I’ve deleted some later posts and a couple of others are friends-only, so the images may be closer at hand for some readers.)
To my surprise, I realize that in a different emotional register, the pleasure isn’t that different from the pleasure that art critics of the 1980s took in Robert Longo’s “Men in the Cities” images. (I call them images because I forget whether they were paintings or large drawings; I do remember I once knew one of the studio assistants who helped fill in the large areas of flat black).
Longo’s pictures were one of the things that won me back to looking at art after acute boredom with almost everything I saw in the 1970s (granted, I missed a lot). His business-suited figures, who were either dancing or recoiling from an unspecified blow, caught the mood of ambiguous unease that club culture successfully masked most of the time. The general sense expressed by many artworks of the 80s (and some rock songs) was that people tended to shut up and dance because they were all too aware of the sheer number of terrible things that could happen to them, but which they could do nothing to prevent. (It was one of the reasons for my fascination with books about the Weimar Republic, and Czeslaw Milosz’s autobiographical ruminations on the run-up to World War II in Europe’s smaller countries.)
So when I saw the photographs of protesting Pakistani lawyers caught in the dance postures of Longo’s figures, I laughed at the anomaly of a prophecy brought home in an unexpected location. Professionals are not supposed to engage in protests; their job is to file briefs on behalf of, or to keep the economy running in spite of, the scruffy types out demonstrating for human rights or democratic freedoms or whatever. We know this (or so we think) instinctively from a lifetime of television news.
So when the suits are in the streets and uniting with the students, well, as I believe Hercule Poirot said in Agatha Christie’s novels, it gives one to think. Or as Paul Ricoeur most definitely did say, the symbol (or the image) gives rise to thought.
I could go on for quite a while unpacking my reactions to moments in which men of law or finance are ensnared by history, but I’d rather not, and you would rather I not, too.
What I am saying is that those photographs from Pakistan are emotionally resonant images. But just as with pictures by Arthur Rackham and Charles Vess, what emotions they stir all depend on the prior experience and inclinations of the viewer.
Which is why I spend so much time in my art reviews (or did, when I had more than 200 words in which to do it) saying that it is misleading to say there is no accounting for taste. We can account for it, we can understand it, and we can modify it, though probably always within limits. (I came of age in the decade surrounded by Aubrey Beardsley and Andy Warhol posters, with René Magritte for chasers, and that will always color my response to anime and graffiti. Not to mention my ambiguous relationship to conceptual art, which I enjoy making but which always seems like a more laboriously roundabout way of getting at points that have been made better in fiction and philosophy.)
Having recently wept and winced my way through a movie that had my seatmates and most of the audience rolling in the aisles with laughter (and it was meant to evoke both reactions), I was left reflecting that one’s reactions to such things was probably a good indicator of how one would cast one’s ballot in the general elections. But as always, it was too simple a reaction.
What I am more certain about is that there is a spectrum of mutually uncomprehending reactions to anomalies that ride the cusp between laughter and tears. Some people cry, some giggle, and some do both. Some people do neither, and we change the subject or say we need to go get another drink.
I would love to pursue the thread of thought, starting from the images I selected from the eBay auction, that leads to why I share a (guilty) pleasure in Arthur Rackham (or edgier practitioners of his genre) and the illustrations for Oswald Croll but not in Alex Grey or in Charles Vess’s lesser imitators. But I can’t.
I’ve only gotten as far as the source of the pleasure I got out of imagining what Donald Barthelme would have done with the strange illustration of how seventeenth century soldiers besieged cities, or with the very peculiar architecture of the Pavilion of Catholic Life in the 1935 Brussels World’s Fair, both of which I reproduced a few posts back. (I’ve deleted some later posts and a couple of others are friends-only, so the images may be closer at hand for some readers.)
To my surprise, I realize that in a different emotional register, the pleasure isn’t that different from the pleasure that art critics of the 1980s took in Robert Longo’s “Men in the Cities” images. (I call them images because I forget whether they were paintings or large drawings; I do remember I once knew one of the studio assistants who helped fill in the large areas of flat black).
Longo’s pictures were one of the things that won me back to looking at art after acute boredom with almost everything I saw in the 1970s (granted, I missed a lot). His business-suited figures, who were either dancing or recoiling from an unspecified blow, caught the mood of ambiguous unease that club culture successfully masked most of the time. The general sense expressed by many artworks of the 80s (and some rock songs) was that people tended to shut up and dance because they were all too aware of the sheer number of terrible things that could happen to them, but which they could do nothing to prevent. (It was one of the reasons for my fascination with books about the Weimar Republic, and Czeslaw Milosz’s autobiographical ruminations on the run-up to World War II in Europe’s smaller countries.)
So when I saw the photographs of protesting Pakistani lawyers caught in the dance postures of Longo’s figures, I laughed at the anomaly of a prophecy brought home in an unexpected location. Professionals are not supposed to engage in protests; their job is to file briefs on behalf of, or to keep the economy running in spite of, the scruffy types out demonstrating for human rights or democratic freedoms or whatever. We know this (or so we think) instinctively from a lifetime of television news.
So when the suits are in the streets and uniting with the students, well, as I believe Hercule Poirot said in Agatha Christie’s novels, it gives one to think. Or as Paul Ricoeur most definitely did say, the symbol (or the image) gives rise to thought.
I could go on for quite a while unpacking my reactions to moments in which men of law or finance are ensnared by history, but I’d rather not, and you would rather I not, too.
What I am saying is that those photographs from Pakistan are emotionally resonant images. But just as with pictures by Arthur Rackham and Charles Vess, what emotions they stir all depend on the prior experience and inclinations of the viewer.
Which is why I spend so much time in my art reviews (or did, when I had more than 200 words in which to do it) saying that it is misleading to say there is no accounting for taste. We can account for it, we can understand it, and we can modify it, though probably always within limits. (I came of age in the decade surrounded by Aubrey Beardsley and Andy Warhol posters, with René Magritte for chasers, and that will always color my response to anime and graffiti. Not to mention my ambiguous relationship to conceptual art, which I enjoy making but which always seems like a more laboriously roundabout way of getting at points that have been made better in fiction and philosophy.)
