|
|
| Peter Culley Roy Arden's Fragments: A Poem Containing History Oakville catalogue text [ 2,468 words ]
A fragment pre-supposes an integration, a totality being either moved towards or away from. The photograph — traditionally poised between the unrepeatable moment of its creation and its unavoidable inclusion in the index of all things depicted — is the most fragmentary and contingent of objects. The career of Roy Arden has been to a great extent an exploration of this contingency, an active meditation on photography's manifest uncertainties; of origin, status and descriptive accuracy. At times, indeed, its tight interweaving of historical, critical and expressive elements seem to constitute a personaliszed recapitulation of photography's complex fate, an internalization of its dilemmas. So if the group of early photographs that the artist has recently selected under the title Fragments would seem to suggest — if only by their belated and anomalous appearance — a possible reintegration of these elements, a mid-career recalibration, the next questions should be: why these images, and why now? But both questions lead us at once into a consideration of the — if not entirely bifurcated — increasingly layered nature of Arden's project that Fragments makes vividly apparent. For in selecting and showing Fragments Arden acts not only as artist and curator but as archivist and historian, subjecting the lyric productions of youth to the contextualizing intelligence of maturity, simultaneously poring over "fragments" of unrecoverable experience and rediscovering a worthy but neglected body of work (much as he has recently done for the little-seen photographs of painter David Ostrem). This is a risky strategy; the faintly unheimlich, Dorian Gray-ish quality always lurking in old photographs is enhanced by this layering of function. Perhaps being the subject of one of the images in Fragments foregrounded this Gothic sense for me: confronting this previously unseen and formidably depicted young doppelganger — wary, slightly flattered by the unaccustomed attention, squeezed into his clothes like one of Goya's young grandees (lacking only ruffles) — was a little chilling. To stumble across an old snapshot of oneself is sometimes traumatic, if less often than commonly pretended, but to find one's image in this historically hinged context is as close to the narcissistic void of immortality as I'm comfortable approaching. Fragments' other portraits are likewise full of unresolved tension — between sitter and subject, historical depiction and aesthetic function, autonomy and inclusion. The viewer is never quite able to forget that these are portraits by an artist who was for some time to decisively abandon the form. Their place in the willed reconfiguration that Fragments represents could as easily be addressed to portraiture's impossibility as to its realization. In Stan Douglas 1 the subject defensively shields his eyes from a consuming noonday glare straight from the pages of Bataille or Camus; in Gerald Creede 1 the subject, shirtless, awkwardly recumbent on a worn carpet, pivots nervously away from the same merciless light. In both of these images the photographic portrait's conventional dialectic of subject (flesh), light and emulsion are out of balance, some unspoken contract between sitter and subject seems subtly violated. Light works in these images not as Dante's (or Edward Weston's) immanent manifestation of Grace but as Van Gogh's sulphurous 'demon of noontide', American poet Jack Spicer's 'terrible yellow cold'. If in Greg Girard with coat the burn of Arden's controlled overexposure seems less invasive, Girard's pose — submitting to the harsh daylight as if to a police frisk — does little to temper the sense of illuminated dread that undercuts the image's sensual charge. The oscillations between desire, repulsion, boredom and avidity that suffuse Fragments' portraits reach in this image a point of claustrophobic saturation. Paradoxically, however, Fragments' most fully realized portraits are the two in which there is a disruption in the young Arden's slightly overdetermined scenarios. Collage artist, author and jazz musician Al Neil is from that early generation of Vancouver hipsters who survived both real repression and their own excesses, and he is not about to give up one particle of his labyrinthine self-possession for any young punk — Arden might as well have been photographing Mao or an Easter Island statue. The artist wisely steps well back, immersing Neil in the biographical clutter of his studiedly Lowryesque cabin. In a sequential image, as if realizing that the actual presence of the implacable beatnik interfered with the rich material narrative of his domestic interior, Arden photographs the same room with the 'subject' removed, registering (as so often in these images) presence with theatricalized absence. In the best and most justifiably well-known of these portraits Kevin Hatt is so insouciantly confident in the radiance of his offbeat beauty that, though looking down and away as instructed, he manages to fix the viewer's attention