IN SPRING THE WORLD FILLS up with exhibitionists. All the flowers come up with colors they think bees will have to notice, and young people appear in class plays and dance recitals and get strange haircuts, all by way of saying, “Look at me! Look at me!” (Or, in this multicultural age, “Mira, Mamma! Mira!“)
Dutifully, we attend their exhibitions and have a look at what the children have been up to. But there are so many flowers, so many needful, noisy children, that even the most obliging attention-giver has to pick and choose. A competition ensues among exhibitors; awards are awarded, and then disputed; hierarchies evolve; and losers form their own Salons des Refusées, which soon gel into new establishments.
The ironies of this process of attention-getting and-giving were the constant theme of the photographer Diane Arbus, who, 34 years after her suicide at the age of 48, has been given a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum (then on tour to Essen, London, Barcelona, and Minneapolis). “Diane Arbus Revelations,” as the show is called, is a crowd-pleaser, and I was happy to have been part of the crowd being pleased. Time and again Arbus astonished me, as per Louis XIV’s command, and she did it with pictures that have become as familiar as old family photos, pictures that made their first impact in the seventies but have gained new zing in the interval. Surely the mark of a good photographer, as of a good painter, is to create coups d’oeil, images that are taken in at a glance and can’t be forgotten, images that seem to be axioms in some non-Euclidean geometry that explains the whole world.
Like haiku, good photos show what oft was thought but ne’er so well compressed. The photo that serves as a frontispiece to the exhibition catalogue, “Clouds on screen at a drive-in, N.J. 1960,” is a fine example. Who has not gasped or giggled at the sight of the image on a drive-in screen contesting for our attention with the sky behind it? In Arbus’s black-and-white picture, the backgrounding sky is pitch-black, the foreground cars visible only as glints of metal, and the image on the screen is a VistaVision cloudscape. Simple, ironic, sublime.
And, it should be noted, in no way one of her signature images, which are of circus freaks, crying babies, masqueraders, pathetic teenagers, sagging grande dames, big-haired suburban housewives, nudists, religious fanatics, and right-wing weirdos. What all these typical Arbusites have in common is a fervent desire to be noticed, a desire so pressing it has vanquished all shyness and turned even the drabbest and least prepossessing of them into exhibitionists, at least for their moment before Arbus’s camera. The effect is disconcerting, in varying degrees, but it never ceases to have the good vibrations of that New Jersey drive-in, as though each raddled face and crazy costume were an exhibit in a textbook on the psychopathology of everyday life. Arbus’s discoveries are not clues in some criminal case, just facts of life (in its eternal aspect).
This was not Susan Sontag’s sense of the matter when she declared Arbus an “anti-humanist” and general public enemy in the first chapter of her 1976 book, On Photography, where she scolds:
“Arbus’s work does not invite viewers to identify with the pariahs and miserable looking people she photographed. Humanity is not one.” She goes on to ask: “Do they see themselves, the viewer wonders, like that? [i.e., acceptingly] Do they know how grotesque they are? It seems as if they don’t.”
Sontag herself didn’t seem to know how grotesque she was at such a moment, how like one of Arbus’s big-haired, purse-lipped, veiled beldames. But to answer her question: No, they don’t know how grotesque they are, because grotesquery, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. They probably think they’re beautiful, or at least presentable. That’s what Arbus is showing us: how we present ourselves, how every face we see on the street is a mask, and how every mask is a message to be decoded.
If Arbus is to be reprehended, it must be on some other basis than inhumanity. Many of her critics have argued that she trespasses on her subjects’ right to privacy, and in the excellent catalogue to the show (Random House, $50 in paperback), Arbus, writing to a magazine editor, is quoted to this effect: “The releases are sometimes a problem: if people are grand enough they have learned never to sign anything and if they are degraded enough they can’t. . . . Tuesday I saw a man lying on the steps of a church on Lex Ave under a sign saying Open for Meditation and Prayer with his fly open and his penis out. I couldn’t ask him to sign a release, could you?”
Her dilemma epitomizes the camera’s central position in the debate on the “right to privacy.” If something happens in a place where passersby may view it legally, isn’t its photographic image in the public domain? Must we now live our lives as though always in view of surveillance cameras? My own inclination is an unqualified yes; but a world of such radical transparency (where one could google the annual income of anyone one knew) would send all civil libertarians to the barricades. Arbus is the Cassandra and the Evangelist of such a post-private society, and that is why she gives those like Sontag the willies.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), the wunderkind of the New York art world in the boom-time of the ’80s, is having a full-scale retrospective of his own at the Brooklyn Museum (thence to Los Angeles and Houston). Along with Chatterton, Van Gogh, and Arbus herself, Basquiat was one of the art world’s legendary suicides. The Basquiat catalogue and its PR materials try to minimize that side of his legend (a press release speaks of “his untimely death”) but it is rather hard, in his case, to blink it away. As with Sylvia Plath, much of his best work takes the form of an all-but-overt suicide note, with graffiti skulls as profuse as flowers in May, and repeated tributes to his primary role model, Charlie Parker, another artist who died by a drug overdose. In such cases, it is not unfair to regard an artist’s suicide as a career move, one calculated to preclude the possibility of burnout (already under way for Basquiat at age 27) and a collapse of his auction prices. An early death is the best hedge against the ill effects of too prolific production, and part of ambition’s Faustian bargain.
In many ways, Basquiat is more interesting as a case study in reputation-building in the art market than for the actual art he created, which can either register as pleasant and deft or as callow and even brain-damaged. Basquiat put himself on the map as a New York City graffiti artist, after the fashion of Keith Haring, but his work in that vein consisted chiefly of his “tag,” Samo, and dull, self-aggrandizing mini-manifestos, such as SAMO AS AN END TO BOOSH-WAH-ZEE FANTASIES and THIRD WORLD TRICKED BY CHRISTIANITY. At his best he reinvented art brut with a frisson of the ghetto, as though he were signing Michael Jackson for the deaf. At his worst you might think that your five-year-old elephant could produce paintings of equal intelligence and formal panache. As with Warhol, the only arbiter of his final merit is the auction house and its related machineries, of which this retrospective is an instance. My advice: sell.
Thomas M. Disch is a poet, novelist, and art critic.
