POLLOCK, BRANCUSI
my photographs and my muse
THE EXHIBITION
Recently I visited the Brancusi (1876 – 1957) exhibition at the Pompidou Centre
in Paris, on from 27 March – 1 July.
It is a huge sprawling presentation
with much of the organization and explanatory texts
seemingly the work of academics concerned more with facts and figures,
dates and references than with the meaning of the work.
I feel certain that the overwhelming size of the devoted space
was seen as a tribute to the artist’s tremendous influence
on modern western art.
None the less it seemed to me
to neither compliment Brancusi’s tribute to the earth and heavens
nor to respect the quiet understated intimacy of many of his works,
and of the Sleeping Muses in particular.
Brancusi has lived in me since I first saw his work by chance
at New York’s Museum of Modern Art when I was 16 years old.
I had driven to New York from my home in the Midwest ,
yearning to see the then current exhibition of photography.
JACKSON POLLOCK
Walking up the long staircase from the foyer to the first floor,
I saw in the distance a postage stamp sized painting
on the furthest wall of a gallery.
As I climbed the stairs and moved closer to the postage stamp,
then a poster sized image,
I became intrigued by the frenzy of it.
The closer I got, the more fascinated I became.
Eventually I was as close as the guardrails allowed,
with my entire sight engaged in this exciting image.
It was a Jackson Pollock abstract expressionist work.
Being so young and with no real experience
of seeing and understanding
how to view contemporary modern art,
I didn’t know what to make
of his thick tubular snakes of pure colour,
or of the areas of angry spattered colours,
or the chaos of it all.
But it continued to engage me.
Only later did I understand
his repugnance to much of western art
and many living artists who had capitulated to
or were absorbed by Nazism or the Stalinist USSR.
Pollock had turned his back on all previous forms of art
and therefore to perpetuators of the holocaust.
The painting I was engaged with was a cry of rejection and rage…
something I could understand
as by then I found the world around me was disappointing.
BRANCUSI
Staggering away from the Pollock encounter,
I wandered into a room that memory tells me was empty
but for a low solid white plinth.
On it was again something I had never seen before:
an oval white marble simplified representation
of a woman’s head lying on its’ side.
Coming from a background
which allowed for little or no literary or visual refinement,
this exquisite muse with the slightest suggestion of features,
was something I could not have imagined existed.
In the smooth white marble,
the reductive minimalism and the allusion of features,
I fell in love with Brancusi’s art
and with it, a love for that which seemed distinctly female to me.
It was more than about looks.
It was the beauty of her being,
the beauty of a soul I knew one day I would meet,
and indeed some 20 years later I did.
There was another sculpture,
a long thin slightly arching tube
standing on a tall, narrow cylindrical column.
It seemed that the tube was about to depart from its base
and indeed it was called BIRD IN SPACE.
I was overcome with lightness,
a sense of freedom and pure joy.
The slightest markings illuded to its eye and perhaps a beak.
SEARCHING THE ELEMENTAL FOR THE ETERNAL
It was his work that helped me to understand
the relationship between the elemental
which I would find in front of my camera
and its eternal allusion.
This led me to strive towards simplicity
to rid my images of inessentials,
to strive to understand the inner meaning of things
in relation to human life.
I have done this
through framing and sometimes reframing in post production,
and to use darkening and lightening tones,
to soften areas of focus,
to reduce the intensity of distracting colours
and to spotting out lines, scratches, and often other imperfections
on the surface of a thing or on a person’s skin.
It could be (and has been) argued that these processes are distorting reality.
Of course that immediately throws open the question
‘what is more real: being able to see more clearly
into the essence of somebody or something
or carefully describing every mis-colouration, whisker or abrasion?’
This distracting in the way of inner reality,
as fogging,
as allowing a mask of inessential details estranged from the inner reality
be allowed to create a skein of misleading or distracting details?
I think that many photographers pay homage
to what they may refer to as ‘truthful representation’
rather than to the essences of things.
This is a justifiable tribute to the photographic medium
but also an insistence that superficial looks
provide the best and only truthful way
into understanding the beingness of things.
Over time I began to understand
the ever-purer his shapes became,
dispensing with details when volumes and materials were sufficiently telling,
he worked continually towards discovering and revealing
the essence of a person, animal or thing.
These pieces were a probe into the viewers unconsciousness,
in which through the beauty of his sculptures
people were able to join Brancusi on his search for the truths
he had discovered in eastern mysticism.
Grasping for the eternal he was disinterested in superficial reality.
His Bird in Space series was a sign of this,
with his elegant, elongated bird like figures seeking freedom
from earth bound struggles and death.
Although during his 57 years living in Paris
he only sold 3 works to French individuals and organisations,
even though he was recognised as one of the greatest artists of the day.
The official and monied world of gallery owners
disapproved of his inventive sexual ambiguities
and his new vision of reality.
None the less, upon his death
the French government rushed to get hold of his studio
and all the works within it.
This is displayed in the Pompidou Centre gallery.
People hang around it,
try to grasp what it may mean to them,
do endless quickly grabbed snaps and selfies.
Perhaps even to them his work is still acting as a probe into consciousness
searching for a higher than earthly reality.
If you have never seen a Brancusi in reality,
standing next to the real thing is deeply moving,
regardless of the noise and selfie-seeking tourists.
Dear Gareth...I have a sense we never actually met. Thank you for your comments, very generous.
Dear Patrick…first, thank you for writing to me in such a supportive way.It is appreciated.
Second, i have had a handful of mentors I have only read and studied but never met.
Central to the non photographers are Albert Camus and John Berger.
Both of them, but in particular Berger was and still is central to how I see and in part, to how I write.
It is not exactly a direct route from his writing to mine, but a sense which invokes for me
the desire to help others come to culture as a way of finding kindness, critical thinking, beauty and
thereby being humanised, turning away from violence, fascism, hatred.
Still, it is not perfect in that we know the Nazi’s were able to embrace some art like Wagner and Beethoven (once his
lyrics were re-writen by a non-Jew).
Are you an artist? And if so, what do you do?
robert