across the decades as easily as the artist's on the day the film was exposed. Arden is merely required to fuse his own rapture to Hatt's healthy narcissism, and he wisely does no more, resulting on one of the era's best and most characteristic portraits. It is the nature of young people to have dramatically mixed feelings about a lot of things, and to assume that the rest of the world takes an interest in the mercurial hour-to-hour shifts of their sensibilities. Less common is the ability to articulate these feelings, to fix them in a coherent and enduring form. That Arden was able to do this as a young man was and is beyond dispute, but if Fragments were no more than a record of Arden's precocity it would be less interesting — less disconcerting — than it is. The attachment that an artist feels for his or her early productions is often bittersweet; the struggles, influences and mistakes writ large, the subtlety of mature craft only fitfully present, and sadly present too evidence of the unrecoverable energy and physical optimism of one's youth. And over time these productions become, inevitably, historical artifacts of peculiar potency, repositories of not only personal recollection but also the social habits and mentalité of another time. Fragments is an exhibition that though defiantly un-nostalgic, is nonetheless conscious of nostalgia's deep cultural sway, its political dimension, its unavoidability. But the world it constructs is no more 'representative' of the early eighties now than it would have been then. Ironically, the self-consciously 'timeless' lyricism of many of Fragment's images — so anomalous back then in their unashamed, even aggressive aestheticism — is now literally timeless, a patina of real antiquity thinly overlaying the one formerly assumed. The stack of Life Magazines that in those days occupied a mouldering space in every junk shop are undoubtedly scattered now, any remaining copies safely sealed in plastic; the similarly arranged Radios are likewise rarely encountered in such handsome form and quantity these days — they seem as mutely classical, as enigmatically closed off as the Statue East Berlin. The urban landscapes — whether of Paris, Geneva or Vancouver — are alike in their lack of the sharply observed local detail that so strongly characterizes Arden's later work, their willed timelessness accompanied by a similar disinterest in literal place. The time and space these images occupy is romantically psychological, their motifs of timepieces, vitrines, drapery, flesh, falling light, etc. sophisticated but youthfully passionate projections of inner states. Their contrast with the elaborately qualified Flaubertian Realism of Arden's later work would seem on first reckoning to be close to absolute. Yet at least part of the demand that Fragments places on viewers is to reconcile the hyper-subjectivity of its images with the sober and unemphatic witnessing of a later work such as Terminal City. Both are, after all, the work of one man in one medium, with roughly analogous urban subject matter. The influences so baldly proclaimed in the earlier work must continue to operate, however deeply and imperceptibly, in the latter. A key image in this process of assimilation is Fragments' (almost) sole 'self-portrait'. In it, as if avoiding confrontation, the artist has withdrawn, hiding behind both his camera and the suit jacket draped artfully over his head. Only his fingers, tensely working the Rolleiflex that is the image's focal point, are visible. Such cod-Lacanian moments of awkwardly narcissistic self-recognition are a mainstay of young photographers, and the young Arden's droll, well executed variation / spoof on it would certainly have seemed amusing enough back then, but its reappearance in Fragments is more interesting for the obliquely prophetic light it sheds on the artist's future progress. For the partial disappearance from the range of his own depiction that the image records was a real indication of the direction his subsequent career would take. In the context of Fragments the essence of this self-portrait becomes the camera — without (in Arden's words) 'substantial human interference' — depicting itself; intently, unblinkingly looking. The figure of the photographer as ultimate arbiter of the real is minimized, even mocked. The only sure relationship, the image seems to say, is between light, camera and emulsion. Photography's capacity for truth is ensured by specific physical limitations and all critiques of photography must contend with that blunt material fact. The task of the photographer is, to the extent possible, to be mere agent and witness of this mechanical and chemical recording. While the photographer drives around, finds a spot, sets up the tripod and squeezes the bulb, he or she never takes a picture. This idealist, self-abnegating aesthetic — which can be glimpsed emerging from the clutter of Fragments' wilful experimentations — has begun to attain a distinctly historical aspect itself. The introduction of digital imaging has rendered forever moot photography's already frayed default claim to mechanical accuracy. The crude alterations of Stalin's podium or Conan Doyle's fairies has given way not only to the literally seamless hard drive constructions of Jeff Wall or Steven Spielberg but the lurid domestic fantasies of a legion of photoshop fantasists. In a pair of recent essays Arden addresses this radically altered post-photographic environment in ways that illuminate and contextualize Fragments' multiple significations. After Photography presents the brave new digital hegemony as both crisis — The arrival of digital technology promises to obliterate the truth-value of photography once and for all. Digital images are not photographs but mechanically produced pointillist paintings. and, more significantly for an understanding of Fragments, paradoxical opportunity — Today, despite the numerous refinements of its technology, there is something quaint about photography. Eclipsed by digital media, photography can now be seen as the obsolete, 19th century technology that practitioners, occasionally frustrated by its limitations, have long suspected it to be. When something comes to an end it is typical to pause and reflect on its beginning. Though Arden's career is clearly ongoing, the part of it that existed prior to the digital regime — subject to now literally meaningless oppositions of 'art' (subjectivity) or 'document'(objectivity) is at an end, and despite protestations of frustration at technological obsolescence, it is clear that he could not be more pleased. The obliteration of the ideologically overloaded and confining 'truth-value' Arden mentions frees photography forever from eroded but persistent moral claims of documentary fidelity. Photography, now a devalued, anomalous and orphan technology, a surplus economy, can be directed more unambiguously and with less interference toward an enlightened 'realism.' The existing index of images, too, can be re-examined at leisure, free of previously constraining categories. And though Fragments is the first time Arden has engaged with his own work in this manner, his essay 'Kennedy Bradshaw: Vernacular Photography and Realism' is not only a sensitive evaluation of the work of an amateur photographer whose striking achievement resists easy categorization, it also acts as something of a manifesto for the evolving sense of 'realism' that he wishes to invoke. This realism — at the risk of simplifying Arden's complex argument — is less a movement or set of aesthetic guidelines than an existential commitment to a transparent but fully imagined representation of the real, opposed to not only the baubles of the culture industry but the false pieties of the documentary tradition. A code of ethics rather than a prescription, this realism is as likely to occur in the films of Pasolini or the music of Scott Walker as it is in Bradshaw's lucid northern interiors. To what extent, then, is this realism present in the images of Fragments? In pausing to reflect on his own beginnings so extensively — especially given the doubtlessly exhaustive process of selection — Arden is clearly interested too. Superficial similarities of subject matter and treatment between these photographs and later work would seem to offer a quickly affirmative reply, but one has only to compare an image like Discarded Chairs, Geneva with the later Wal-Mart Store (plastic stools) to recognize two fundamentally opposed approaches to the making of images. One is the record of a happy flaneurial accident in a strange yet familiar city, the shadow of the artist (in another coy self portrait) falling across an attractively sculptural arrangement of forms; the other depicts with high-key precision the extruded and comfortless waste of late capitalism, its bright and saturated colours deepening the indictment. Likewise, Fragments' numerous vitrines and empty spaces — reminiscent only vaguely of the entropic voids of such images as Landfill, Richmond, BC — act primarily as receptacles for the staging of psychosocial projection; though absent of literally depicted figures, they are brimming with presence, suffused with longing. So perhaps the question should be put another way: if Arden intends to enlarge with Fragments both the parameters of his career and the limitations of his iconoclastic realism, how are we then to re-assess in its light his career as a whole? I think the title 'Fragments' offers a direction. Since at least Shelley's Prometheus Unbound the broken, fragmentary epic has been a paradigmatic modern form, though rarely one applied within photography. But in finding a balance between spontaneity and indexicality, between the precise particular and the longue durée, between Jack Spicer's 'disordered devotion to the real' and its ethical demands, Arden's career has begun to attain just such a shape. Its ultimate extent in all directions, bordered in at least one place by the passionately prophetic Fragments, can be anticipated but not predicted. Oakville catalogue text Text: © Peter Culley. All rights reserved.
|
|
Copyright ©1997, 2009. Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art. All rights reserved. |